KNOCKING SHOPS KNOCKED BACK

"Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, has been hit by the global credit crunch so badly that it has issued a memorandum to senior executives telling them that brothel visits and adult channels in hotel rooms cannot be claimed on expenses. ...A Deutsche Bank insider said: "In the good old days, you could pass off a trip to a knocking-shop as a restaurant if the name wasn't too obvious. But we're in an uptight, locked-down new Puritanism now, not helped by sub-prime or VW." (Independent, 23 April) RD

THE HORRORS OF CAPITALISM

"The Australian government has launched an investigation into claims that aboriginal children seized from their parents during the 1920s and 1930s were secretly used as guinea pigs for leprosy treatments. The allegations surfaced at a Senate inquiry this week into plans to compensate the "stolen generation" of aboriginal Australians who were taken from their families as part of a government programme. "As well as being taken away, they were used... There are a lot of things that Australia does not know about," Kathleen Mills, a member of the Stolen Generations Alliance and an indigenous elder, told the hearing. Ms Mills said children held at a compound in Darwin were injected with serums designed to be used in the treatment of leprosy – a practice which seriously damaged their health. Her uncle, who worked there as a medical orderly, had told her about the sinister goings-on." (Independent, 20 April) RD

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

"Walking around the Salon International De La Haute Horlogerie, the annual luxury-watch trade fair in Geneva, Switzerland, it is difficult to get much of a sense of the impending disaster that stalks the world's financial markets. On the first day I was shown a baguette-set tourbillon wristwatch made by Jaeger-LeCoultre, retailing for €409,840; three orders had been taken before lunch—and the fair hadn't even officially opened yet. Across the country, at Switzerland's other, older watch fair in Basel, Jean-Claude Biver, the effervescent boss of the newly resurgent sports brand Hublot, told me he took orders for €159.4 millions' worth of watches, compared with €81.9 million at last year's fair. If anything, the problem that many brands have encountered is managing to deliver all the watches for which they have taken orders." (Newsweek, 12 April) RD

MORE PROFIT MEANS MORE HUNGER

"This year global production of biofuels will consume almost 100 million tons of grain – grain that could have been used to feed the starving. According to the UN, it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol – enough to feed a child for a year. The UN last week predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted. Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur on the right to food, said biofuels were "a crime against humanity", and called for a five-year moratorium." (Independent, 16 April)
The UN can issue all sorts of pious resolutions, but if is more profitable to produce bio-fuels than food, then that is what capitalism will do. RD

THE DISTORTION OF SCIENCE

Producers of genetically modified foodstuffs often claim that it is the answer to world food shortages but recent research suggest otherwise.
"Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining, repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis. The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields. ...The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available." (Independent, 20 April)
Despite the claims of capitalist firms like Monsanto, GM crops are not the answer. Why do they make such claims? To them profits is the main consideration, not science. RD

100 YEARS OF POVERTY

The columnist Richard Morrison on pensions "The old-age pension is 100 years old. When Asquith introduced it in 1908, it was five shillings a week - a sum that was regarded as shamefully low by progressives in his party. But if even that paltry figure had kept pace with the growth in Britain's GDP, the state pension should now be £161 a week. The actual figure? £90.70p. Some progress." (Times, 30 April) RD

Indian wealth

According to the BBC , UK developers are heading to India in search of wealthy new customers for their luxury flats. But why would anyone invest in London's wobbly property markets? Because the super-rich still have plenty of cash to spend.

One of the world's most expensive homes is currently being built in Mumbai for Reliance head Mukesh Ambani. His personal skyscraper will boast six storeys just for parking cars, and is expected to cost nearly $2 billion by the time it is complete.

Nick Candy, one half of the design and development firm Candy & Candy, is in Mumbai to drum up interest for his own super-luxury project, One Hyde Park. The central London project is offering apartments - to the right kind of customer - for an average of £20m. Mr Candy is a man used to dealing with the fabulously rich. But he says, "I'm flabbergasted by the amount of wealth in India. It's staggering."
Candy & Candy specialises in strictly top-end property. Its customer base is a roll-call of the super rich: royals, entrepreneurs, private company bosses. It's now looking to open an office in India. India now has more billionaires than any other country in Asia - 36 at the last count. Together they are worth nearly $200bn. India's top three richest people are all successful businessmen, but have made their money in old-economy industries, such as oil and property.
And while they have thrived in India's new economy, they have all built their wealth on fortunes inherited from their parents.

