The recent chaos on world stock markets is a
manifestation of the general turbulence that is the most prominent feature of
the present epoch. The crisis that affected the Northern Rock bank in Britain
is but an indication of dramatic
events that are being prepared globally.

We are making available to our readers an appeal by the Labour
Representation Committee on the issue of internal party democracy. On Sunday
Labour Party conference kicks off. If Brown’s proposals are accepted it appears
that from next year CLPs and affiliates will no longer have the right to take
resolutions to Party conference.

The all-new revamped website of the Wellred Online
Bookshop is now fully operational at
www.wellred.marxist.com – nearly all of the books and
pamphlets we had on the old site have been transported to
the new one and they have been joined by a number of
new additions.

Over the past 15 years production has risen at
about 3% a year in the OECD countries, while money supply, mortgage and company
debt, personal borrowing and the massive so-called derivatives market based on
this credit has increased at over 25% a year! Result? A huge bubble which is
now bursting, starting with Northern Rock.

Pat Macdonald gives a report on Hands off Venezuela at this years T.U.C in Brighton. To a filled room of trade union
activists, Rob Sewell gave a speech on the importance of events in Venezuela,
followed by John McDonnell MP, who praised the work of Hands off Venezuela and
its founders. NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear and  FBU vice president Alan
McLean also spoke at the meeting.

Floods, Foot and Mouth and hundreds of thousands of public
sector workers balloting for industrial action over pay, not perhaps the sort
of run up to the party conference that Gordon Brown had hoped for. But can we be
confident that Labour can beat the Tories in a "snap" election, and just
as importantly is there any evidence that Brown will be more convincing to
working class voters who have stayed at home in droves in the past period?

Since the first Gulf War the US and UK have been using Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry. DU has a half-life of 1.5 billion years, can result in cancerous tumors and
genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth
defects. In
Basra hospital from 1991 to 2000 some malignicies, like Leukemia, have increased as much as 600%. This reveals not only the depths of imperialist barabarity, mocking the idea of ‘the rules of war’, but demonstrates with painful acuteness capitalisms’ inability to regard the environment.