LOADS OF MONEY

The Wall Street Journal employ Robert Frank to record the comings and goings of the super-rich, so he has decided to publish his findings in his book Richistan; A Journey through the 21st Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. This was reviewed by Tim Adams who came up with a couple of statistics that should interest all workers. "There are many statistics that attach themselves to Richistan. These are two telling ones; Wall Street's five biggest firms paid out $36 billion in bonuses in 2006; and while in the Seventies the average American chief executive typically took home 40 times the wage of his average employee, he now pockets 170 times that of his typical minion." (Observer, 22 July) As a "typical minion" how do you feel about that? RD

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.

OUTDATED MARXISM?

One of the oppositions to Marxism is that it is so out-dated, it is so 19th century. So let us get up-to-date. "The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) is to ballot its members on industrial action over pay, the first time in its 125-year history that such a move has been made. ..The decision to ballot 23,000 midwives, taken at an RCM council meeting last night, follows the government's announcement that midwives and nurses would get a 2.5% pay rise in two stages, amounting to 1.9% across the year." (Guardian, 20 July) It just shows you how outdated Marxism is, after all in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote - "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverend awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourer." How outdated, they never mentioned midwives did they?RD

CAPITALISM AND SPORT

We are all well aware that the Tour de France cycling race has been marred by drugs, even leading to death. Football clubs have been investigated for illegal "bungs" and the once pristine sport of cricket has had its bribery and corruption scandals. Now we find that golf too has been invaded by drug cheats. "Gary Player, one of the legends of golf, has marked the start of this year's Open Championship at Carnoustie by declaring that performance-enhancing drugs are rife among world players. The South African who won three Opens, the first of them at Carnoustie 38 years ago, said he knows several top golfers are developing their physiques by taking human-growth hormones, steroids and creatine, though only the first two are prohibited by international sports bodies." (Herald, 19 July) It seems that everything that capitalism touches it corrupts in its insatiable drive for wealth. RD

DOMESTIC BLISS?

It is the subject of romantic novels and love songs - boy meets girl, wedding bells and domestic bliss, but the reality often proves to be otherwise inside the stressful society that is modern capitalism. "The conviction rate in domestic violence cases has risen dramatically in four years, the Crown Prosecution Service said. A snapshot view found that in 2003 46 per cent of cases ended in conviction. By 2006 this had risen to 66 per cent. In 2003 the CPS dropped 17 per cent of cases. By 2006 this had fallen to 11 per cent. More than 57,000 cases were charged for prosecution in 2006/7." (Times, 19 July) RD

health and the worker

Deprivation is fuelling ill health in Scotland, according to new research. A study of 25,000 men and women across the country found that heart disease was more prevalent in areas with poorer communities. The research found poor health and lifestyle among people with low levels of education, middle-aged men, and women out of work or in low-skilled jobs.
The report by the Medical Research Council (MRC) said that if social and economic conditions improved, many health problems would disappear.

"Glasgow's health is likely to continue to be worse than the rest of Scotland unless there is a considerable change in the circumstances of our poorer communities." Director Professor Carol Tannahill said

Dr Linsay Gray, of the MRC said "... improving Glasgow's health remains closely linked with tackling the problems associated with deprivation and poverty."

Socialist Courier concur that it is change - but revolutionary change - that will be required to improve the health - both physical and mental - of the working man and woman .

Anyone for Tennis ?- The physical price of fame

A study of 33 young elite players aged between 16 and 23 at a national tennis centre, who represent Britain's best hope for a future Wimbledon winner, found 28 of them had damaged spines. Nine players had stress fractures. Some of the damage was irreparable.

Far from improving fitness, the game could leave them seriously damaged. The demands of modern tennis are so extreme and the competition so intense that young players in training face a high risk of fractures, slipped discs and damaged joints, researchers for the Lawn Tennis Association say. The increased speed and types of strokes used in tennis all boost wear and tear on the lower back.

"...These players have backs like 50-year-olds, not 16-year-olds." - David Connel, of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital

The Loony Right

The Conservatives are fighting a claim that a businessman did not know what he was doing when he left the party £8.3 million in his will.

London's High Court heard Branislav Kostic was "deluded and insane" when he willed his money in the 1980s.

He made the will after saying Margaret Thatcher was "the greatest leader of the free world in history" and that she would save the world from the "satanic monsters and freaks".

His son says his father lacked "testamentary capacity" because of his delusional and paranoid mental illness.

