The Protests in Burma

Phan, a member of the ethnic Karen group which has been mercilessly persecuted by the ruling military junta, was just 14 when her village was attacked by Burmese soldiers. She fled to the jungle and lived in hiding .

"... While I was in hiding in the jungle, British businessmen were dining in Rangoon and making deals with the very men who had ordered the slaughter of my people." says Phan .

The Burmese army has been routinely accused of using rape (including that of children) as a weapon of war, as well as ethnic cleansing, extra-judicial executions and torture and imprisonment without trial. More than one million people have been displaced and 3000 villages destroyed by government troops.

The UK has more companies than any other nation on Earth trading with the regime. In total, the London-based Burma Campaign has found that 128 firms globally are trading with Burma - of those 44% are British. An example of one of the 56 British firms trading with Burma, and propping up the army generals currently smashing the nation's pro-democracy movement, is Britannic Garden Furniture (BGF).The company builds expensive accessories for Britons using Burmese teak.
Total Oil, which has offices in London, is in a joint venture with the military regime, developing an offshore gas field. It has been taken to court by six Burmese people who were allegedly used as forced labour in the preparation of Total's pipeline in Burma.
Perhaps the most high-profile firm is Rolls-Royce. Through its Singaporean subsidiary, the company has a contract to supply and service aircraft engines for at least one Burmese airline.

Among the firms are two Scottish-based companies: Aquatic from Aberdeen, and Schlumberger from Westhill in Aberdeenshire. Aquatic is a privately owned company, with offices in Burma, that provides specialist services to the oil and gas industry. Gas exports are the military dictatorship's biggest source of income.

Anna Roberts, acting director of the BurmaCampaignUK,said:
"The Burmese regime spends half its budget on the military, and just 19p per person on health and education. It relies on foreign trade to supply this income. So, companies which trade with Burma are helping support a military dictatorship which uses foreign money to buy weapons to suppress its own people."

See Socialism or Your Money Back for a socialist point of view of the present Burma situaton

A TASTY TIPPLE

"An anonymous telephone bidder has paid £29,000 for a 157-year-old bottle of whisky. McTears auctioneers in Glasgow sold the Bowmore single malt, which was bottled in 1850. The price, a record for a Scottish whisky at auction, was almost double pre-sale estimates, despite the fact that the whisky's cork had dropped into the bottle. ... .In 2005, a bottle of Dalmore 62 Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky is thought to have become the world's most expensive after it was bought at a hotel in England. A businessman paid £32,000 for the rare bottle, produced in 1943." (Daily Telegraph, 29 September)
20 to 30 grand for a bottle of whisky is everyday stuff for members of the capitalist class while members of the working class cannot even afford medicine to keep them alive! RD

And its jobs for the boys ( and girls ) . Ex-attorney general , Lord Goldsmith , starts a lucrative new career with a big American law firm called Debevoise & Plimpton LLP on a salary thought to be in the region of £1 million a year. As European chair of litigation, Lord Goldsmith will be part of a firm that prides itself on conflict resolution and anti-corruption investigations - it recently acted for a company in connection with a worldwide inquiry into possible corrupt payments to government officials. Lord Goldsmith , of course , possesses plenty of experience upon how to handle corruption cases as witnessed by his handling of the Saudi Arabian - BAE arms and bribery investigation . Never let the law and legal nicieties interfere with politics and business .

Other pigs with snouts in the trough as reported by the Guardian are :-

· Alan Milburn - The former health secretary is an adviser to Pepsi which brings him £25,000 a year. He also holds a £30,000-a-year role on Lloyds pharmacy's health advisory panel and draws another £35,000 as an adviser to the European board of Bridgepoint Capital Ltd, a finance company with an interest in healthcare.

· Stephen Byers - The former transport and trade secretary is a paid consultant to a Lebanese construction firm based in Athens. He is chairs the board of the Yalta European Strategy group.

· David Blunkett - The former home secretary, collected £385,000 from his memoirs, and up to £150,000 a year from his weekly Sun column. He is also an adviser to Entrust, a company which is bidding to run Britain's controversial identity cards programme.

· John Prescott - The former deputy prime minister signed a £300,000 deal to tell his story in Prezza: Pulling No Punches after stepping down this year.

· John Reid - The former home secretary who was famously labelled Labour's "attack dog" by Jeremy Paxman is expected to become chairman of Celtic Football Club.

· Alastair Campbell - Downing Street's former communications director is reported to have earned £1 million for his book, The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries.

The poor and education

Socialist Courier has directed readers towards findings that have indicated a link between class and educational achievement here and here and the Herald reports further connections between poverty and educational success .