Many of those super-rich are now keen to invest their wealth around the globe. But why would Indian investors want to put money into London's property market now the boom is over?
"It's going to be very tough in America, and I think the UK will probably mirror it six months later," admits Mr Candy. But, he says, this applies only to properties under £2m where buyers need to borrow the money. There, you can expect "serious reductions in prices", according to Mr Candy - "and you're looking at a lot more than 10%." For top-end property - costing more than £5m - he thinks prices will be stable. There are not many people who can afford that level of luxury - and in London, there are still very few properties for them to buy.

Besides, says Mr Candy, "they've still got huge amounts of wealth. Maybe it's come down from $1bn to $500m - or if they've been very unlucky, it's $50m. But it's still huge amounts of wealth."

And of course they are the economic migrants that the government want .

Blair's Riches

Tony Blair have bought a £4 million stately home that once belonged to the late Sir John Gielgud, it was reported . The Grade 1 listed mansion in Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire, has seven bedrooms, a drawing room, ornamental gardens and two paddocks. The house, South Pavilion, built in 1704, is said to have been snapped up by the Blairs before being put on the open market. It has undergone extensive renovation since it was Gielgud's home and now includes a four-bedroom converted outbuilding.

The Blairs' property portfolio already includes two houses in London, two flats in Bristol and a home at Trimdon Colliery, Co Durham, in his former constituency.

Seems as if he has no problem with the credit crunch that his pay-masters in the banking world created .

tails we win , heads you lose

Before it was rising house prices that left workers unable to get a foot on the housing ladder , now its the refusal of mortgages .

It is reported that Building Societies are now only lending to one in 10 would-be homeowners, compared with a traditional level of almost one in five. A 68% decline means that building societies are scaling back lending as a result of the credit crunch even more severely than major mortgage bank rivals, such as Halifax and Cheltenham & Gloucester.

And for those workers lucky to have a house , prices in the UK are dropping by almost £500 every week . The Halifax said the average home price has fallen £8,136 since the start of the year reaching £189,027 - a fall of £479 a week. Two other surveys - from the Nationwide and Hometrack - also said it was the first time since the mid-1990s that house prices were down year-on-year.

Seema Shah, economist at Capital Economics, said: "The last time we saw two such large falls in consecutive months was during the depths of the housing market crash of the early 1990s, and even those falls fell short of the declines seen in the past two months...With the economy and labour market set to weaken further, our forecast for a 20% fall in house prices by end-2009 is firmly on track,"

Under capitalism , workers just can't win

SOMETHING SMELLS HERE

"To the small town of San Giovanni Rotondo, in Southern Italy, they came in their thousands - devotees of St Pio of Pietrelcina, better known as Padre Pio, whose remains went on display to the public for the first time since his death 40 years ago. ... Padre Pio, was born in 1887 and died in 1968, is Catholicism's most widely and fervently worshipped saint. During his lifetime he was believed to have borne the stigmata - the wounds of the crucified Jesus - on his body, to have performed many miracles of healing, to have had the capacity of being in two places at the same time and to have emitted a strong aroma of wild flowers."
(Times, 25 April) RD

LABOUR RE-DISTRIBUTES WEALTH!

"The fortunes of Britain's richest 1,000 have risen by £53 billion, almost 15 per cent, in the last year. Their wealth has quadrupled from £99 billion to £412.8 billion since Labour came to power in 1997." (Times, 28 April) RD

Mayday Rallies

SPGB members and sympathisers will be out and about at the Mayday rallies in Edinburgh and Glasgow this coming weekend, distributing Socialist Standards and leaflets .

Details of Saturday's Edinburgh Mayday Rally here

Details of Sunday's Glasgow Mayday Rally here

Mayday belongs to the workers – we have a world to win, and we can win it.

