ANOTHER LABOUR FAILURE

Despite the Government's efforts, around 20 per cent of the population is still
stuck in poverty

"Labour's strategy for tackling poverty has reached the end of the road and Britain risks a return to Victorian levels of inequality, according to a major two-year study seen by The Independent. With 20 per cent of the population still stuck in poverty, the report calls for sweeping reform of the tax and welfare systems under which higher earners would finance more generous. universal benefits. The £43,888-a-year ceiling on national insurance contributions (NICs) would be abolished, so people earning more would pay NICs at 11 per cent on all their income above that level, instead of the current 1 per cent. The study, by the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust, argues that Gordon Brown's "quiet redistribution" of wealth now lacks public support - and declares that one of the reasons is Labour's tough language about benefit fraud and claimants." ( Independant, 30 November ) Rd

THE USA TODAY

"With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs. Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, long-time recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare." (New York Times, 29 November) RD

LOTS OF VACANCIES

"Wanted: Clean-living young people for a long career (women need not apply). Responsibilities: Varied. Spiritual guidance, visiting the sick, public relations, marriages (own marriage not permitted). Hours: On call at all times. Salary: None, bar basic monthly stipend. He hasn't placed classified ads in the Irish press just yet, but according to Father Patrick Rushe, coordinator of vocations with the Catholic Church in Ireland, "We've done just about everything" else to attract young men to the priesthood. And yet the call of service in one of Europe's most religious countries is falling on more deaf ears than ever. Earlier this month, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, made a grim prediction about the future of the church in Ireland: If more young priests aren't found quickly, the country's parishes may soon not have enough clergy to survive." (TIME, 29 November)  RD

TEN WASTED YEARS

"Poverty has been rising in the UK since 2004 and is now at the same level as the start of the decade, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says. The group said that issues of unemployment and the repossession of homes had become more acute before the recession started. ... The report, produced by the New Policy Institute, found that two million children lived in low-income, working households. This was the highest figure since the Foundation started collecting records. " (BBC News, 3 December RD  

GREEN MADNESS

"Can a bullet, a bomb or a hand grenade ever be 'friendly'? Environmentalists seem to think so. Having 'greened' their homes, their eating habits and their fashion choices, eco-campaigners now want to 'green' warfare too. They want to make the military obliteration of human life, the destruction of families, homes and towns through fire and fury, a more eco-friendly pursuit ­ one which will still kill and maim people, of course, but which won't cause too much damage to the surrounding soil or trees. Last week, the 10:10 campaign group welcomed MBDA Missile Systems into its fold. Founded by eco-filmmaker Franny Armstrong and backed by the Guardian, 10:10 is about encouraging individuals and organisations to reduce their carbon emissions by 10 per cent in 2010. ...The 10:10 organisers say they had a long and tortured debate about whether to accept MBDA. In the end they decided that they should, because the important thing is that MBDA "reduce their emissions by 10 per cent... What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn't possibly comment." In other words? All we're interested in is reducing emissions. You can make deadly weaponry; you can ship it around the world; you can sell it in war zones where it will be used to blow up things and people ­ just make sure you do it in an eco-responsible fashion. Destroy human life, by all means, but please do it sustainably." (First Post, 30 November) RD

A MURDEROUS SYSTEM

"And while it's been 20 years since Central America's last major civil-war battle, the isthmus is actually more dangerous today. Thanks in large part to exploding gang violence and useless justice systems, Central America has seen 79,000 murders in the past six years, more than the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war or the 50,000 killed in Nicaragua's 1980-1990 contra war." (TIME, 30 November) RD

Food for Thought 2

America On Line (AOL) is planning to lay off 2 500 workers, more than a third of its work force as unemployment refuses to go down. Some are alright though. The Thomson family, who control Thomson Reuter News among many other things, has amasses $22 billion, up 19% on last year, read the Canadian wealth list. John Ayers

PROMISES, PROMISES

Business as usual will not do it.

"In 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America's secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry."

