ART AND AUSTERITY

While unemployment rises and the government warns "we are all in this together" it seems that all is not doom and gloom. "Sotheby's in London's upmarket New Bond Street sold nearly £1bn of fine art in its sales during 2011, according to results filed at Companies House. And with global sales of fine art estimated to have hit £35.8bn last year, it appears Britain is taking a significant chunk. The biggest sale of the year was Francesco Guardi's Venice, a View of the Rialto Bridge, Looking North, from the Fondamenta del Carbon, which yielded £26.7m. " (Independent, 19 March) It is heartening to note that the owning class have not let the present austerity affect their love of a nice picture. RD

THE PRICE OF PLATINUM

South African mine owners are complaining about government interference in the safety precautions in their booming industry. "A surge in government-ordered safety stoppages has already hit output in the world's largest platinum producer and the murder of a female miner underground last month means South Africa's mines are going to come under even more scrutiny. With deaths among miners up 10 percent in the first two months of this year - albeit alongside a sharp drop in injuries - the industry is going to keep feeling the heat. Mine deaths have plunged since the end of white-minority apartheid rule in 1994 but around 10 miners, the vast majority of them black, are still killed every month, chiefly in accidents." (Reuters, 7 March) Every month ten workers die in the mining industry and the owners are complaining about interference in their profit making. RD

Music to their ears

Scotland's biggest music festival, T in the Park, was worth more than £40 million to the Scottish economy last year, according to organisers.

work til you drop

Someone born today may have to work until they are 80, a leading insurer has warned.

John Lawson, head of pension policy at Standard Life, said a child born this year may have to work through their seventies.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

As many European countries face bankruptcy and workers find themselves out of a job with social benefits being constantly cut, it should be noted that in Greece and Italy where the crisis is deepest the owning class are still doing very well. "A recent survey published by agency Knight Frank shows that Italians have overtaken Russians as the leading buyers of prime London property. Since January, they have accounted for eight per cent of all sales in the area. Last year it was the Greeks, who more than doubled their spending on prime London as riots raged across Athens. This year, it is their cousins across the Adriatic who are opening their chequebooks. The total spend for Italians in prime London is estimated to be £408m for 2011, up from £185m in 2010." (Daily Telegraph, 9 March) All this is happening at a time when Italy is in danger of falling apart at the seams. Economic reports worsen daily. The Bank of Italy forecast the Italian economy to contract by 1.5 per cent this year, while employment is shrinking at its fastest rate since July 2009. RD

THIS IS CAPITALISM

Living in Rio de Janerio Eike Batista is reckoned by many to become the world's richest man in the next couple of years. He has possibly a fortune of £19 billion according to the Sunday Times (18 March) He is pictured therein with a McLaren F1 Mercedes in his living room. "Oxfam said that malnutrition rates across Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and northern Senegal are hovering between 10% and 15%, and in some areas have risen beyond the emergency threshold level of 15%. It says that more than one million children in the Sahel region are at risk of severe malnutrition. In parts of Chad, Oxfam says, some villagers are digging up ant hills to gather grain that the ants have stored." (BBC News, 9 March) A useless parasite that produces nothing lives in such an arrogant display of wealth while people starve. This is how capitalism operates RD

HUNGRY FOR PROFITS

Along with caviar and truffles, foie gras is part of the top three Western gourmet items. However, the forced feeding of geese in order to fatten up their livers has been plagued with controversy internationally. Geese or ducks forced to undergo gavage feeding, starting when they are between 10 and 14 weeks old, have a 20 to 30-centimeter-long tube stuck into their esophagus two or three times a day. Food is poured down this tube. Occasionally this causes the bursting of the esophagus. Sometimes the bird develops liver disease. “Feeding like this for two weeks is the limit of what the poor birds can bear. Beyond this limit, they’d die in large number,” says Zhou Zungo, director of the World Animals Welfare Farms Association.

