Saudi justice

24-year-old Ali al-Khawahir will be deliberately paralysis for stabbing his friend in the back 10 years ago unless he pays his victim 1m Saudi riyals (£177,000) in compensation. diyya, blood money is paid instead of the implementation of qisas – legal retribution. Originally, the religious prescription to seek diyya in lieu of punishment was seen as a way of preventing bad blood fomenting between communities and encouraging compromise. In the modern age it commodifies justice, where the price of crime is arbitrarily determined by the state. An eye for an eye … unless you can afford to be spared. In an another case in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, a father sexually molested and murdered his five-year-old daughter, but avoided jail by paying money to her mother. It has become a way for the rich and the powerful to purchase impunity.


JEREMY PAXMAN:
You called (Saudi Arabia) a friend of the civilised world.

TONY BLAIR:
It is. In my view, what it is doing in respect of the Middle East now...

JEREMY PAXMAN:
It chops people's arms off. It tortures people.

TONY BLAIR:
They have their culture, their way of life."

 And we have larned never to bite the hand that feeds us!

Salmond - apologist for organised crime

Speaking during his New York trip, Alex Salmond said HSBC "in many ways is the most Scottish bank in the world now. Founded by Scots, run by Scots, on the principles of Scottish banking. Hence one reason why it's survived the winds better than other institutions"


With the Scottish-based HBOS and RBS exposed as incompetent and failed banking institutions Salmond was required to look further afield for a positive example. But the HSBC?

This was the bank fined £1.2 billion for money laundering in the United States and Mexico, and embroiled in a fresh scandal with Argentine authorities accusing it of laundering $100 million. In India, in November 2012, anti-corruption crusaders Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan alleged that the bank was involved in black money and hawala transactions. They said that in July 2011, the Indian Government had received a list of about 700 people having bank accounts in HSBC, Geneva, in 2006. The Bank also was fined $1.4 billion by the U.K. for improper selling of its financial products, including interest-rate swaps to corporate customers.

According to the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development and Global Financial Integrity, HSBC Mexico’s Cayman Islands branch opened as many as $50,000-denominated accounts without adequate attention to customer identification. HSBC USA opened 2000 accounts with untraceable bearer share corporations as owner over the past decade. Between 2001 and 2007, it allowed 28,000 transactions involving countries, groups, or individuals against which the US had imposed financial sanctions. These include sale of $1billion of US banknotes to Al Rajhi, a Saudi bank with owners having ties to terrorist organisations, including al-Qaeda. Transactions amounting to $881 million were routed on behalf of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel and Colombian Norte del Valle cartel. Then, wire transfers totalling $670 billion between HSBC Mexico and HSBC USA were unmonitored. Another $200 trillion went through HSBC USA without anti-money laundering controls or monitoring.

The bank became “the preferred financial institution of drug cartels and money launderers” and as Alex Salmond says, it successfully weathered the recession seemingly by being the bag-man for drug-dealers, terrorists and tax evaders. Proud Scottish banking principles for Salmond to preach?

Food for thought

A survey conducted in twenty-two countries by Globescan Radar, found that few people considered problems such as air and water pollution, species loss, auto emissions, water shortages, and climate change, to be very serious. As John Smol, chairman of Research into Environmental Change at Queen's University, put it. Concern for the environment has always been in competition with the economy. When economic times are bad, people's priorities shift. We have seen this before. When the economy falters, almost always the environment is asked to pay a price." This is mainly because the loss of one's job, or the fear of it happening, seem more immediate than the destruction of the environment, despite the fact that the latter certainly affects the former and, despite the fact that the latter is becoming closer to an immediate problem, both should be viewed as matters to be dealt with now and this can only be done with the establishment of socialism. John Ayers

Remembering our history

The SNP would allow American bases on Scottish soil after independence – as long as they were non-nuclear. And just who would be doing an inventory check in a military escalation and crisis?