Figures from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) show that Glasgow, Dundee, North Ayrshire and West Dunbartonshire are among the councils with the lowest attainment rates at Standard Grade and Higher - all are regions which have a much higher proportion of pupils on free school meals than the national average of 14.6% - a key indicator of deprivation. Glasgow , for instance , has 32% of pupils are on free meals .

The best performing councils, including East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling and the Western Isles all have much lower proportions of pupils on free school meals. In East Renfrewshire, the figure is 8.3%.

The latest figures to highlight the gulf in exam attainment between rich and poor will spark renewed concerns that not enough is being done to address the problem. Last year, HM Inspectorate of Education found the gap between the best and worst-performing pupils in Scotland was growing wider, despite a raft of government initiatives and £19 billion spent on education since devolution.
Isabel Hutton, education spokeswoman for Cosla, which represents local authorities, called for the "inequalities arising from deprivation" to be removed.
A Scottish Government spokesman said the focus by ministers of early intervention, cutting class sizes in deprived areas and ensuring teachers were retained in nurseries would all help to raise attainment across the board.

Socialist Courier doubts if such palliative will address the situation . After all , it has been an objective of all governments , of all shades of the political spectrum , to foster an educated work-force and here we are still facing the same problem .

The New Gold Rush

BHP Billiton will tomorrow announce that it estimates the reserves of gold at its Australian Olympic Dam mine are more than 50% bigger than previously thought, raising speculation that it is sitting on the largest gold mine in the world. Situated 330 miles north of Adelaide, South Australia, Olympic Dam contains deposits of several minerals and is already the home to the world's largest uranium mine.
BHP shares hit record levels with feverish expectations that a recent drilling programme had vastly exceeded expectations. BHP has grown in value on the back of the China-fuelled commodity boom. Its stock market value has reached $200 billion (£99 billion), compared with $30 billion five years ago. Yesterday the share price rose 81p to £17.37.

The price of gold neared a 28-year peak yesterday as investors continued to buy into the commodity as a hedge against a falling dollar and the potential for a serious economic downturn in the US. The precious metal hit $736.05 per troy ounce at one stage helped by a forecast from Goldman Sachs that prices could soon reach $775. Gold prices have been rising since 2000 when they were as low as $280 per oz.

BEHIND THE FINE WORDS

At the annual conferences of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Parties we hear fine words about full employment and prosperity but what is the reality? "Danny Wilde collected his last pay cheque from the Tulip pork factory in Norfolk on Friday before joining the dole queue. His wife, Melissa, was made redundant from her job at the same Thetford plant earlier this month. They both joined the meat processing lines from school and have put in 20 years at the company between them, taking turns on early and late shifts so that they could look after their two children. There have been jobs cuts here before: in 2003 more than 170 full-time employees were made redundant and replaced immediately with agency staff, most of them migrants on poorer terms - lower rates of pay, mostly just the minimum wage, less overtime money, less holiday, more antisocial shift patterns, uncertain hours. The full-time employees had no pay rise for three years and watched as their incomes were eroded by inflation. Now the rest of the work has gone, most of it relocated to another subsidiary of the trans-national Danish Crown group in Cornwall. The Wildes feel badly let down after years of loyal work. As Melissa puts it: "That's business today, isn't it. It doesn't care." Tulip has been Thetford's largest employer since Thermos closed its factory on the same industrial estate five years ago and shifted to China where the labour is cheaper. Up to 700 people who have worked at Tulip regularly will now have to look for jobs elsewhere." (Guardian, 25 September) RD

MILITARY PRECISION?

There is a much used phrase in the English language - "military precision". If something is carried out efficiently we use "military precision" to denote an extremely smooth operation. We may have to get rid of that phrase though in view of recent developments.
"Nuclear warheads capable of unleashing the equivalent of 10 Hiroshima bombs were mistakenly flown across the United States by a bomber crew who thought they were dummies, and the terrifying security lapse was not discovered for almost 36 hours, it has been revealed. The Pentagon is examining how so many vital checks and balances, painstakingly set out during the Cold War era, broke down causing an incident that military personnel are calling one of the biggest mistakes in US Air Force history.... The B-52 took off from the remote Minot air force base in North Dakota with 12 cruise missiles that were being taken out of commission and scheduled for burial in Louisiana. The warheads on the decommissioned missiles should have been replaced with dummies of the same weight, but personnel failed to notice that six of the 12 were fully operational nuclear warheads." (Independent, 25 September) RD