Countries like Germany and Poland outlaw the “gavage” method of feeding, while California prohibits the sale of foie gras. the European Union has planned to stop, from 2019 onward, the production of this traditional cuisine. Currently, Hungary, which used to be the second-biggest producer, has gradually decreased its output. Israel, another major producer in the past, has also discontinued its production. Last year, some French foie gras producers were shut out at the Cologne International Food Fair.

So it is not altogether surprising that production is shifting eastward to China. The world’s biggest goose farm and foie gras factory will soon be established on the banks of Poyang Lake, Jiangxi Province, China. The American investment company Creek Project is said to be putting $100 million into the venture. The planned Poyang Lake project will raise around two million geese and eight million ducks annually. China already produces an estimated 1,000 tons of foie gras per year, double its output in 2006. France still remains No. 1 with about 20,000 tons a year.

Bruce - the invader

He was probably brought up in a mixture of the Anglo-French culture of northern England and south-eastern Scotland, and the Gaelic culture of Carrick and the Irish Sea, French being his paternal-tongue and Gaelic his maternal-tongue. In 1292 his mother died, elevating Robert the Bruce to the Earldom of Carrick

Bruce, like all his family, had a complete belief in his right to the throne. However his actions of supporting alternately the English and Scottish armies had led to a great deal of distrust towards Bruce among the “Community of the Realm of Scotland”. His ambition was further thwarted by John Comyn, known simply as the Red Comyn and another lord of Norman origin. English records still in existence today state that the Comyn murder was planned in an attempt to gain the throne of Scotland. For this reason King Edward of England wrote to the Pope and asked for his excommunication of Robert Bruce. Barely seven weeks after Comyn was killed in Dumfries, Bruce was crowned King of Scots

Bruce's struggle for the Scottish crown wasn't an enterprise born of patriotism. Bruce's motives appear to be slightly more self-serving than that. The ascension of his family to royalty seemed more central to his long-term plans than Scottish liberation from English rule.

The facts speak for themselves. Both Bruce and his father supported Edward I's invasion of Scotland in 1296, hoping to gain the crown after Balliol's fall. They were understandably disappointed when Edward proceeded to install himself as king. In 1297, Bruce, encouraged by Bishop Wishart, raised the standard of revolt at Irvine (the reason why he was absent at the Battle of Stirling Bridge). However, the rising failed and Bruce, rather than join Wallace after the Scots victory at Stirling Bridge, kept a low profile until he could determine what the English reaction would be. Bruce was also absent at the Battle of Falkirk, in which Wallace's army was devastated, but seems to have made an effort to help by burning the town of Ayr in order to deny it to the English as they returned south.

In 1298, after the Scots defeat at Falkirk, Bruce and John Comyn replaced Wallace as Guardians of Scotland. They soon quarrelled however, Comyn being a supporter of Balliol's claim to the throne, and Bruce was 'replaced' a year later. He continued to fight on until it seemed Balliol was about to return, then, once again, he submitted to the English king, hoping for recognition of his claim to the throne. So Bruce wasn't adverse to switching sides in pursuit of his goal, and this wasn't irregular practice amongst noblemen in pursuit of power at the time. The rhetoric of the Declaration of Arbroath, 22 years later – "For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English" – was never Bruce's rhetoric, for he had appealed to English lordship on more than one occasion.

In the early 14th century, Ireland was divided between Irish dynasties and Anglo-Irish lords who ruled parts of Ireland. The Dark Age Kings of Alba had been intensely proud of their Gaelic-Irish origin and Bruce wrote as king asking them to free "our nation" (meaning both Scots and Irish) from English rule. Edward Bruce may also have had a reasonable claim to the Irish high kingship. He was supported by Ireland's most powerful king, Domnall Ua Neill, a kinsman of Robert and Edward through their maternal grandfather. Robert appealed to the native Irish to rise against Edward II's rule, and some have seen this as a cynical manipulation of Gaelic sentimentalism. Bruce popularised an ideological vision of a "Pan-Gaelic Greater Scotia" with his lineage ruling over both Ireland and Scotland. This propaganda campaign was aided by two factors. The first was his marriage alliance from 1302 with the de Burgh family of the Earldom of Ulster in Ireland; second, Bruce himself on his mother's side of Carrick, was descended from Gaelic royalty in Scotland as well as Ireland. Bruce's Irish ancestors included Eva of Leinster (d.1188), whose ancestors included Brian Boru of Munster and the kings of Leinster. Thus, lineally and geopolitically, Bruce attempted to support his anticipated notion of a pan-Gaelic alliance between Scottish-Irish Gaelic populations, under his kingship. This is revealed by a letter he sent to the Irish chiefs, where he calls the Scots and Irish collectively nostra nacio (our nation), stressing the common language, customs and heritage of the two peoples:

"Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent you our beloved kinsman, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God's will our nation (nostra nacio) may be able to recover her ancient liberty."

The diplomacy worked to a certain extent, at least in Ulster, where the Scots had some support. The Irish chief, Donal O'Neil, for instance, later justified his support for the Scots to Pope John XXII by saying "the Kings of Lesser Scotia all trace their blood to our Greater Scotia and retain to some degree our language and customs."

However, the Scots failed to win over the non-Ulster chiefs, or to make any other significant gains in the south of the island, where people couldn't see the difference between English and Scottish occupation. The Irish Annals of the period described the defeat of the Bruces by the English as one of the greatest things ever done for the Irish nation due to the fact it brought an end to the famine and pillaging brought on the Irish by both the Scots and the English. Edward Bruce's bid for the high kingship ended when he was slain in 1318 at the Battle of Faughart .

The whole expedition does show, however, just how ambitious the Bruce family were. The attack on English-ruled Ireland could be perceived as ploy to split English forces and, hence, better defend Scotland, but Edward Bruce did have a serious ambition to rule Ireland as the King. Would the Bruces have stopped at Ireland and Scotland? Or would Wales have been their next target, in a sort of United Celtic Kingdom?

PROFITS AND POLLUTION

As China strives to become the world's biggest producer and manufacturer there is a horrendous price to pay. "Air pollution will become the biggest health threat in China unless the government takes greater steps to monitor and publicise the dangers of smog, the country's leading respiratory disease specialist warned this week. Lung cancer and cardiovascular illnesses are already rising and could get worse in the future because of factory emissions, vehicle exhausts and cigarette smoke, Zhong Nanshan, the president of the China Medical Association, told the Guardian." (Guardian, 16 March) Zhong said he has been concerned about the problem for 10 years, but his efforts to press for official data have met with silence. During the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he said he asked the environment department for information about ozone and carbon levels, but made no headway. What Zhong does not seem to comprehend is that in their mad dash for profits the capitalist class look upon health risks as unimportant. RD

EDUCATION AND NUTRITION

The owning class are always thinking up ways to cut costs and increase profits, so it should come as no surprise to learn the US government have thought up a ruse to cut the education bill. "Like a horror-film villain, "pink slime" - the cheeky nickname for scraps of slaughtered cow that have been pulverized, defatted, subjected to ammonia steam to kill pathogens, and congealed into a filler for ground beef - takes a pounding but keeps coming back. Last month, McDonald's announced it would stop using the stuff. But just this week, pink slime got a de facto endorsement from none other than the USDA, which the online journal The Daily reported plans to keep buying millions of pounds of it for use in the National School Lunch Program." (Mother Jones, 7 March) This "pink slime" was too awful for even cut-rate eaterie MacDonald's to use but perfect for kid's school lunch

EDUCATION AND EXPLOITATION

One of the illusions that many young workers have is that if they can get a university degree it would mean that they could get a better job. "According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the proportion of graduates employed in jobs requiring less skill than they were trained for stands at 36 per cent, up from just over 25 per cent a decade ago. The findings mean that around 500,000 people of the 1.5 million who graduated in the last six years are in low-skilled work. The figures will lead young people to question the value of university education, according to recruitment experts. The ONS said that around one new graduate in every five available for work is unemployed." (Daily Telegraph, 6 March) A degree in Philosophy is not much use to you when you are stacking shelves in Tescos, but it is all part and parcel of the unpredictability of capitalism RD

who owns the sea-side?