Salmond said the SNP’s support for entry into Nato was “to send a signal to our friends and partners that we wanted to assume responsibility as a responsible friend and partner.” Whats that about who sups with the Devil sups should have a long spoon? Salmond wants him in our back-yard.

On his visit to the United States Salmond spoke at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, a New York-based group set up in memory of Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (see here and here for this despicable man's history), and said: “Both the Declaration of Arbroath, with its search for a Scottish legitimacy, and the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of popular sovereignty, were sealed in the force of arms and struggle."

All nationalism is based on mythical history and nations have to create their ideologies from whatever scraps come to hand. Scotland is no exception and is perhaps luckier than most with its many tales of romance. The 6th April marks the anniversary of the signing of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath.


"Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." - Declaration of Arbroath or properly titled "Letter of Barons of Scotland to Pope John XXII".

Stirring patriotic stuff. That it had ever existed was soon entirely forgotten and it was only rediscovered when a version of it was published by Sir George Mackenzie in 1680. It then becomes influential, but not really as an expression of nationalism but as support for those who wished to curtail royal power. It was only later that the Declaration of Arbroath came to be seen in purely nationalistic terms.

Scotland in 1320 was a very different country to the Scotland we know today therefore we should not ahistorically give to a medieval mind-set the sensibilities of a later, modern age. So we should what did the signatories of the document actually mean by "we" and "freedom"? The "we" who attached their seals to the document were all noblemen. And it was their freedom that it concerned. The authors of the Arbroath declaration most likely used the word "people" to mean "people like us". There you have it. The “people” of Scotland were the nobles, the majority of whom at that time were still fairly much culturally Anglo-Norman, despite inter-marriage within the indigenous Scoto-Gaelic ruling families and their further integration in terms of land holding and property ownership. As for the common-folk of Scotland; they had no say in the matter. Or in anything for that matter. The idea that the peasant in the fields or labourer in the towns had any type of say is laughable. The Declaration signatories certainly had no concept of popular sovereignty.

Those medieval signatories to the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath were merely feudal barons asserting their claim to rule and lord it over their own tenants and serfs, not leading any "liberation struggle". In fact, John de Menteith, who turned William Wallace over to Edward of England put his seal to the Declaration of Arbroath.

The claims that the Declaration challenged the traditional belief in the Divine Right of Kings and promoting in its place the notion that the nation itself was foremost and the monarch merely its steward, is argued solely to justify Bruce usurping the rightful king John Balliol, who it should be remembered Wallace acted as Guardian for. The section of the Declaration reading “if this prince [Bruce] shall leave these principles he hath so nobly pursued, and consent that we or our kingdom be subjected to the king or people of England, we will immediately endeavour to expel him, as our enemy and as the subverter both of his own and our rights, and we will make another king, who will defend our liberties” should be read as a cautionary warning and a veiled threat to Robert the Bruce himself for he had switched his allegence several times in previous years.

In a propaganda war, the Scots were at a disadvantage . The Pope in Rome had excommunicated Bruce who had decided to hell being just an English lord, I’d rather be a Scottish king and to achieve that goal murdered his chief rival in a church. He sent three letters to the Pope. The first was a letter from himself, the second from the Scots clergy, and the third from the nobles of Scotland that became known as the Declaration of Arbroath.

The lesser-known earlier 1310 Declaration of the Clergy (the clergy being usually the younger sons of the nobles) proclaimed the Kingship of Robert. It begins by stating that John Balliol was made King of Scots by Edward Longshanks of England, but goes on to criticise Balliol’s status, because an English King does not have any authority to determine who will be the King of Scots. Such authority rests with the Scots themselves and alone, ignoring the fact that the Scottish nobles had given up that right in negotiations with Edward over twenty years beforehand.