( Economist, 19 November ) RD

A BLEAK FUTURE

If words were food, no one would go hungry

"According to the FAO, the number of malnourished people in the world rose to over 1 billion this year, up from 915m in 2008. Economists at the World Bank reckon that the number living on less than $1.25 a day will rise by 89 m between 2008 and 2010 and those on under $2 a day will increase by 120m. A quarter of a century after a famine in Ethiopia which dramatised failings in the food system, famine again stalking the Horn of Africa." (Economist, 19 November) RD

Food for Thought

 On the economic front, the recession keeps hanging on. Bankruptcies soared September over August. The export oriented manufacturing sector failures were up 71%, retail business insolvencies up 69%, the high tech sector failures up 119% and personal bankruptcies spiked at 15 465, up 45% over last year. It also seems the Dubai building bubble has burst as they have requested suspensions on loan payments in the $70 billion range that will send shivers around the financial market. How stupid is this system that will result in many thousands losing their livelihood and being idled when there is so much to be done, but then, no one ever accused capitalism of having common sense! John Ayers

CONSPICIOUS CONSUMPTION

"Liverpool. A designer has produced the world's most expensive mobile telephone, featuring almost 200 diamonds and costing £1.92 million. The casing of the iPhone 3GS Supreme is made from 22-carat gold. The front bezel has 136 diamonds, while the Apple logo is made from 53 of the same jewels and the front button has a diamond of more than seven carats. Stuart Hughes, from Liverpool, took ten months to make the phone, which comes in a chest made of granite and Kashmir gold and lined with nubuck leather. It was commissioned by an anonymous Australian businessman." (Times, 30 November) RD

POVERTY EQUALS DEATH

"The number of deaths during the coldest three months of the year was up almost 50 per cent on the previous year to 36,700, sending extra 10,000 pensioners to early graves, new figures showed yesterday. The rise in "excess winter mortality" for England and Wales for the three months to February was the biggest for years and the highest total in a decade, sparking fresh calls for ministers to combat high energy prices. ... As fuel bills have soared over the past six years, the number of households in "fuel poverty" – defined as having to spend 10 per cent or more of their income on power and heat – has risen five-fold to 6.6 million this year. Britain has a worse record on winter deaths than colder European states such as Sweden, Norway and Finland. Age Concern, the charity for the elderly, warned that unless heating was made more affordable, further large-scale deaths would occur this winter. ... Last winter more than 90 per cent of deaths were pensioners, who are among the least able to afford heat but the most vulnerable to cold-related disease, such as seasonal flu, hypothermia, bronchitis and emphysema." (Independent, 25 November) RD

THINK-TANK NONSENSE

From time to time politicians like to spread the lie that modern politics is a very complicated complex subject and that is why we need clever people like them to administer capitalism.

Part of this fiction is supported by what they choose to call "think-tanks." Recently the Tory party leader David Cameron has given his support to Phillip Blond's new organisation rather grandly titled "ResPublica". The political sketch writer Ann Treneman went along to the launch of this new organisation to try and find what it stood for. She was completely baffled.

"The label that the great and the good have given to Mr. Blond is "philosopher king". Not only is he a blond who is a brunette but he is also something called a red Tory, which I am told is a blend of Catholic social thought and a critique of the effects of economic neo-liberalism. Since I have almost no idea what that means, I was looking forward to the speech, which was his vision of a "radical transformative conservatives".

"I listened closely and can report that this is radical transformative conservatism at its deepest: abstract, abstruse, and quite possibly, total gobbledygook."

Political sketch writers are notoriously flippant and renowned for taking the Mickey, but to be fair to Treneman she has certainly got a point when she directly quotes Blond on human relationships.

"These associations themselves are not post-modern verities; they are arbitrary collections of whim and sophistry arrayed against the void." (Times, 27 November)

Before you go searching for a dictionary trying to decipher that utterance lets go with Treneman's description "total gobbledygook".

$10 MILLION A DAY MAN

Don't rely on experts.

