DOLE MONEY CHAOS

Kenneth Kottwitz, a laid-off cabinet maker in Phoenix, waited three months for his benefits to arrive. He exhausted his savings, lost his apartment and moved to a homeless shelter.
Luis Coronel, a janitor at a San Francisco hotel, got $6,000 in back benefits after winning an appeal. But in the six months he spent waiting, there were times when he and his pregnant wife could not afford to eat.
“I was terrified my wife and daughter would have to live on the street,” Mr. Coronel said.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said: “Obviously, some of our states were in a pickle. The system wasn’t prepared to deal with the enormity of the calls coming in.”
The program’s problems, though well known, were brushed aside when unemployment was low. “The unemployment insurance system before the recession was as vulnerable as New Orleans was before Katrina,” said Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, who is chairman of a House panel with authority over the program. ( msnbcnews 24th July)

FROM SPY TO TYCOON

"Alexander Lebedev is telling the story of how he met his girlfriend, Elena Perminova, who is 22 and heavily pregnant. We are sitting in the dining room of Lebedev's house in the ultra-exclusive enclave of Rublyovka, just west of Moscow, early this year. The house includes an underground pool with a cherub-laden fresco on the ceiling, Italian marble floors and a huge ovoid window onto a grand staircase that, Lebedev says, is typical of classical Italian architecture. Outside, there are four or five guards milling around in the driveway. Former President Boris Yeltsin once lived beyond the trees on the other side of a nearby tennis court, now covered in snow. A black BMW with tinted windows, its engine running, sits next to a wall that wraps around the compound. Lebedev, 49, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt and black vest, is sporting his signature glasses with rectangular lenses. He has tousled grey hair and a mostly English accent that sounds carefully studied, because that's exactly what it is - in the 1980s, Lebedev spied for the KGB while posing as an economic attachÉ at the Soviet embassy in London." (Yahoo News, 17 July) RD

BAD NEWS FOR OTHERS

"The FTSE 100 registered its sixth consecutive gain on Monday, its longest rally of the year so far. But Smith & Nephew lagged behind the trend after its house broker voiced swine flu fears. The orthopaedic device maker fell 2.4 per cent to 440¾p after Cazenove said the pandemic could lead hospitals to cancel elective procedures." (Financial Times, 20 July) RD

GOOD NEWS FOR SOME

"Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu. Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines. The fresh sales – on top of strong results from Novartis of Switzerland and Baxter of the US, which both also produce vaccines – come as the latest tallies show that more than 740 people have died from the H1N1 virus, and millions have been affected around the world. ... A report last week from JPMorgan, the investment bank, estimated that governments had ordered nearly 600m doses of pandemic vaccine and adjuvant – a chemical that boosts its efficacy – worth $4.3bn (€3bn, £2.6bn) in sales, and there was potential for 342m more doses worth $2.6bn."
(Financial Times, 20 July) RD

A GRAVE BUSINESS

Willie Esper, a gravedigger who helped expose an alleged scheme to dig up
graves and resell plots at Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Chicago, says another
worker warned him to keep his mouth shut or risk losing his job.

Loose bones kept turning up as he practiced digging holes with a backhoe in a supposedly unused section of Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic black graveyard near Chicago. Esper refused to keep his mouth shut about the grisly things he saw, leading to the arrest of four cemetery workers accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies and reselling their plots.

(msnbc 21st July 09)

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Describing themselves as 'good squatters', the men said they had plastered the
ceilings, linked up the electricity and had running water in the three storey
eight bedroom house in which they live rent free

"Squatters have moved into a £3 million property on one of the richest streets in Britain, only a few doors down from royalty, financiers and an industrialist billionaire. The three men, from Romania and France, have been living at the run-down house on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, north London, for the last two months. Not far away lies Lakshmi Mittal's £40 million gated home, Summer Palace, while members of the Saudi Arabian and Brunei royal families own large properties further along the road." (Daily Telegraph, 15 July) RD

