Blair - quids in

My , isn't he going to be busy man for business . First he has a job with J P Morgan Chase Bank as reported here , although the fee turned out to be 5 times what we believed at the time - $5 million a year . Now Zurich Financial Services AG, Switzerland's biggest insurer have said former Tony Blair has agreed to advise the company on international politics according to Bloomberg.com .
Blair will specifically help the insurer with its climate initiative, the Zurich-based insurer said today in a statement. He will also advise Chief Executive Officer James Schiro on general political trends and developments. No word on the filthy lucre yet though, but it's rumoured to be another half million or so .

In Debted to Capitalism

Researchers have found that, by the age of 50 years and 90 days, the typical adult will shake off the shackles of debt. In Scotland, debt-free status comes at an average age of 49 years and six months . To pay off their debts, people use a mixture of salary, inheritance, windfalls and profits from investments.

Until then, the average Briton is in debt to the tune of £10,306. Men are deeper in the red, with debts totalling £12,631, while the average woman owes £7,982, excluding any mortgage.

"There are a lot of people in a cycle of debt. They're paying for credit over ten to 15 years, which means they may not pay it off until their retirement." Stuart Glendinning, the managing director of Moneysupermarket.com said .

A spokesman for Your Money Matters said: "As the cost of living continues to rise, we're being forced to save through our twenties and delay the major milestones of life until our thirties. On top of that, the average cost of a house is now well over £200,000 so we're not even getting on the housing ladder until 34. All of this and the average UK salary is just £25,986 for men and £20,488 for women, so it's no surprise that the majority of us are hitting our fifties before shaking off the shackles of debt."

Blair - politican for hire

Tony Blair has taken a part-time post with US investment bank JPMorgan , one of Wall Street's leading banks, part of JPMorgan Chase & Co, a global financial services firm with assets of $1.5 trillion (£760billion) and operations in more than 50 countries. Blair has been employed "in a senior advisory capacity", the bank said ,

Advising the bank on the "political and economic changes that globalisation brings" according to Blair himself .

It is not known how much JPMorgan will pay him, but some estimates say more than $1m (£500,000) a year. The bank said he had a "unique perspective".

Blair would advise the firm's chief executive and senior management team, "drawing on his immense international experience to provide the firm with strategic advice and insight on global political issues and emerging trends... Our firm will benefit greatly from his knowledge and experience," the bank said.

Blair earlier told the Financial Times he planned to take up "a small handful" of similar roles with other companies in different sectors.
"I have always been interested in commerce and the impact of globalisation. Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong."

As prime minister he was always a representative of the capitalist class and now , without the need to disguise the fact to the British elector , Blair can openly and shamelessly promote world capitalist interests .

The property ladder

Research by the Bank of Scotland, found that young people faced a financial struggle to own property, with the average price paid by first-time buyers soaring 113% from £57,929 in 2002 to £123,213 this year. With the threshold set at £125,000, many first-time buyers paying more than the average price of £123,213 will have to find an extra 1% of their property price on stamp duty.
The average property is now out of reach of first-time buyers in 95% of places, according to the fifth annual First Time Buyer Review. Edinburgh and Helensburgh are the least affordable places for first-time buyers and properties there are 8.2 and 7.5 times the average income of a first-time buyer household. The deposit required by first-time buyers has soared 238% since 2002 and the average amount put down for a first property in Scotland is £25,951 - 95% of an average full-time worker's salary. Five years ago it was only 35% of an average worker's full-time earnings.

"It is beyond the reach of people who are earning between £12,000 and £16,000 a year to save up for that kind of deposit. " Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance said. "People are putting themselves in more risky positions and it will be people who are on the low end of the income scale who will pay the price for that."

Housing charity Shelter Scotland said that an additional 30,000 affordable rented homes, not including general housebuilding, were needed by 2011. It said that more than 200,000 people were on waiting lists and 9000 households were in temporary accommodation in March this year.

For a socialist take on housing read Building Profits Versus Building Houses

And for a more recent article on the house property price bubble read here

Nor should we think of the lack of shelter as just a Scottish problem , of course .

A man, believed to be in his sixties, was found dead on a wooden pallet in the Place de la Concorde in the heart of Paris victims of homelessness and the cold . Another man, 62, was found dead in his car in Vanves, just west of the capital. The deaths have provoked new quarrels over the alleged failure of successive governments to provide lodgings for France's alleged 200,000 homeless people. One pressure group, Les Morts de la Rue (the dead on the street), claimed that at least 200 people, between 18 and 80, had died prematurely while sleeping rough in France in the past 12 months.