Clare Montgomery QC said the Conservatives "only benefited because the testator became mentally ill".

Mr Simmonds , QC for the Conservative Prty , said that while it was accepted that Mr Kostic had a delusional disorder it was not accepted that this made him incapable of making a proper will.

I think Socialist Courier readers will concur with all who say that this individual must have indeed been crazy to believe and trust in Magaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party .

JESUS AND HARRY POTTER

"The Church of England is publishing a guide advising youth workers how to use Harry Potter to spread the Christian message. ... the Rt Rev John Pritchard, the Bishop of Oxford, said yesterday: "Jesus used storytelling to engage and challenge his listeners ..." Owen Smith, its 24-year-old author and a youth worker at St Margaret's Church in Rainham, Kent, said: "To say, as some have, that these books draw younger readers towards the occult seems to both malign JK Rowling and to vastly underestimate the ability of children to separate the real from the imaginary." (Times, 18 July) A good point, Mr Smith; what child-like mind having read about healing the lame, making the blind see, bringing the dead back to life and so on could imagine it had anything to do with reality? RD

BLIND INDIFFERENCE

"A pensioner aged 84 is suing an NHS trust over its refusal to pay for drugs to save his sight in the first such case to be backed by Britain's leading charity for the blind. Dennis Devier of Henley-on-Thames has been told by Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust that he cannot have drugs to treat his macular degeneration, the commonest cause of sight loss, unless he can prove he is an " exceptional case". Mr Devier, a war veteran, is the main carer for his disabled wife and is already blind in one eye. He also has diabetes and Paget's disease, which affects the bones. ... The charity said Oxfordshire PCT claimed to consider each case on its merits but had not funded drug treatment for a single patient, despite having more than 70 in need of it." (Independent, 9 July) Why such cruelty towards an old man who will go blind in three months? Could the cost of treatment £9,000 a year for two years have anything to do with it?
RD

EUROPEAN HUNGER

"It's 10 o'clock in the morning and Shkelten Daljani, a rambunctious boy of 14 in a tattered "Route 66" T-shirt, should be in school. But if he wants to eat, he has to help his father collect scrap metal to sell. The previous day, he says, there was no metal and no food."If we have food, we eat," Shkelten says with a shrug. "If we don't, we don't."Shkelten and his family live on the outskirts of Albania's capital, Tirana, in the neighborhood of Breju Lumi, which means riverside, though the only nearby water is a dry streambed cluttered with trash. The houses are a collection of concrete blocks and tin shacks without electricity, running water, or sanitation. The streets are little more than dirt lanes.Shkelten's situation – inadequate housing and sanitation, poor medical care, and occasional hunger – is little different from that of millions of children throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But his home is in the heart of Europe. .."We used to say that everybody was equally poor," says Arlinda Ymeraj, a social-policy officer with the UN Children's Fund in Albania. "Now, if you compare, there are big disparities. A few people have gotten very rich, but more have stayed poor or gotten poorer." ..Despite recent economic growth, a third of Albania's children live on less than $2 a day. Ms. Ymeraj says that it is difficult to compare the situation of children today with that during communist times, but that life has deteriorated for the poorest in a number of concrete ways." (The Chritian Science Monitor, 10 July) No matter where you look in the world today Ms Ymeraj's statement "a few people have got rich but more have stayed poor or gotten poorer" applies. RD

THE WASTEFUL SOCIETY

"In proposals which will be hotly disputed in wine-producing countries from France to Bulgaria, Brussels wants to pay producers of unsaleable wines to "grub up" their old vines. And from 2013, national restrictions on the planting of different varieties of vines would be lifted to encourage "competitive" growers to shift to types of wine more in demand from consumers..... Part of the EU budget for supporting the wine industry would be shifted to a campaign to promote European wines on the international market. The distillation of surplus wine into industrial alcohol or disinfectants - which costs €500 million (£340m) a year - would end from 2009. The European Union's annual "wine lake" of unsold wines is more than 13 million hectolitres - equivalent to about 1.7 billion standard-size bottles." (The Independent, 5 July) This gigantic surplus wine lake is a terrible problem inside capitalism, of course inside socialism we would just drink it. RD

More on class divisions

The gap between rich and poor in the UK is as wide as it has been for forty years, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said in a report. Full report here

Since 1970, area rates of poverty and wealth in Britain have changed significantly. Britain is moving back towards levels of inequality in wealth and poverty last seen more than 40 years ago. Over the last 15 years, more households have become poor, but fewer are very poor. Even though there was less extreme poverty, the overall number of 'breadline poor' households increased – households where people live below the standard poverty line. This number has consistently been above 17 per cent, peaking at 27 per cent in 2001 . Already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier.