The Declaration stated: “The people, therefore, and commons of the foresaid Kingdom of Scotland, ...agreed upon the said Lord Robert, the King who now is, in whom the rights of his father and grandfather to the foresaid kingdom, in the judgement of the people, still exist and flourish entire; and with the concurrence and consent of the said people he was chosen to be King, that he might reform the deformities of the kingdom, correct what required correction, and direct what needed direction; and having been by their authority set over the kingdom, he was solemnly made King of Scots... And if any one on the contrary claim right to the foresaid kingdom in virtue of letters of time past, sealed and containing the consent of the people and the commons, know ye that all this took place in fact by force and violence which could not at the time be resisted.”
Like a lot of such grandiose statements we've seen down through the ages, the Clergy's declaration was nothing more than misleading propaganda, which sought to disguise the facts of history.

A more modern myth connects the Declaration of Arbroath with the American Declaration of Independence because both enshrined in their declarations the principle that sovereignty rests with the people. Firstly, as noted already it was not a "declaration" in the sense of the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man but a plea to the Pope. The Act of Abjuration (1581), where the Dutch deposed their Spanish ruler for having violated the social contract with his subjects could be just as easily cited as the influence on the American Declaration of Independence. Or even the English Declaration of Rights, which deposed King James II and brought to power William and Mary of Orange can be said to have had an influence on the Founding Fathers.
Nor should we over-look that although the Declaration of Arbroath says that the King of Scotland can be deposed if he abuses his power one hundred and five years earlier than the Declaration of Arbroath, at Runnymede, King John was forced to sign Magna Carta, giving his English subjects rights including the right to establish a monarchs rule. Nor should it be forgotten that between 1320 and 1603, Scotland had 11 monarchs. 3 of those (James I, James III, and Mary) were removed through assassination, civil war or deposition. In the same period, England had 18 monarchs. Of which no fewer than 7 (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, and Jane) were removed through civil war or deposition. So who, exactly, had the richer tradition of overthrowing monarchical power?

If heroes are required then instead of Wallace or Bruce, the Scottish workers should look to the likes of Wat Tyler and John Ball, commoners, who in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt took London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. The true history of the exploited is about the resistnce of the Levellers and Diggers and the Chartists not the winners and losers of aristocratic family feuds for the throne of Scotland.

The Real Artfull Dodgers

In an effort to balance their books the British owning class have had their subservient government slash all sorts of welfare benefits. Putting limits on government employees wages and introducing the bedroom tax are just a couple of the measures they have dreamt up. There is one benefit recipient they seem unable to deal with though - the tax-dodging rich. Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world. 'The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.' (Guardian, 3 April) We don't suppose these millionaires have to worry too much about trivialities like bedroom tax. RD

Not So Glamorous

Behind the High Street glamour of the fashion house Zara lurks the horror of slave labour in Bolivia. Kate Middleton is seen regularly shopping in the chain's branches and every Zara dress she has worn has sold out within hours. Both Kate and her sister Pippa stepped out in the Zara outfits the morning after the royal wedding, but the source of their trendy outfits is less than glamorous. 'High-street fashion store Zara is under investigation over the use of slave labour at factories in Argentina, it was reported today. Immigrant workers, including children, were discovered producing clothes for the label in 'degrading' sweatshop conditions, investigators said. The mostly Bolivian labourers claimed they were made to work more than 13-hour days and were prevented from leaving the factories without permission.' (Daily Mail, 3 April) Authorities moved in on the sweatshops in the outlying Mataderos, Liniers and Floresta districts of the Argentine capital after a tip-off from workers' rights NGO La Alameda. The charity's spokesman Gustavo Vera said people at the factory were made to start at 7am and work without a break until 11pm, from Monday to Saturday. He said: 'Their workplaces were also their homes, families were forced to share cramped quarters in a mess of sewing machines, needles, threads and children.'The places were dark without proper lighting to sew and no ventilation. RD

The Banksters

Fred Goodwin had his knightship removed. Shall we see the same for Sir James Crosby and Lord Stevenson being stripped of their honours.
The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards concluded the three men, who have since moved on to new positions, should never be allowed to work in the financial sector again. The report identified bad lending (when someone cannot repay a loan), inadequate liquidity (not enough ready cash) and a lack of risk management as the key factors behind HBOS’s fall