Jean-Paul Bolufer, the head of the private office of the Housing minister, Christine Boutin , said last month that it was "scandalous" that some relatively wealthy people lived in subsidised, publicly owned housing while others lived on the streets. a newspaper revealed that he was paying 1,200 Euros (£870) a month rent – a quarter of the market price – for a 190 square metre apartment in an upmarket area of the Left Bank. There were at "least 200,000" other well-off people living in subsidised flats in Paris, he said.

Chocolate Class War

Cadbury's announced this year that it would cut 7,800 jobs world wide and is currently fighting union resistance to factory closures in the UK .

However , billionaire corporate raider Nelson Peltz, who has been building a stake in the confectionery giant has been demanding that Cadbury Schweppes should return as much as £1.7 billion to shareholders after the spin-off of its US drinks business next year or face an attempted boardroom coup . He and his confederates dmand that by adopting more aggressive trading margin targets, Cadbury could push the value of its shares up to 970p and pay a special dividend of 80p per share – handing back £1.7bn in total – when the drinks business is spun off. The stock was up 15p to 623p yesterday. Cadbury's chief executive promised this year to raise the company's trading margins from about 10 per cent currently to a mid-teens percentage by 2011. Mr Peltz says the target should be closer to 20 per cent

The veteran financier made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from previous forays in the food and drink business, most recently buying Snapple for $300m (£149m) and selling it three years later for $1.5bn.

So there is the answer to why jobs are lost or out-sourced - to fill the pockets of investors

Reforming Child Poverty

Child poverty in Scotland once again is in the news .

A charity has launched a campaign aimed at eradicating child poverty in Scotland. Save the Children said almost one in every 10 children in Scotland was living in "severe poverty" and that the problem was a "national disgrace "

Save the Children classes the worst deprivation as that which forces families to live on £19 a day, after paying housing costs. Previous research by Save the Children revealed that 90,000 children in Scotland live in severe poverty.

"Parents are being forced to make impossible decisions between such basic provisions as providing an adequate meal or putting on the heating..." said Save the Children's programme director for Scotland .

Yet , as always and as before , the solutions offered by the charity are aimed at only alleviating child poverty through tinkering with the system - more government money (£4 billion) , helping parents back to work, and a new scheme to give poorer families seasonal grants of £100 for each child in summer and winter - remedies that Socialist Courier place no hope in .

"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side. " - William Morris .

We have seen many times how after all of the reforms obtained by "worthy" reformers who sought welfare aid for workers, the system simply creates new dimensions of poverty which undermine whatever apparent progress the reformers made. Capitalism as a social system cannot be humanised by reforms .

Preferential Treatment

How different the government can respond to some financial woes .

Mr Darling told MPs the government had a clear duty to protect the public interest . The government put up huge loans to save the Northern Rock bank , emergency funding equivalent to twice the amount of the annual primary school budget. Deposits of savers would continue to be fully guaranteed .

Contrast now the collapse of the Farepak Christmas savings club that last year drove many of its low-income victims into a cycle of debt according to a union-sponsored report . Many of those affected were low-paid women saving small sums for Christmas who went into debt to buy the gifts they had been expecting to purchase with their Farepak savings . Over 122,000 people have lodged claims , and they have been told to expect just 5p in the pound for their claims, and that there will be no payout this year.

Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Director Richard Garside. said "Many Farepak customers are asking why, if the government was prepared to underwrite Northern Rock to the tune of billions of pounds, no comprehensive help has been forthcoming"

"I think it is annoying that they just treat ordinary working class people like that..." said one victim of the company's collapse .

And there lies the answer ....ordinary working class people are treated that way by the capitalist system just because they are working class .

A Fragmented Society

From the president of the Headteachers' Association of Scotland.

"The expectations which have been placed on Scottish education are enormous in a society which has grave problems of obesity in young people and in the population at large, in which one in ten young people and one in four in the population will experience mental health issues.

"[A society] in which binge drinking in public and hazardous and harmful drinking in private are a growing concern. In which teenage pregnancy is among the highest in Europe, in which one in four young people can expect to experience family break-up.

"[A society] in which antisocial behaviour is a major issue in many communities and, in which, the gap between the most advantaged and most disadvantage members has never been greater, there are extraordinary demands on schools to fill the gaps in a fragmented society."

A spokesman for the Educational Institute of Scotland, the country's biggest teaching union, said : "Schools will always reflect society, but that does not mean they can be expected to solve all of society's problems..."

A recent study revealed children in the UK were the unhappiest of any of Europe's wealthier nations.