Socialist Courier reads that MPs on Westminster’s Scottish affairs committee recommend that the Crown Estate Commissioners, the body responsible half of Scotland’s coast and almost all the seabed should be stripped of the role and control of the coast handed back to the local communities.

“The point is to conserve these assets and maximise the benefits to the island and coastal communities most closely involved with them.The only way this can be done is by devolving as much of the responsibility – and benefit – down to those local communities as possible.”

Socialist Courier previously but briefly touched upon this subject when it highlighted the continued existence of the Viking-derived Udal law found in Shetland. Scottish Courts have acknowledged the supremacy of Udal law in property cases and in particular about shore ownership rights, where it declared that the Shetland community owns the sea and seabed around its isles. The Crown Estate had to admit the supremacy of Udal Law.

The old neglected again

Older patients are “not safe” on hospital wards in Scotland because of a lack of qualified nurses to care for them according to Royal College of Nursing (RCN) findings. The report suggests there is just one nurse caring for nearly ten patients on old people’s wards. A survey of almost 1,700 nurses found that 78 per cent said comforting and talking to patients was not done or done inadequately on their last shift because of low staff numbers. Some 59 per cent said promoting mobility and self-care was left undone or unfinished, with 34 per cent saying they could not provide patients with food and drink, and 33 per cent claiming they were unable to fully help patients to the toilet or manage incontinence.

The RCN warned there was a danger that “care becomes compromised” and said that many nurses say “they are too busy to provide the standard of care they would like”. The report said: “Older people in Scotland are being let down by a lack of professionally qualified nurses in hospitals, despite nationally agreed planning for the nursing workforce. Despite older people often having the most complex needs, the evidence suggests that they regularly suffer from a severe shortage of nurses and healthcare support workers (HCSWs), coupled with an inappropriate skill mix of HCSWs to nurses."
The RCN called for a “patient guarantee” to set out the number of nurses needed on older people’s wards.

It emerged the number of nurses in Scotland’s hospitals plummeted by thousands in just over two years, with further nursing posts lost during the last few months of 2011. The RCN said the number of nursing and midwifery staff employed in Scotland had fallen by 2,190 between September 2009 and the end of 2011.

According to the RCN Scotland director, Theresa Fyffe, the number of nurses employed was at a six-year low. She said: “As health boards come under increasing financial pressure to deliver the same services to more and more people, they are saving money when nurses leave by not replacing them or by replacing them with nurses and healthcare support workers at lower-paid bands."

The charity Age Scotland demanded dramatic improvements to care services in the community, to keep older people “safe and out of hospital”.

Scotlands water

Forget oil ... It is water the world wants more than anything else.

Last week the Environment Agency warned parts of England were facing a drought this year. Seven water companies have announced hosepipe bans in the southeast from next month. It is not just the southeast of England that is short of water. According to the latest United Nations (UN) water report, published last week, there are a billion people across the world who do not have access to safe drinking water, and the number is rising.

Droughts and water shortages are common across large parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Two-thirds of the Arab region's available surface water originates from outside of the region, leading to many conflicts with upstream countries. Experts have often predicted that "water wars" will break out in the Middle East as nations struggle to feed their people and water becomes scarcer. At the UN World Water Forum in France, the former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, warned there was no substitute for water. "The deficit of fresh water is becoming increasingly severe and large scale," he said. "Continuation of water consumption at 20th-century rates is no longer possible."

In his book, Peak Water, Scottish writer and a political adviser to the Scottish Government, Alexander Bell imagines the decimation of Dubai, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. "The great monument to 21st-century civilization lies in ruins, shattered into the sand like so many before," he wrote. "Not long before the world had fought over oil, but now water is the prize."