The report said: “The primary responsibility for the downfall of HBOS should rest with Sir James Crosby, architect of the strategy that set the course for disaster, with Andy Hornby, who proved unable or unwilling to change course, and Lord Stevenson, who presided over the bank’s board from its birth to its death...Lord Stevenson, in particular, has shown himself incapable of facing the realities of what placed the bank in jeopardy.” It said the former HBOS bosses had failed to admit their mistakes and should apologise for their “incompetent and reckless board strategy”. commission member, Lord Turnbull, pointed out that when Bank of Scotland and Halifax merged to create HBOS, the organisation had a market capitalisation of £30bn. “Just seven years later, all that value had been destroyed”

Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the commission, said: “The HBOS story is one of catastrophic failures of management, governance and regulatory oversight. Primary responsibility for these failures should lie with the former chairman of HBOS and its former chief executives Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby.”

The report explained that “The lending approach of the corporate division would have been bad lending in any market. The crisis in financial markets was merely the catalyst to expose it.”

To illustrate the scale of the risks being taken on, the report said that in the corporate bank in 2001 the biggest exposure to one single borrower was less than £1m. By 2008 there were nine customers who had each been lent £1bn. One borrower had been advanced £3bn.

Crosby is now working in the City as a member of the European advisory board at private equity firm Bridgepoint. He was knighted for services to finance. He remains on the board at Compass.
Hornby is now chief executive of gaming group Gala Coral.
Stevenson, Baron Stevenson of Coddenham, has gone on to hold a number of non-executive board positions since leaving HBOS including Western Union and The Economist magazine.

The report added: "We are shocked and surprised that, even after the ship has run aground, so many of those who were on the bridge still seem so keen to congratulate themselves on their collective navigational skills."
Socialist Courier isn’t. It par for the course for the capitalist class.

More Nonsense About Class

There is more nonsense written about class than almost any other subject. Here is the latest contribution to that nonsense. 'People in the UK now fit into seven social classes, a major survey conducted by the BBC suggests. It says the traditional categories of working, middle and upper class are outdated, fitting 39% of people. It found a new model of seven social classes ranging from the elite at the top to a "precariat" - the poor, precarious proletariat - at the bottom.' (BBC News, 3 April) In fact in modern developed capitalism there are only two classes. The working class - all those who own little or nothing and are forced to work for a wage or a salary in order to live, and the owning class - the tiny minority who own and control all the means of production and distribution and therefore do not need to work but can live of the surplus value produced by the working class. RD

The Regal Con Game

Times are hard in British capitalism today so our rulers have had to cut costs. Slash welfare benefits, cap government workers wages and introduce a bedroom tax. There are some things of course that are sacrosanct. 'The Queen has received a £5m boost in the funds she receives from the taxpayer to carry out her official duties. The sovereign grant, which covers the running costs of the Queen's household, has been set at £36.1m for the 2013-14 financial year.' (Guardian, 2 April) Keep the workers thinking they are one nation and give them spectacular royal events. Essential to disguise their exploitation. Money well spent. RD

Bad News

A study in America found that over a three-year period, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN aired just 141 stories in which unions and the labor movement were either the primary or secondary topic. That's out of an estimated 16,000 news stories aired on the four networks, so less than 0.3 percent of all news stories. Not only were just the unions not getting much attention in the news their view was being ignored. CBS did not use even one union source in 24 percent of its stories on labor; NBC omitted union voices from 19 percent of the stories.
The pattern of portrayal of unions was negative, with workers critical of unions more likely to be heard. The report found that news about labor and unions related to the field of education and the automobile industry included more governmental sources than labor sources. “The news treatment thus presents the government as the organized party willing to provide solutions, but not the labor/union negotiators”.