For our childrens' and grand-childrens' sake - Isn't it time for socialism

The Gravy Train

The highest-earning 300 bosses in the public sector saw their salaries increase by 12.8 per cent last year, raising their average to £237,564. Seventeen of the top bosses earned more than £500,000, according to the Taxpayer's Alliance second annual Public Sector Rich List.

The pay rises, more than three times the national average . The top 10 earn an average salary of £799,000 – more than 40 times the basic pay of a nurse or soldier.

Top of the league is Adam Crozier, chief executive of the Royal Mail. The only person on the list with a seven-figure salary. Strike-breaker Crozier has presided over the cancellation of the second mail delivery and an increase in the price of stamps. He saw his pay package swell by 21 per cent last year, taking his salary to £1,256,000. The report shows that it equates to earning £1,000 every 1 hour and 27 minutes and he had the gall and audacity to say that the ordinary postal worker was over-paid

Who owns the North Pole - Part 8

Continung our series of postings about the the competition to control the Artic and the North Pole ( last reported here ) , we can now declare that the North Pole belongs to the Russians - or so they have now claimed .

A Russian expedition has proved that a ridge of mountains below the Arctic Ocean is part of Russia's continental shelf . Russia's Natural Resources Ministry said early test results on the soil samples showed Russia is geologically linked to the Lomonosov Ridge.

"Results of an analysis of the Earth's crust show that the structure of the underwater Lomonosov mountain chain is similar to the world's other continental shelves, and the ridge is therefore part of Russia's land mass," a statement from the ministry said.

So now it is official , at least , for Russian interests .
Socialist Courier rather doubts that for Denmark , Norway , Canada and the USA , who all possess conflicting claims , will be seeing it Moscow's way .

Old and out of the way

Just how society treats our elderly is becoming cruelly more and more apparent . We had this report , a 108 year old woman having to wait a year and half for a hearing aid to improve the quality of her short remaining life and now we read about this care home evicting an 103 year old woman because she is requiring too much care , or so they say , in a squabble over how much she has to pay for the nursing care . Abbeymoor's owner, Mark Sutters, told the Nottingham Evening Post that the home could not continue to "subsidise" Mrs Collins's care.

Local authority and care services minister Ivan Lewis said " I am deeply concerned at the attempt by the home owner to use Mrs Collins as a pawn in a funding dispute. Whatever the difficulties, such treatment of a 103-year-old cannot be tolerated in a modern care system which has dignity and respect for older people at its heart."

Esme Collins was told to leave after 10 years at Abbeymoor nursing home in Worksop, because its owners refused to back down in a dispute over funding her care.

Age Concern has campaigned for the closing of a legal loophole that left the pensioner without the protection of human rights legislation.
"Forcing an older person to leave their care home can have a devastating impact on their physical and emotional health. We urge the government to act quickly to give the protection of the Human Rights Act to people living in private care homes to help prevent such situations."

Socialist Courier fully sympathises with such sentiments but to be perfectly blunt , it is just one very small example of the heartless nature of a society where everything has a price , even life and everything is valued in prices , even people . Events such as this will not stop until capitalism is superceded by a truly caring , sharing society such as Socialism

Red Crosses for Johnson and Johnson

Capitalism cares little for society other than as a milk-cow for profits and further profits . Socialists are rarely shocked by the depths of decency that capitalists will go to accrue profits .

Johnson and Johnson is suing the American Red Cross, alleging the charity has misused the famous red cross symbol for commercial purposes. The lawsuit asks for sales of disputed products - also including medical gloves, nail clippers, combs and toothbrushes - to be stopped and unsold items to be handed over to Johnson and Johnson . The firm is also seeking damages equivalent to the value of such goods sold in supermarkets such as Wal-Mart .

Johnson and Johnson claim a deal with the charity's founder in 1895 gave it the "exclusive use" of the symbol as a trademark for drug, chemical and surgical products. It said American Red Cross had violated this agreement by licensing the symbol to other firms to sell certain goods. The lawsuit argues that the firm reached an agreement with the charity's founder Clara Barton about the commercial use of the symbol for certain products. It maintains that the charter did not give the charity the right to engage in commercial activities which would conflict with a private company.

The American Red Cross described the lawsuit as "obscene" , adding that it believed the firm's actions were financially motivated.
It said many of the products at issue were health and safety kits and that profits from their sale had been used to support disaster-relief campaigns.