"Even as th e financial system collapsed last year, and millions of investors lost billions of dollars, one unlikely investor was racking up historic profits: John Paulson a hedge fund manager in New York. His firm made $20 billion between 2007 and early 2009 by betting against the housing market and big financial companies. Mr Paulson's personal cut would amout to $4 billion, or more than $10 million a day. That was more than the 2007 earnings of J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods combined".

(Wall Street Journal 15 November) RD

UK OWNERSHIP

"According to consultants AT Kearney, the richest 1pc in the UK hold some 70pc of the country's wealth. That there is this divide between rich and poor is not exactly new – but the scale of it, and the likelihood that it is not being narrowed by the financial crisis, is a big worry. Indeed, according to the report, in the US the amount of financial assets owned by the richest 1pc in the US is far, far lower at 48pc, and only 34pc in Australia. This must, to a large degree, be due to the fact that the UK set itself up in recent years as a haven for the super-rich, with its relatively generous rules on capital gains tax, because the income tax system itself is rather more redistributive than in the US. But the Kearney report is interesting because, unlike the traditional measure of inequality, the gini coefficient, it focuses not on income (the flow of money) but on actual substantive wealth (the stack of it that sits beneath us)." (Daily Telegraph, 25 November) RD

CLUNKERS AS CASH

While the "Cash for Appliances" programs will vary by state, some of the
proposed rebates that have been annouced so far, range from $50 to £100 per item

Capitalists can only access the surplus value extracted from the working class when they sell the products on the market. In times of recession they can reduce the price, but a method of selling and not reducing the price is preferable, trading in your old car as junk for a new car at a reduced price has met with some sucess, so the same method is to be used for refridgerators etc.

On the heels of its ballyhooed "Cash for Clunkers" program for cars, the federal government is expected to finalise details in the coming weeks of a tax- supported shopping extravaganza, known as "Cash for Appliances"

"Clunkers" is one of several stimulus programs whose purpose is to shift expenditures by households, businesses and governments from the future to the present," the coucil wrote in a September report. "Such time shifting is valuable in a recession when the economy has an abundance of unemployed resources that can be put to work at low net economic costs".

GOD AND MAMMON

"After what it must have deemed a decent interval since triggering a furore over its attack on traders and bankers as "robbers and assassins" last year, the Church of England is shamelessly seeking more yield. Just to refresh your memory, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, last September said it was right to ban short selling, while John Sentamu, archbishop of York, called traders who cashed in on falling prices "bank robbers and asset strippers". But the Church Commissioners had a tough year in 2008, as the Church's total assets dropped from £5.7bn to £4.4bn, a 23 per cent fall over the period. Clearly, faith alone was not enough. As the FT's People column reports on Wednesday in an appropriately headlined piece "God meets Joy", the Church of England has appointed fund manager Tom Joy to run its £4.4bn investment portfolio from a "very strong field of more than 70 applicants". (Financial Times, 6 August) RD

THE PRICE OF COAL

"A gas explosion tore through a state-run coal mine in Northern China, killing 42 people and leaving 66 others trapped underground. More than 500 people were working in the Xinxing mine in Heilongjiang province at the time. In the first nine months of this year, China's coal mines have suffered 11 major accidents with 303 deaths." (Observer, 22 November) RD

KING OF THE BRONX

Jacob Selechnik at his office in the Bronx, from which he oversees an empire of
apartment houses

"In the feudal world of real estate, where a handful of landlords claim ownership to its skyline of cramped apartments, Jacob Selechnik is most certainly royalty. He has been buying buildings in the city's poorest borough for nearly 50 years, amassing an empire that reached a peak of more than 7,000 apartments. Brokers estimate his net worth at more than half a billion dollars. What's more, Mr. Selechnik, who has $300 million in proceeds from recent sales and uncommon good will from banks, sees the haemorrhaging real estate market as an open season for bargain hunting."
(New York Times, 18 November) RD

FOR A PAIR OF GLOVES?

"Yves Saint Laurent. Advert" 

These jet-black gloves fuse bangles with supple leather for dramatic effect. The statement piece of the season - with a price to match.   Price: £2,345: (Independent, 9 November) RD