These findings resemble those of past studies, such as the Glasgow Media Group which have found that media coverage is often slanted against collective economic action and toward business and elite interests. Unions are portrayed as hurting competitiveness, and thus costing jobs. The media serve their masters well. It has turned worker against worker, and particularly against the unions.

We Are all In This Together

One of the fond notions that supporters of capitalism like to espouse is that times may be hard, but we are all in this together. Indeed Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has insisted he knows what it is like to "live on the breadline". 'The comment comes after 250,000 people signed a petition urging Mr Duncan Smith to try living on £53 a week. He dismissed this as a "complete stunt", telling the Wanstead and Woodford Guardian he had been unemployed twice in his life. .......... Mr Duncan Smith told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday, the day the changes came into force, that he could survive on £53 a week.' (BBC News, 2 April) This was the amount another speaker on the show - market trader David Bennett - said he would be left with.' Dom Arvesano, who was behind the petition commented: '"This would mean a 97% reduction in his current income, which is £1,581.02 a week or £225 a day after tax." This is a gigantic fall in his present standard of living and we note despite his courageous boast of how he could survive on £53 a week he has declined the petitioners challenge to live for a year in such penury. RD

Ghost Town

37% of people buying property in the most expensive neighbourhoods of central London did not intend them to be primary residences.
"Belgravia is becoming a village with fewer people in it," said Alistair Boscawen, a local real estate agent. He works in "the nuts area" of London, as he put it, "where the house prices are bonkers" — anywhere from $7.5 million to $75 million. The buyers are super-wealthy foreigners. London is not the only city where the world's richest people leave their expensive properties vacant while they stay in their expensive properties someplace else; the same is true in parts of Manhattan.
Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council, said the situation had reached a tipping point. "They may live here for a fortnight in the summer, but for the rest of the year they're contributing nothing to the local economy. The spectre of new buildings where there are no lights on is a real problem."
One Hyde Park, an opulent $1.7 billion apartment building in Knightsbridge. It is rare to see anyone coming to or going from the complex.

Ending World Poverty

World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim called for a global drive to wipe out extreme poverty by 2030, acknowledging that reaching the goal will require extraordinary efforts. “A world free of poverty is within our grasp. It is time to help everyone across the globe secure a one-way ticket out of poverty and stay on the path toward prosperity,” Kim said
Not a very difficult goal nor a paticularly ambitious one to achieve if you happen to a member of the world’s super-rich capitalists.
Last year, the world's billionaires added $800 billion dollars to their wealth. According to the latest issue of Forbes, when all the money is counted, the 1,426 billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion. That means the average billionaire is worth about $3.8 billion. Of those billionaires in the U.S. -- 442 of them -- the average net worth is about $4.2 billion.

That's a whole lot of money and according to the OECD, the total amount of aid given by the wealthy nations of the world to the developing countries was only 3% of the total wealth of the world's billionaires.
There are 1.1 billion people without access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization, and as a result 1.6 million people die of cholera and other diarrhea-related diseases every year. World Vision provides clean drinking water to about 1 million people every year, and we do it for a rough average of $50 per person, depending on the country and other factors. Theoretically, for about $50 billion clean water could be brought to every person on the planet thereby saving 1.6 million lives every year. That would cost just 1% of the total wealth possessed by the mega-rich.
Lack of nutrition contributes to the deaths of 2.6 million school children. The World Food Program estimates that $3.2 billion is all it would take to make sure children stay alive and grow up fully nourished. For less than measly 0.6% of the wealth of the world's billionaires could end childhood deaths from hunger -- saving 4.2 million lives.
Socialist Courier is not suggesting that philanthropy will solve these problems, just putting the situation into perspective. Capitalism is the root cause of why the poor needlessly suffer and die. The world has the technical solutions and all the field-tested programs to end hunger and most disease. Advances in health, agriculture, education and technology has given the world the tools needed to make changes. These all exist and can be deployed by a rational society that declares peoples needs should be satisfied instead of being only resources employed to make profits for the few.