In another scenario, he has both Chicago and Toronto smashed into "twisted steel and broken concrete" after a war between the US and Canada over access to water. Canada is one of the wettest countries in the world, but the US is growing short of water, partly because it consumes two and half times more per person than Europe. Debates have raged for decades over whether Canada should sell water to its southern neighbours. The US problem is illustrated by Las Vegas. To sustain the city's two million people, water is brought 1400 miles from the Rockies by the Colorado River via a vast artificial lake created by the Hoover Dam. "This may be a sure case of ecocide," observed Bell. "Las Vegas can only die, and within our lifetimes, because the water supply is running out."

Even in Europe, as many as 120 million people lack access to safe drinking water. "Water resources are under pressure in many parts of Europe, and it is getting worse," warned Jacqueline McGlade, the executive director of the European Environment Agency, based in Copenhagen. "With climate change making water supply less predictable, it is extremely important that Europe uses water more efficiently for the benefit of all its users. Water resources should be managed as effectively as any other natural asset owned by countries." Farmers, who use about a quarter of Europe's water, need to adopt less wasteful ways of watering their crops like "drip irrigation" , she said

Large parts of Spain, France, Ireland and the southeast of England are shown to have "extreme water stress". The whole of Italy and other parts of France, Spain and England are said to be enduring "water stress", while Scotland has "no stress".

First Minister Alex Salmond views Scotland's water is a natural resource with the potential to swell the national coffers by selling it to England. Salmond suggested that Scotland could help alleviate the long-term shortages. "..you would sell it on...as an ongoing commercial transaction." The Scottish Government said Scottish Water could make a profit out of selling water to England. But the idea of selling water to England has run into criticism from other experts, who warn that it would be impractical, polluting and expensive. "It is not simple," said Dr Jon Hargreaves, chief of Scottish Water for six years until 2007 and now chair of the British Waterways Scotland Group. "Ultimately, it depends on the market.

Chris Spray, a professor at Dundee University's water centre and a former director of environmental science at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency explained that it raised a series of difficult questions about ecological damage, costs and ownership. Dr Sarah Hendry, another Dundee University specialist said exporting water would also mean that you would have to turn it into a commercial commodity, which would open up the difficult political issue of who should own and benefit from Scotland's water. Scotland's water has no legal owner.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/pipe-dreams.17056511

PUBLIC MEETING ADMISSION FREE

Glasgow Branch of the Socialist Party GB

Don't recycle Capitalism, BIN IT

Many people look at history as a dull academic subject, like Henry Ford they may say "history is bunk". Although it should be noted that when he said that he was referring to the notion that history was just the recording of the acts of kings, queens and great men. If that was the case then it would indeed be bunk. The viewpoint known as the Materialist Conception of History is central to the world viewpoint of the SPGB, so the speaker will attempt to:- 1. Outline the basic viewpoint 2. Correct some illusions about the MC of H 3. Discuss the role of the class struggle

Venue: Maryhill Community Central Halls 304 Maryhill Road Glasgow G20 7YE Wednesday March 21st AT 8.30PM

Future Meetings of the Glasgow Branch which will take place at the same time are.

Wednesday May 16th The Positive Case for World Socialism speaker Brian Gardner

Wednesday April 18th The Main  Barriers to  Socialism speaker John Cumming

We don't micro-credit it

Glasgow and surrounding parts of western Scotland have some of the worst pockets of poverty in Britain. Life expectancy is below the national average and some families have been on welfare for three or four generations.

Mohamed Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winning economist, hopes to raise £1m ($1.56m) in coming months to open the first European branch of his Grameen Bank in Glasgow by the end of the summer. Under its business plan for Glasgow, which will be overseen by experienced managers from Bangladesh, Grameen expects to raise £3m over three years and lend an average of £1,000 to 1,500 borrowers at an interest rate of 19.8% a year.

Rushanara Ali, the Labour Party’s spokeswoman for international development, welcomed the symbolism of experts coming from a developing country to share their knowledge “If they’ve got solutions that work somewhere else, it doesn’t do us any harm to look at how we adapt them,”

Unfortunately Yunis mico-credit schemes are NOT the panacea for poverty. Thomas Dichter of the Cato Institute - “In Bangladesh, 30 years after Yunus’s invention, poverty statistics are worse than they’ve ever been, so something else is the source of the problem and micro-credit is not helping.”