SPEED AND STUPIDITY

"The fastest driver ever caught in a routine speed check in the UK has been sentenced to 10 weeks in jail. Timothy Brady, 33, of Earls Crescent, Harrow, north-west London, pleaded guilty at Oxford Crown Court to dangerous driving. Brady was clocked at 172mph in a Porsche 911 Turbo in a 70mph zone on the A420 in Oxfordshire on 27 January. He was banned from driving for three years and will have to take an extended driving test to get another licence. He denied another charge of aggravated vehicle taking. The court heard Brady had taken the Porsche from luxury car hire firm Helphire, where he worked as a delivery driver. ... Judge David Morton Jack said to Brady in court: "Your driving was criminally self-indulgent and utterly thoughtless of the danger you might be creating for the innocent." Police have criticised Brady for travelling at such high speed." (BBC News, 24 September)
Brady was criticised by the judge, the police, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and the Safe Speed Safety Committee.
The manufacturers of this potential baby killing Porsche and the advertisers of this speed death trap escaped censure of course. After all, that's business, isn't it? RD

Health service rationing

According to the BBC , Doctor magazine asked readers about rationing.

16% - said patients had died early as a result.

Over 50% said patients had suffered as a result .

They reported not being allowed to prescribe drug treatments including smoking cessation drugs and anti-obesity treatment. They also reported that local NHS trusts had been placing restrictions on fertility treatments, obesity surgery and a host of minor operations, including those for varicose veins.

Many experts fear the situation will get worse with increasing demands on the health service made by the ageing population and expected advances in medicines.

Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association's GPs committee, said:
"The NHS could spend whatever you gave it, but it obviously works with a limited budget ...Rationing is the great unspoken reality. The only people who refuse to mention the 'r-word' are the media and the politicians, who continue to want to promise everything for everyone in order to win elections."

Malnourished old folk

A major survey is to try to establish how many people are malnourished when they enter hospitals and care homes. The three-day investigation by nutrition charity Bapen - assessing more than 500 institutions across the UK .

Based on studies carried out 10 years ago, an estimated 30% of patients in hospitals and care homes are clinically malnourished - a total of 3m people.

Charities such as Age Concern complain malnutrition remains prevalent .

As many as 10% of people aged over 65 are malnourished. That figure rises to 60% when it comes to elderly people in hospital.

"Weight loss and poor nutritional state is not a normal part of aging. And if it's happening we ought to address it and treat it." - The director of nutrition at King's College hospital , Rick Wilson said

More pay for company directors

It is reported that the typical salary increase of executive directors was 7 per cent last year, well above the UK average of 3.7 per cent.

Potential bonuses were an average 130 per cent of salary, up from 115 per cent the year before - but the actual bonus payout rocketed from 75 per cent to 94 per cent.

"Increases for executive directors are still significantly ahead of those received by the general workforce" the report by accountancy firm Deloitte said.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

"Tory defector Quentin Davies has urged other Conservative MPs to "take the plunge" at the Labour Party conference. He accused Tory leader David Cameron of having made a "Faustian pact with his own extremists" on Europe. He said he was proud of his new party and won a standing ovation from many delegates but others appeared to find the speech amusing. Deputy leader Harriet Harman welcomed other ex-Tories, including Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward. ..Mr Davies praised Gordon Brown as a man of "sound judgement" and "great competence" who had dealt with a series of trials since becoming prime minister. By contrast he accused Mr Cameron of saying and doing "such consistently foolish and superficial and transparently contradictory things" - on schools and tax and spending." (BBC News, 24 September)
Mr Davies was the former Tory MP for Grantham and Stamford who defected to the Labour Party in June. It shows that the differences between Labour and Conservative, never very great at any time, grow less and less as the Labour Party shows itself as an out and out supporter of capitalism. RD

DEMOS? NO BOTHER

"The ray gun has been a staple of science fiction since HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds, but fantasy is now reality as the first heat-ray weapon goes on display in London this week.
Raytheon, the American defence company, is hoping to find customers for its Silent Guardian system, developed as a form of non-lethal crowd control, which will be shown at the Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) exhibition, the world’s largest arms fair, at the Excel centre in Docklands, East London. The weapon emits a wave of energy that vaporises skin moisture, causing an intense burning sensation. Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials will be invited to place their hands in front of the machine’s ray and experience what its maker describes as “intolerable” pain." (Times, 10 September)
Isn't capitalism wonderful? Think of the millions of pounds the owning class will save in policing demonstrations and protests, as for the "intolerable pain" who cares? RD

IT BEGGARS BELIEF

"Inside a tiny courtroom buzzing with flies, a police officer stands before a judge and carefully unfolds a white handkerchief. The damning evidence inside: 13 coins worth about 30 cents. He says he found them in the pockets of Shanni Ram Ganga, a hunched man standing next to him facing a sentence of one to three years. Ganga's alleged crime: begging. Beggars crowd every sidewalk in India, yet panhandling is illegal, so a separate judicial system exists just for those accused of pleading for coins in public. More than 1,400 people are serving sentences in beggars' homes — rundown facilities often little better than prisons, critics say — and that number is expected to rise as the government "cleans up" the Indian capital to host the Commonwealth Games, a major sports competition, in 2010....There are some 60,000 beggars in New Delhi, most earning 50-100 rupees a day, not much less than the working poor, according to a recent government-commissioned study on beggars. Many are handicapped." (Yahoo News, 15 September)
Yes this is New Delhi part of the new vibrant Indian capitalism that we are told about. RD