Life's good for some

Edinburgh-based Standard Life’s saw its top three directors share close to £10 million in bonuses in 2012 with the chief executive of the insurance giant, David Nish, nearly doubling his remuneration to £5m.


Keith Skeoch saw his pay rise to £4.3m from £2.6m, thanks mainly to a bonus from his role as head of Standard Life Investments (SLI), while finance director Jackie Hunt saw her overall pay rise to £2.5m from £1.4m.

65 per cent growth in operating profit before tax to £900m and 61 per cent growth in share price over the year.

What recession?

Who Are The Work-Shy?

Some sections of the media are fond of portraying the British working class as a feckless, work-shy bunch of state benefit scroungers but recent events expose that as complete nonsense. 'An astonishing 4,000 people braved the bitter cold to queue for work at a new £84million shopping centre. Long lines of desperate job seekers started to build up two hours before the jobs fair opened and the turnout was so big that organisers had to introduce a one-in one-out policy. The Whiteley Shopping Centre in Hampshire is set to open in May and will be home to 56 shops.' (Daily Express, 29 March) Feckless? Work-shy? That is an apt description of the British owning class. RD

The Battle Hymn of Cooperation

Next time you pop into your local co-op sing this song while you wait for your divi.

Battle Hymn of Cooperation

Oh, we are a mighty army, though we bear no sword and gun,
We’re enlisted ’till the struggle for cooperation’s won,
And beneath our banner blazoned “One for all and all for one,"
Consumers marching on!

Chorus:
Come and let us work together
Come and let us work together
Come and let us work together
Consumers marching on!

It was long ago in Rochdale that our cause saw first the light,
We were sadly few in numbers but our principles were right,
But today we count our millions as we girt ourselves to fight:

Consumers marching on!
Chorus

Oh, the world today is suffering filled with poverty and pain,
And the day has come for freedom from the curse of private gain,
For all may live in comfort ’neath Cooperation’s reign.

Consumers marching on!
Chorus

Oh we know our scheme is righteous and we know our cause is just;
For upon the brotherhood of man we firmly base our trust:
Let us strive to win the victory, for win we can and must.

Consumers marching on!
Chorus

Elizabeth Mead  and Carl Ferguson, 1932

I confess that i have not previously known about this little known song which like the more popular Solidarity Forever is based upon the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

If only we could substitute that word "consumers" for "communists" !

Being fed lies

An ever-shrinking number of mega-corporations controls an ever-expanding food industry, from seeds to equipment, from chemical inputs to processing, from the farm field to the supermarket shelf.


In America just four companies own approximately 84% of the U.S. beef market. Four firms control 66 percent of the pork-packing market and another four control 58 percent of poultry processing. Four companies own 43% of the world’s commercial seed market.Three companies control 90 % of the global grain trade. Four companies own 48% of grocery retailers. Monsanto, is the largest seed making company and DuPont the second biggest so they may technically be competitors yet a $1.75 billion deal between them ensures that Dupont gets access to Monsanto technology and Monsanto can access DuPont’s massive customer base. Much will be the same for the UK and Europe as in America. All those corporations appear to be recession-proof, having in recent years increased their profit margins.

Our food comes in vacuum-packed plastic bags, in boxes, bottles, jars and cans -- but it isn't really food. It's food stuff. It doesn't come from an animal or plant; it's made in a plant, rolled off an assembly line. It's processed with sugar salt and fat to be addictive. Its not just the manufacture of processed foods, it is us who are being processed too. Processed food tastes good and the added ingredients and chemicals ensure we keep coming back for more...and more.

The food industry just want to make money. Manufacturers and retailerswho sell junk food don't much care for the truth about food. The obesity, heart disease and diabetes epidemics they are causing is of no concern to them. There are now health experts predicting that our children will have shorter life expectancies that we have.