A MAD, MAD WORLD

"A French court will examine whether the elderly heiress to the L'Oreal fortune, Europe's richest woman, was in her right mind when she lavished gifts worth close to $1.4 billion on a younger male friend. Prosecutor Philippe Courroye, who has been probing for over a year the gifts made by Liliane Bettencourt to photographer and socialite Francois-Marie Banier, told Reuters on Wednesday the case would come to trial in September. Banier, 62, a fixture in fashionable Paris circles for four decades, has received artwork, checks, cash, life insurance and other gifts from Bettencourt since 2002. Judicial sources estimate the total value of the gifts at about 1 billion euros. "What I have given to Francois-Marie Banier, though it's a lot, is not that much when you put it in perspective," Bettencourt told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche in December, in her only interview on the matter. Bettencourt, 86, is the biggest shareholder in cosmetics giant L'Oreal, the company her father founded. Her fortune was estimated at $13.4 billion by Forbes this year, placing her in 21st position on the magazine's list of billionaires." (Yahoo News, 15 July) RD

A CARING SOCIETY?

"A bleak picture of a mental health service that tolerates bullying and houses children alongside adults in breach of guidelines is revealed in a damning report from a government monitoring body. The Mental Health Act Commission claims many more patient deaths will occur through inadequate staffing and lack of training. The 248-page study, the last by the commission before it is replaced by the new Care Quality Commission, highlights how patients put on suicide watch are often poorly observed, leading to tragedies half-concealed by "falsification" of nursing records." (Observer, 19 July) RD

A BOOM DURING THE SLUMP

"The greed and self-centredness of the bankers that helped to cause the credit crunch is costing taxpayers around the world billions of pounds - but has brought a counter-cyclical boom to one business off the Essex coast. The Causeway Retreat, on a private island in the Blackwater estuary, has had a flood of stressed and substance-abusing financiers. ...Bankers account for about 60% of clients at the retreat, which occupies all of 400-acre Osea Island. ... A week's stay in the luxurious manor house costs £10,000; more mundane cottage accommodation is £5,000 per week." (Observer, 12 July) RD

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

"What does a Danish shipping magnate give himself for a birthday? Well if you're Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller, who turned 96 on Monday, you get yourself an 82-foot sailing yacht, according to the daily Berlingske Tidende said. The $11 million boat is a Finnish-built Swan and is Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller's eighth yacht, the paper said. Like his earlier boats, it will be christened "Klem," which means "hug" in Danish and is formed by the first initials of the names of his daughters Kirsten and Leise and his late wife Emma Maersk, the newspaper said. Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller's billions comes from the A.P. Moller-Maersk's Group, which is the world's biggest container shipping company." (Yahoo News, 13 July) RD

GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY?

"UK unemployment rose by a record 281,000 to 2.38 million in the three months to May, the Office for National Statistics has said. The jobless rate increased to 7.6%, the highest in more than 10 years. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit increased by 23,800 in June to 1.56 million, which was less than analysts had forecast. Unemployment among young people has been especially acute, as firms cut jobs to reduce costs in the downturn."
(BBC News, 15 July) RD

WARLORDS AND WASHINGTON

"The Bush administration repeatedly sought to block investigations into alleged killings of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners by a US-backed Afghan warlord in 2001, The New York Times reported Friday. Top US officials discouraged separate probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department and the Pentagon into the mass killings because it was conducted by the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, a warlord then on the Central Intelligence Agency's payroll, the Times said on its website. Dostam's militia had worked closely with US Special Forces during the US-led invasion and was part of the Northern Alliance, which helped the United States topple the Taliban." (Yahoo News, 10 July) RD

CHICKEN FEED FOR SOME

"London Mayor Boris Johnson dismissed the £250,000-a-year he earns from a second job as "chicken feed". Mr Johnson also insisted it was "wholly reasonable" for him to write newspaper columns on the side because he did them "very fast". The comments risk infuriating millions of Londoners struggling to make ends meet amid the economic downturn. And they are unlikely to please David Cameron, who has ordered his shadow cabinet to give up extra work in the run-up to the general election to show their "commitment". Mr Johnson, who is paid nearly £140,000 for his day job, was quizzed over his lucrative contract with the Daily Telegraph during an interview for the BBC's HARDTalk programme. He responded: "It's chicken feed." (Independent, 14 July) RD

THIS IS DEMOCRACY?