There is evidence of increasing polarisation, where rich and poor now live further apart. In areas of some cities over half of all households are now breadline poor. Both poor and wealthy households have become more and more geographically segregated from the rest of society. 'Average' households (neither poor nor wealthy) have been diminishing in number and gradually disappearing from London and the south east. Poor, rich and average households became less and less likely to live next door to one another between 1970 and 2000. As both the poor and wealthy have become more and more clustered in different areas

While in another BBC report , the Centreforum research paper , Tackling Educational Inequality , wants the funds (£2.4 billion) schools in England get to teach pupils from disadvantaged homes to be doubled .

It said low attainment too often stemmed from children's backgrounds, not their abilities.

"Britain is a bastion of educational inequality," said Paul Marshall, chairman of Centreforum, an independent liberal think tank. "The die is cast at an early age and rather than recast the die, the English educational system tends steadily to reinforce the advantages of birth."

ALIENATION IN ABERDEEN

Capitalism is a ruthless and uncaring society, just how uncaring is summed up in this news item. "A man is believed to have lain dead in his flat for almost a year before his body was discovered, a city council said. Debt collectors found the remains when they came to evict the man from his Aberdeen flat. They had called there numerous times in the past but there was never a response, Aberdeen City Council said. It is understood that the man may have died in August last year." (Times, 13 July) RD

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 .

East end , Early ends

A "cluster" of suicides among young adults has been identified in one of the most deprived parts of Scotland.They said the cluster , a "persistent and remarkably consistent" geographical concentration of suicides, was focused on the east end of Glasgow. The research showed that the east end of Glasgow has particularly high suicide rates among young adults but that this can be explained by the high levels of deprivation in this area.

Dr Exeter, the project researcher, said: "The finding demonstrates that suicide is particularly high in the most deprived part of Scotland... Factors which are known to influence suicide, such as drug misuse, divorce and unemployment, are likely to be more common in such deprived areas."

Earlier recent research which found that between 1980 and 2000, young people (aged 15-44) in Scotland's poorest areas were more than four times as likely to commit suicide than those in its least deprived areas. Socialist Courier also reported previous that the Irish Travelling Folk also suffered from much higher suicide rates due to worsening living conditions

Days of Cheap Food to End

Mark Hill, food and agriculture partner at Deloitte, the accountancy firm , warned that rising demand for wheat and maize was bound to result in increases in the price of staple foods. The era of cheap, subsidised food, which had lasted since the war, was over, he said. We are going to see sustained price inflation - a general upward trend for staple foods such as grains, milk and meat.

The price of milk, poultry and pork is also expected to increase because of a rise in the cost of livestock feed . Wheat and maize prices are at their highest level in more than a decade.

The growing trend of turning wheat and corn into alternative fuels had come at a time when stocks had been run down. Grain supplies were already under pressure as a result of bad weather that reduced harvests and pushed up prices last year. Population increases and growing affluence in China and India could double global grain consumption within the next 40 years.

Cost-Cutting Cost Lives

Hoping to expand profits has led to the courts for Cadbury chocolate.

A major salmonella outbreak caused by Cadbury chocolate bars followed a decision to change the company's product testing system . The confectionery giant sought to save money and reduce wastage by introducing an "allowable tolerance level" for salmonella in its products . There was no safe level for salmonella cells in ready-to-eat products and that the organism could survive in chocolate for years. Chocolate acts as a protective layer for salmonella organisms, shielding them from acid in the stomach.

Until 2003 Cadbury had destroyed any chocolate which tested positive for salmonella, adopting an approach that "no amount of testing will make a positive result go away."
They then changed it to what they believed to be an allowable tolerance level. Cadbury sought to save money from wastage by allowing a tolerance for salmonella in their food. Large quantities of product were being destroyed and Cadbury's were looking for ways of avoiding that . There is no dispute that there is a linkage between the chocolate that was distributed by Cadbury and the poisoning that took place later on.

Cadbury has pleaded guilty at Birmingham Crown Court to breaching food and hygiene regulations in the summer of 2006 and the scare led to the recall of more than a million chocolate bars.

Mr. Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's ministry of food and drug safety , was found guilty of putting cash before food safety has been sentenced to death . Fortunately for Cadbury's directors and management , Socialist Courier does not condone capital punishment .

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 .