Personal debt increases

Over 8 million British adults are in serious debt and over 2 million are struggling with repayments. 18% of adults in Britain are in £10,000 or more of unsecured debt such as credit cards, overdrafts, loans and store cards .The number of bankruptcies rose by 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period in 2006. Around 420,000 people were prosecuted for defaulting on loan repayments in the first six months of this year - up eight per cent on 2006. Scotland was revealed as the area with the highest proportion of indebted residents .

The Bank of England has raised the cost of borrowing five times in the past year to 5.75 percent -- the highest level in six years. Analysts expect another rise to 6 percent by the year end . High levels of unsecured debt are clearly linked to the rise in interest rates over the last 12 months . The record rise in house prices -- especially in London and the south-east -- has led to a growing discrepancy between mortgage payments and salaries. The high pressure to maintain social and commercial status often goes hand in hand with high expenditure on the high street. Borrowers affected by the higher interest rates now are storing up debt problems for the future; instead of making cuts in their personal expenditure, they are taking on further unsecured loans and credit cards .

See here about the bubble bursting

...Names will never hurt me

Two of Socialist Courier contributers felt the need to comment on recent health and safety statistics and the rise in deaths at work .

Why increase the expenditure on safety? It cuts profits and capitalism hates that! said RD

The Sunday Herald carries a story with much the same conclusion concerning the weakness of the recently passed legislation governing "corporate killing", which has just received Royal Assent and is expected to become law within months.

In the UK, between 1966 and 2006, more than 40,000 people have been killed in work-related circumstances, according to Gary Slapper, professor of Law at the Open University. 40,000 deaths .

But under the common law of culpable homicide (or manslaughter in England), only 34 companies were prosecuted and only seven convictions were secured. In Scotland, only one company has ever been prosecuted for corporate homicide - utility firm Transco for the Larkhall gas explosion, caused by a leaking main, which killed Andrew and Janette Findlay and their two children in their house in December 1999. Although the company was eventually fined £15 million in 2005 for breaching health and safety laws, the homicide charge failed because, given the disperse communication channels of large companies, the court could not find a "controlling mind" or pin the blame on one senior figure who knew enough to be liable.

The new legislation removes the requirement to find a "controlling mind." Now, it must only be shown that someone in senior management was guilty of "gross negligence". YET , under the new legislation, there are no extra duties that directors must adhere to. The maximum penalties are the same as under existing health and safety laws.

Courts will now also be able to order the company to publicise any conviction. The reputational damage and stigma is thought most likely to act as a deterrent and encourage directors to take health and safety concerns more seriously.

Patrick Maguire, legal adviser to the Scottish TUC who was also a member of the Scottish Executive's expert panel , however interprets the new law as one that simply finds new scapegoats .
"...the need to identify the "controlling mind" has simply been replaced by the need to find a senior management who committed "gross negligence"...It is not the board of directors that makes these decisions on health and safety. They delegate the task to middle and lower management. They are going to say the guy who got it wrong was not a senior manager "

A Labour regime that purports to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime", exempts business from this treatment.

Voicing what the capitalist class thinks - and echoing the words of RD that the a central concern with any proposal which could mean stricter laws coming into force in Scotland, would scare businesses away , David Watt, director of the Institute of Directors in Scotland, said: "We don't have different company law across the UK. We don't want bits and pieces of company law pulled out and made more punitive in Scotland. We need all the incentives we can for people to do business here."

The old are getting poorer

And how does Capitalism treat the old ? Read here

The cost of living for the elderly is rising at more than twice the rate of other households, research shows today. People aged between 65 and 74 found that their annual expenditure increased by about nine per cent a year between 2002 and 2006, more than double the national average of four per cent . The situation is even worse for people over 75, who saw their cost of living soar by about 10 per cent a year during the same period.

The average pensioner income was increasing by only three per cent a year.

Charity and Philanthropy

The cash-for-honours affair and Tom Hunter's philanthropy merely prove the rich call the shots in an unequal society, says Joan Smith in the Independent

Peter Mandelson remarked nine years ago that Labour ministers were "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"

During Blair's premiership the wealth of Britain's top 1,000 quadrupled.

The Scottish self-made retail billionaire Sir Tom Hunter, promised to give away at least £1bn to good causes before he dies. Hunter has joined an elite club of people who have made so much money that they are able to give away sums that most of us cannot even visualise ...Hunter is usually mentioned in the same breath as the hedge fund investor Chris Hohn, who has promised £230m to a children's charity run by his wife, and the financial trader Peter Cruddas, who is giving £100m to good causes which include The Prince's Trust and Great Ormond Street children's hospital.