A WASTEFUL SOCIETY

Occasionally some workers might push the boat out and spend a little more than they intended on a night out, but it is doubtful if they could reach this sort of extravagance.
"Kobe beef can fetch up to $250,000 (£125,000) per animal. It comes from the black Tajimaushi breed of Wagyu cattle, which are raised according to strict tradition, including daily massages and supplies of sake, in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. In 2004,
The London restaurant Zafferano bought an 850g white truffle for £28,000. It was accidentally left to rot." (Times, 10 September)
This sort of extravagance can be reported in a society where many are living on less than $2 a day. It makes us sick, how about you? RD

AN EXPENSIVE SOCIETY

Many workers get upset when the landlord ups their rent, but really they are getting upset about nothing when you consider the plight of members of the capitalist class. "A record has been set for the world’s most expensive office rents after Permal, a hedge fund group, committed to occupy two floors in the West End – in spite of the woes in financial markets. The group, an international fund of funds which is part of Legg Mason, agreed on Friday to pay £140 and £130 per sq ft for the fifth and sixth floors of 12 St James’s Square, a redevelopment by D2, a private Irish group." (Financial Times, 21 September) RD

Upstairs and Downstairs

This week, the socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson revealed that she had a "massive staff", mainly from Ukraine. "As I don't have a husband, I rather look forward to having people around me. I have half the Ukraine here every day. It's like the Russian army coming in to clean. I want to come back at night and feel like I'm in a five-star hotel," she said.

The British middle classes [sic] are looking for domestic help who can't easily pack up and leave, which means employing people from war-torn countries or from non-EU countries whose presence in Britain is dependent on their employment .

It is legal for a private householder to refuse to employ someone on the grounds of their colour, their nationality or their religion, and from our interviews with employers, it is clear that they do .

Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, was sued by her cook, Jane Martin, earlier this year.
Ms Martin claimed sexual discrimination after being forced to work 14-hour days while pregnant. The tribunal heard how Ms Styler, 52, abused her domestic staff to make her "feel royal".

Who owns the Atlantic Ocean - Part 1

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields .

"The Russians may be claiming the Arctic but the UK is claiming a large chunk of the Atlantic. Some states might ask why a big power is entitled to huge stretches of the ocean's resources thousands of miles away from its land, but that's the way the law is." - Martin Pratt, director of research at Durham University's international boundaries research unit .

Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the UN - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests. Relying on detailed geological and geophysical surveys by scientists and hydrographers, any state can delineate a new "continental shelf outer limit" that can extend up to 350 miles from its shoreline. According to the convention on the law of the sea, applicant states may register their rights by "establishing the foot of the continental slope, by meeting the requirements stated for the thickness of sedimentary rocks".
Once demarcated, the ocean floor may then be claimed up to 60 nautical miles from the bottom of the continental slope. When territorial rights have been obtained, states have the right to extract any minerals, natural gas or oil discovered in the annexed seabed.
There is a deadline of May 2009 for claims from the UK and other countries to be submitted, although states that ratified the treaty later have more time

Greenpeace has described the process as a "land grab".

The Falklands claim has the most potential for acrimonious political fallout. Britain and Argentina fought over the islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be up to 60 million barrels under the ocean floor. Britain has been granted licences for exploratory drilling around the islands within the normal 200-mile exploration limit and any new claim to UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf would extend territorial rights further into the Atlantic.

A MOTHER SPEAKS

"There were around 600 deaths in custody in England and Wales last year, a third of them suicides, according to a report published today. The study, by the Forum for Preventing Deaths in Custody, found there were 500 to 600 deaths in custody each year, some of which were preventable. ...In 2004-05 - the most recent year with a full breakdown of the cause of deaths in custody - 127 of the 590 deaths in custody were suicides. ..The report also raised concerns about the number of mentally ill people in custody, and suggested they would be better looked after in psychiatric care... Pauline Campbell, whose daughter Sarah died in custody, told the BBC that prisons were being "overwhelmed" by high numbers of vulnerable people who needed care, not punishment "They're being used as social dustbins for people who are mentally ill, drug and alcohol dependents, the homeless and so on," she said. (BBC News, 21 September)
If you cannot produce surplus value for the owning class you are thrown into the social dustbin. Mrs Campbell has got it right. RD

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 .