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 […]
The
events of the past year or so, financial meltdown, political instability,
uncertainty over jobs and the threat that many workers could lose their homes
represents a huge shift in society, both internationally and especially in
Britain where the effects of the “credit crunch” have been particularly acute.
In the context of such a deep crisis the halcyon days of the “feel good factor”
and the “15 years of unbroken economic growth”, seem like ancient history.
In November we wrote about how the German Revolution ended
World War I in November 1918. After 4 years of intense warfare, the
German workers and soldiers ended the war that had cost millions of people their lives. The
emperor fell and a Social Democratic government came to power. This was
Germany’s own equivalent of the Russian "February Revolution" of 1917
that overthrew the Tsar.
The workers and soldiers had taken power into their hands but also
handed it over to the very same people who so shamefully supported the war in
1914. Right wing Social Democrats Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske were catapulted
into power and Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who
had opposed the war, were left
with a small group of 3,000 revolutionaries in the Spartacus League.
Whose fault is it that nearly 30,000 workers have lost their jobs
with the closure of all the Woolworths stores? Not the workers, that’s for
sure. We are due to see an avalanche of job losses after Christmas. Unemployment
is nearly 2 million already, and due to hit 3 million in 12 months’ time. None
of these workers deserve to lose their jobs. They are the victims of a
capitalist system that is just not working. How can we make things better? If
we fight for work or full pay, the bosses would soon find them something to do.
What’s the capital of Iceland? £3.50 What’s the definition of optimism? A banker who irons five shirts on a Sunday. Japan is mired in financial uncertainty. The Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and shares in Kamikaze bank have nose-dived. The Isle of Dogs Building Society has collapsed. They’ve called in the retrievers.
The government is desperate to stop effective action against tax evasion. Tax evasion, remember, is illegal. It is a criminal offence. The UK is lobbying to remove paragraph 10 of the Doha Outcome Document. This provides a framework for sharing information, simplifying tax laws and nailing the criminals. John Christensen, director of Tax Justice Network, said: ‘The European Parliament last week made a strong statement demanding the commission support this document. Britain is out on a limb within Europe. It’s the usual suspects of the US, UK, Australia and Canada. These are the countries that created the toxic financial crisis […]
Keynesianism is the only serious economic theory that contends it
can do away with the tendency of capitalism to move from boom to bust by stimulating
the economy. If it could really perform that miracle and eliminate the
contradictions of capitalism, then it could provide a sound platform for
reformism and ever-improving living standards for the mass of workers under
capitalism. If Keynesianism works, then reformism is practical politics.