January 2009

The so-called Peace Process is dead. It will be
not be revived until the Israeli army has done its bloody work in Gaza
thoroughly. Ultimately, both Jews and Arabs must have the right to live in
peace and control their own destinies in a homeland of their own. It is easy to
state this aim, but not so easy to say how it can be achieved. In the
concluding part of his article Alan Woods shows the relation between war and
revolution and explains that the prior condition for solving the Palestinian
question is the overthrow of the reactionary Arab regimes in the Middle East.

The Irish government’s decision to nationalise the
country’s third largest Bank Anglo Irish is yet another sign of the fragility
of the Irish economy. As explained over the past period the bubble is seriously
affecting the real economy and this is the outcome. The nationalisation move comes after the government had originally proposed a
€1.5 billion bail-out plan. The situation at Anglo Irish however has clearly
got much worse. Things haven’t exactly been helped by the revelation from the
Finance Minister as to how the management had been running the bank.

Just over one year after
the Annapolis Conference that was supposed to produce a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, the Israeli ruling
class has concentrated all its military might to pulverise Gaza. Once again the Middle
East is engulfed in the flames of war. Alan Woods explains the
reasons for Israel’s
invasion of Gaza and analyses the wider
implications for relations between the powers in the Middle
East and on a world scale.

A city trader who got a£1.32m City bonus on top of his £300,000 salary is suing his employer because he wants more. Wheeler dealer Mouradian split the total pot of £1.43m in bonuses among his team, awarding just 92% to himself. He is claiming an extra £92,000 from the firm.

James Beresford may be Britain’s richest solicitor. He made £17m in just one year from handling miners’ compensation schemes. His firm took 25% of the damages as a contingency fee. In fact the Department of trade and Industry was prepared to pay their costs, so all compensation would go straight to the miners. For the 97,000 who claimed through his firm for lung and respiratory problems or ‘vibration white finger’ average compensation was just over £2,000. Tens of thousands got less than £1,000. The smallest claim was just 50p.

While the fat cats are waltzing away from the financial crisis with big handouts for their failure, ordinary punters are getting it in the neck. Canary Wharf cleaners have been awarded the London living wage of £7.45 per hour, though it’s not in their pay packets yet. (If you live in London, you know that’s not a lot of money.) Now the bosses are saying they can’t afford it. London Citizens reply, “If the government can find £50bn to bail out bankers, they can find £5m to pay their own cleaners and security guards a living wage.”

They’re laying people off at all the big brickworks. Hanson has axed 600 staff, mothballed two plants, closed another two permanently and are cutting shifts or having a three month holiday at the remaining four. Meanwhile world leader Wienerberger has made 400 permanent redundancies. No wonder. Hanson alone has 500 million bricks stockpiled. We’ve got the bricks, we’ve got the unemployed building workers – but we can’t put the two together to build the houses people need. That’s capitalism.

What costs £250 for every man, woman and child in the UK? Responding to an analysis of bonuses by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which found that city bonuses have doubled in the last seven years to £28 billion in 2008, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘These figures are simply staggering. Sixteen billion pounds of city and finance sector bonuses adds up to more than £250 for every man, woman and child in the country. ‘Creating a new class of super-rich people, cut off from the rest of us, was wrong before the financial crisis. Now we can […]