"In 2000, Jon Corzine spent tens of millions of his personal fortune to vault himself from political obscurity to the United States Senate. In 2005, he spent millions more to jump from Washington to Trenton and become New Jersey's governor. This year he's opening his wallet again as he looks to overcome a steep deficit in the polls to win re-election, in what could be the ultimate test of whether money trumps all in politics today. Throughout American history, personal wealth has often played a significant role in winning political office. But as campaigns are increasingly decided by 30-second TV ads and sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts, the two major parties are increasingly looking to recruit individuals with personal fortunes that can help bankroll campaign costs that now more often than not run into the tens of millions of dollars."
(Yahoo News, 9 July) RD

SUPERMARKET EXPLOITATION

"Foreign fruit pickers are taking home as little as £45 a week at a company which provides some of Britain's largest supermarkets with thousands of tonnes of fruit, an investigation by The Independent has found. S&A Produce, which supplies both Tesco and Sainsbury's, employs thousands of eastern Europeans who are given a specific work visa allowing them to work for the company. They are attracted by the prospect of earning up to £200 a week by picking fruit on its farms in Herefordshire and Kent. The workers are officially paid the minimum wage of £5.74, a comparatively high sum for foreign nationals who often have an average annual income of less than £3,000 in their own countries. But employee pay slips obtained by The Independent show that the real hourly rate for the company's fruit pickers often amounts to less than half the minimum wage once a series of obligatory charges has been deducted." (Independent, 10 July) RD

A WASTEFUL SOCIETY

"... If this weren't bad enough, new research has identified and quantified a whole new layer of waste that has been obscured until now. A new book, Waste: Uncovering The Global Food Waste Scandal, based on three years' research by author Tristram Stuart, suggests that at least 25 per cent of fresh fruit and vegetables produced in Britain is wasted before it even reaches the shops. Piles of imperfect potatoes, spinach, tomatoes and other produce are left in the ground to rot, sent to landfill, or to anaerobic digestion, which generates power from the foul gases that arise." (Independent, 9 July) RD

EVEN THE DAILY MAIL!

"Official statistics show that the gap between rich and poor has widened under Labour, with the poorest 10 per cent forced to survive on an income of just £87-aweek compared to £96 in 1997. Health inequalities have also increased, growing 4 per cent for men and 11 per cent for women." (Daily Mail, 10 July) RD

A CLUELESS POPE

At first glance it might appear that His Holiness is getting bang up to date and having a go at the capitalist system, but on closer examination it is no such thing. "Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy. The pontiff’s call for stronger government regulation was made in his third and eagerly awaited encyclical, Charity in Truth, which the Vatican chose to issue on the eve of the G8 summit of rich nations being held in Italy." (Financial Times, 7 July)
What kind of fairy tale society does he live in when he talks about "a return to ethics in the global economy"? Capitalism is a society based on class ownership, exploitation and the profit motive. To talk of ethics in such a society is nonsensical and "government regulation" is powerless to deal with the slump and boom cycle of capitalism. The Holy Father should abandon his foray into political economy and stick to what he does best - scaring the shit out of believers and passing the collection plate. RD

HARD TIMES, HARD CHEESE

"Tesco are to put security tags on cheese.The metal strips, usually put on alcohol, razor blades and CDs, has been added to everyday items such as Cathedral City cheddar cheese and steak. If the strips are not deactivated at the checkout tills then an alarm is set off. The store in Brockworth, Gloucester, has acted because of a spike in thefts following the economic downturn." (Daily Telegraph, 7 July) RD

THE REALITIES OF CAPITALISM

Every Sunday the pulpits will thunder with the usual Christian nonsense. "Thirst not after the material things of life" ..."Blessed are the poor" and so on ad nauseum. Away from the fairy stories of the bible however the church like every other organisation has to deal with the realities of the capitalist system. "The Church of England is to debate several money-saving measures to cope with the recession, falling investment returns and a £352m pension deficit. At this weekend's General Synod, the governing body for the Church of England, clergy and laity will look at proposals such as trimming the number of bishops and other senior clergy and encouraging churchgoers to donate up to 10% of their earnings. A paper prepared by the diocese of Bradford noted that despite a "large decline" in church membership and full-time paid clergy, there had been no serious consideration given to the need to reduce the number of senior posts and the structures around them." (Guardian, 11 July)
The Church of England is finding that in a recession businesses have to cut their overheads - and that applies to the soul-saving business too. RD