Land-grabbing by the multi-nationals is nothing new, the most obvious example being the fruit plantations of the Central American - the aptly nick-named - “banana republics.” Oxfam reports that in the past decade, an area of land equal to eight times the size of the U.K. has been sold in rapidly accelerating global land transactions. Nor is it the usual imperialist western powers which the Leninists love to blame. A Brazilian-Japanese venture is planning to farm 54,000 square miles of land in northern Mozambique for food exports. These agribusiness schemes exacerbate the problem in areas of chronic hunger and malnourishment and have farmers growing cash crops for export, rather than food crops for consumption. In Sudan the United Arab Emirates was growing sorghum – a Sudanese food staple — to feed camels. Indian corporations’ are active in Ethiopian land-grabs. Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute calls it a “new form of colonization.”

Meanwhile a French newspaper reports upon food scavenging from the garbage of the supermarkets. In France, 1.2 million tons of food is thrown away every year – about 20 kilos per person per year. Of these 20 kilos, seven kilos are still in their packaging, and 13 kilos are leftovers and fruits and vegetables.

Saudi Arabia back-pedals on women's freedom

Women in one of the West closest allies are still banned from driving cars or travelling alone but it is good to note that the British demands for more women’s rights in the Islamic fundamentalist state is being heeded and having an effect.

 Women can now ride bicycles! But only in parks and recreational areas, not as a means of transport, just for entertainment and pleasure. Of course, a male relative or guardian must still accompany them.

Socialist Courier spots a potential market and business opportunity in selling Saudi Arabia tandem bikes.

A Torturous Society

One of the great illusions that the British owning class love to spread is that although capitalism may be an awful society they at least behave in an honourable civilized fashion. 'British troops recount human rights abuses at US detention facility in Iraq. British soldiers and airmen tell of prisoners brought in by SAS and SBS snatch squads being hooded and given electric shocks. The abuses the soldiers and airmen say they saw included: Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels. Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks. Prisoners being routinely hooded.' (Guardian, 1 April) Honourable, civilized? Does that include torture? RD

A re-newed class struggle

The capitalist logic says, “The economy is in a recession and the figures are all down this year. We’re all in it together and we all must tighten our belts” But the majority knows that this shared sacrifice is nonsense even if we don’t have the statistics. The company directors’ have been awarding themselves massive pay rises, the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and the tax evasion of the wealthy is becoming only too well-known. There is a general climate of anger and a feeling that we should take action.


Too often the left propose all sorts of ineffective options mostly on the basis that “the workers aren’t up for it” or “everyone is scared,” or even “we aren’t sure we can win.” But when people don’t seem up for it, it’s because they aren’t stupid and they aren’t up for ineffective action. Workers need to understand their union and their fight. Unions must present the truth. If it’ll take a six-month struggle to win, unions have to say so. Don’t patronizse; educate. Don’t become like the enemy. Solidarity is vital. This means other unions and other workers from different sectors and places supporting one another.

The working class face expanding global corporate power, massive inequality, a rapidly shifting and changing economy, less pay and more insecurity. We need a straight-forward trade unionism, which speaks to the experience of people which is based on the daily lives and culture of people to rebuild a union way of life. It is important to build industrial and international organisation, as opposed to sectional and national organisations. Even though many in the union movement are conservative with the small c , stuck in ideas and traditions of the past and stuck in the rut in in their structure, direction, culture and efficiency, some in the unions are, nevertheless, attempting change in their own way, independently of, and without reliance on political parties without adherence to any notions of a “party line” or generic “one-size-fits-all” class struggle. In recent years, ideas of the full democratic participation in all decision processes have become integrally part of the theory and practice of many workers’ movements.

Yet the basic social relationship of capitalism remains the same and the working class mission remains the same, to build a new form of society. It’s time for a radical, futuristic approach. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has come to understand that the people themselves can organise to provide for their needs and wants. Every revolution is impossible before it happens; afterwards it feels inevitable.