FREESCALE CLAYMORE HOVERS STILL

In an article published on this site
We reported that plans of the possible stopping of production at the former Motorola semiconductor plant at in East Kilbride under the codename Operation Claymore. Various assurances were made about demanding answers etc, however, it seems everyone is still in the dark
in an article named, Are we next?, ask Freescale workers. EKMail, Wednesday the 30th April reports, Freescale bosses have moved to deny rumours they have brought in temporary HR staff to oversee mass redundancies at the troubled plant. In a week when another major employer JVC announced it was to shut up shop at the end of July after months of speculation, these rumours point to a new low in the morale of the 900 workers at the Kelvin industrial estate factory.
The former Motorola semiconductor plant at in East Kilbride was taken over by the new Texan owners, Freescale, last year, it was reported that they were putting the giant plant up for sale.
The plant was opened up in 1969, it is thought that Freescale will only keep their research and development arm which would save about 300 jobs at most. However, 900 workers are set to lose employment.
At that time Local MP Adam Ingram says he has been told nothing officially by Freescale and would be demanding answers tomorrow. It seems he never got any answers because workers say they have been growing increasingly frustrated with bosses who they accuse of keeping them in the dark over the plant’s future. A worker at the plant reports
“The latest rumour is that they have started some HR people on six month contracts. It’s only rumoured, but we reckon that it’s to make up the redundancy packages. But nobody upstairs is saying anything. Not a word.”The worker believes there are worrying parallels to be drawn between the fate of JVC in College Milton and the Kelvin technology manufacturer.He said: “The feeling here is that the closing of JVC was inevitable. “The writing has been on the wall for some time there, as it has been here for a while. There are certain similarities between JVC and Freescale. They weren’t told what was happening there either and it is the same here. It just seems to be the way things are now.“It’s the old mushroom syndrome – keep them in the dark and feed them a load of crap.”
The profit motive will always prevail in a capitalist society, lets go for a society that gets rid of the profit motive, Socialism.

GLOBAL BONDAGE

"Some of the world's leading computer makers don't want you to know about Local Technic Industry. It's a typical Malaysian company, one of many small makers of the cast-aluminum bodies for hard-disk drives used in just about every name-brand machine on the market. But that's precisely the problem: it's a typical Malaysian company. About 60 percent of Local Technic's 160 employees are from outside Malaysia—and a company executive says he pities those guest workers. "They have been fooled hook, line and sinker," he says, asking not to be named because others in the business wouldn't like his talking to the press. "They have been taken for a ride." It's not Local Technic's fault, he insists: sleazy labor brokers outside the country tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero. ...So why don't those foreign employees just quit? Because they can't, even after they find out they've been cheated. Malaysian law requires guest workers to sign multiple-year contracts and surrender their passports to their employers. Those who run away but stay in Malaysia are automatically classed as illegal aliens, subject to arrest, imprisonment and sometimes caning before being expelled from the country." (Newsweek, 21 April) RD

Heart-breaking

It is reported that the number of people in Scotland's poorest areas dying from heart disease has dropped , however, despite the drive to reduce the difference in life expectancy between the rich and poor, experts said there was little evidence the decline in heart disease deaths was any greater in deprived communities than elsewhere.
Those living in areas of deprivation are still at higher risk of dying from coronary heart disease . GPs in deprived areas have 30% more coronary heart disease patients and are likely to have less time for all of them.

33,000 MORE HOMELESS

"Homeowners face the threat of soaring repossessions this year, with a 25 per cent increase in the number of properties expected to be seized by the banks and building societies as mortgage costs remain stubbornly high. According to a report today from the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR), more than 33,000 borrowers will lose their homes once their fixed-mortgages, agreed prior to the credit crunch, come to an end and interest costs rise." (Observer, 27 April) RD

DOES CAPITALISM WORK?

"In Cameroon, 24 people have been killed in food riots since February, while in Haiti, protesters chanting, "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign this month. In the past month, there have been food riots in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Madagascar. The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilized by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security." (Daily Telegraph, 22 April) RD

BUSINESS AS USUAL

"An electronics factory in East Kilbride is to close with the loss of 300 jobs, a union has told BBC Scotland. JVC will shut in July and work will be moved to Poland, a Unite official said. Jimmy Farrelly said employees at the College Milton plant, which makes television sets, had been "stunned" by the announcement." (BBC News, 26 April)
A TU official may well be "stunned", but socialists are not. That is how capitalism operates. Inside capitalism you must.on pain of extinction, cut your costs to survive. Three hundred workers on the dole? Who cares, this is capitalism. RD

US INTEREST IN AFRICAN OIL

"In any event, America's attitude has changed sharply since a Pentagon report in 1995 said that Africa was of “very little traditional strategic interest”. The administration has so far spent $127m on AFRICOM and has asked for another $389m for 2009. America's key interests in Africa remain terrorism and oil. Terrorists linked to al-Qaeda attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people. America gets more than 15% of its oil from Africa, and the figure is rising. It also worries about China's growing influence there." (Economist, 10 April) RD

BIG BROTHER IS LISTENING

"Hundreds of benefit fraudsters have been caught out by lie-detector technology. More than 370 people were identified fiddling their benefits in Lambeth, South London. As part of the pilot project, Lambeth Council staff phoned 2,000 residents and used Voice Risk Analysis, which picks up tiny changes in the voice that show a person is lying. Benefit staff then made further checks to see if claims needed investigation. A total of 638 people were investigated and 377 were caught lying and had their benefits stopped or decreased." (Times, 21 April) RD