Such donations are usually regarded as non-political, a harmless exercise in what's called "soft" power;...Yet a moment's consideration is enough to demonstrate the lack of democratic oversight at most private foundations, and while wealthy people may choose to support causes of which we all approve,.. they may just as easily make decisions which appear capricious or downright perverse. Some wealthy evangelical businessmen withhold money from organisations that support gay and women's rights...Despite the generosity of men such as Hunter, there is a widespread sense that there is something wrong with a society in which growing numbers of wealthy people are able to use their money to fund pet causes – or keep it for themselves... the fact remains that for every billionaire who decides to do something to combat Aids or malaria, there is another who prefers to buy yachts, wives or football clubs.

...there is compelling evidence not just that we are entering a new age of oligarchy, reminiscent of the US in the 19th century, but that it is corroding public trust in the political process. The names of the men who literally built America – Carnegie, Frick, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller – are familiar to this day; in a striking parallel with contemporary Britain, some of these tycoons had a highly developed sense of social responsibility and gave most of their money away. The Scottish-American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who was originally from Dunfermline, gave away the equivalent of $4.3bn in his lifetime... There could hardly be a greater contrast than the railroad pioneer Cornelius Vanderbilt, who has been described as the second wealthiest person in American history, with a fortune estimated at the time of his death in 1877 at more than $100m (a staggering $143bn in today's money)... His son William got the bulk of his fortune, with next to nothing going to good causes.

The moral is that wealthy men are no more likely to be generous than poor ones; even such contemporary philanthropists as the Irish rock band U2, whose lead singer Bono never misses an opportunity to lecture political leaders about increasing aid to Africa, were revealed last year to have moved their financial affairs to the Netherlands in order to halve their tax bill. Private philanthropy is unreliable, in other words, and our increasing reliance on wealthy entrepreneurs to fund everything from clean water in the developing world to British political parties is a symptom of profound malaise.

Capitalism Shares- Or Does it ?

The proportion of shares owned by small shareholders is down to an all time low of 13 % , reported the Independent.

There are as many as 10 million private investors, and BT, for example, retains about half of the people who bought its shares in 1984, but few have a holding in more than one company. Those who own share portfolios with a value of, say, £50,000 to £100,000 is put at no more than 100,000, or 200,000 people.

Half of the UK stock market was controlled by individuals in 1963, that proportion has fallen steadily to this all-time low. The 12.8 per cent headline figure would be even lower were it not for the privatisations and demutualisations of the 1980s.

It is certainly not the Peoples Capitalism , that the apologists of the free market had hoped for .

a fact of corporate life.

Regular readers of Socialist Courier will be aware that we have been high-lighting the generous incomes paid to those in the commanding heights of industry and commerce , now we read that the chairman of Sainsburys , Philip Hampton , yesterday brushed aside concern over soaring directors' pay, declaring that annual rises in excess of inflation are now "simply a fact of corporate life".

Last month, it emerged that chief executive , Justin King , is to reap the rewards of the failed private equity approach to the supermarket group by receiving a hefty pay rise and other adjustments to a pay packet that topped £2m last year. King will receive a 17% rise in his basic salary of £725,000 - taking it to £850,000 - plus an award of shares

It was also revealed that the Qatari royal family own a quarter of Sainsburys .

Meanwhile at Boots The Chemist , Richard Baker , the chief executive of Alliance Boots , and Scott Wheway, managing director of Boots the Chemists step down . Baker made £6.5m when he exercised his share options as the company was taken private. Wheway cashed in £1.19m.

Another Capitalist Windfall

Although it posted a slowing in sales growth Marks and Spencers , chief executive Stuart Rose received £3.6 million in salary and bonuses last year, up 68 per cent on a year ago .

Money worth more as scrap value

Millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh and melted down and turned into razor blades according to a BBC report .

"Our one rupee coin is in fact worth 35 rupees, because we make five to seven [razor-] blades out of them,"

In Calcutta alone, India's central bank - the Reserve Bank of India - has distributed coins worth nearly six million rupees ($150,000) to overcome the shortage in the last two weeks . Long queues form outside the bank's regional office in the city centre every time this happens.
Unscrupulous touts set up makeshift shops and collect as many of the coins as they can, only to sell them later at a premium. The coin shortage is most acute in the north-eastern frontier town of Agartala, right on the border with Bangladesh and believed to be a major centre for contraband trade with Bangladesh. In Guwahati, Assam's capital and the business hub of India's northeast, small coins like 50 paisa have completely dropped out of circulation.

We can only say , ...Oh , for that day when all the world's coinage is turned into something as socially useful as razor-blades .