And Socialist Courier asserts that the source of the problem is property, not the lack of riches. Private property and poverty are twins born of the division of society into classes. To end poverty you have to end private property and wage-slavery.

See our companion blogs related posts.

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/11/yunis-and-micro-credit-myths.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/08/microfinance-fails-poor.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/05/poverty-of-micro-finance.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2012/03/micro-credit-bubble.html
http://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2007/12/can-ethical-capitalism-work.html
http://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2012/01/micro-debt-slavery.html

WHOSE LAND?

453 acres of King's Park below Stirling Castle – the last significant ancient property of the Scottish Crown not controlled by Scottish Ministers – is being sold off by the Crown Estate Commissioners for £1 million. The people of Stirling will pay for more than half the sale price to secure the site for the town's golf club, despite the public having effectively owned the land since the 12th century. Over the past years the CEC has managed the park as just another part of their commercial rural estate. In 2006, it began secret negotiations to sell Stirling Golf Club lands they already leased. Stirling Council stepped in and agreed to acquire the parkland and land at the back of the castle funded by £567,000 Stirling common good fund (60% of its reserves) and £450,000 from the golf club, which would then be granted a 175-year lease.

Andy Wightman, an authority on land-ownership in Scotland, is calling for answers from ministers and the local council. "This land is crown land. It is Scottish public land. It should be administered by Scottish ministers, as nearly all other historic castles, palaces and royal parks are. No public money should be needed to acquire control of this land, least of all the bulk of Stirling's common good fund. Why...is the Scottish Government sitting idly by while a common good fund is raided to pay for public land that already belongs to us, to be given away to a private golf club for 175 years? It is time to stop this madness."

King's Park Community Council wrote to the council: "In our opinion this is a serious mistake given that the recommendations about to be published in the Scotland Bill give every indication that Crown Estate management in Scotland will be returned to Scottish ministers."

$250 MILLION? CHICKENFEED!

The arrogance of the owning class knows no bounds. Take the case of Mitt Romney who is estimated to have a fortune worth about $250 million. "Mitt Romney's wife says she doesn't consider herself to be wealthy. In an interview Monday on Fox News, the wife of the Republican presidential front-runner, Ann Romney, was asked about criticism that her husband can seem out of touch with average Americans. .... She added: "How I measure riches is by the friends I have and the loved ones I have and the people that I care about in my life, and that's where my values are and that's where my riches are. ... Mitt Romney has drawn criticism for offhand remarks that point to the wide economic divide separating him and nearly all other Americans. ....While campaigning in Michigan, Romney referred to his wife driving "a couple of Cadillacs" as he pointed to his longstanding support of American automakers." (Washington Post, 6 March) RD

GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY

When workers are in employment they are often treated like the wage slaves they are, but retirement will bring no improvement to their conditions. "More than half of elderly and disabled people in care homes are being denied basic health services while staff are failing to to do enough to preserve their dignity, according to an official review. Some older people routinely have to wait up to three months for formal checks for painful conditions such as bed sores, according to figures from the health care watchdog. A quarter were not given a choice of male or female staff to help them use the lavatory and more than a third of care homes surveyed admitted delays in getting medication to residents. " (Daily Telegraph, 7 March) In times of economic crisis the owning class must look for ways to reduce overheads. An obvious sources of savings is in cutting the cost of care for old workers. RD

THE OLYMPIAN SPIRIT?

We shall shortly be hearing a lot of nationalistic rubbish from the media about the Olympian spirit and how it is better "to compete than to win" and other such nonsense, but capitalism is just not like that. "Bangladeshi workers producing sportswear for Puma, Nike and Adidas are being physically abused, a British newspaper claimed on Sunday. Bangladeshis working in factories making clothing for the brands, all three of which sponsor the Olympic Games that begin in London on July 27, reported being beaten, verbally abused and sexually harassed, The Observer said." (Himalyan, 5 March) All three companies intend to compete AND win, no matter how much their workers suffer. RD