A World to Win

How nuclear power decision was 'fixed'

2012-02-02T10:02:00.003Z

Parliament was conned by New Labour and the ConDem coalition into supporting new nuclear power stations by distorted evidence and research that ignored important alternatives to achieve emissions cuts, including energy saving measures.

The truth behind this massive deception is revealed in new report that describes the way the decision was taken to build 10 new nuclear power stations as “a corruption of governance”.

MPs were told that without an expansion of nuclear energy, the UK would be unable to meet its target for reduction of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The phrase "unable to keep the lights on" was used time and again.

In reality, the decision to build the 10 power stations was taken first, behind the scenes, and all the research and modelling from then on was designed to prove they were needed. Figures for future energy demand were largely invented and placed at the absolute highest level.

Unlock Democracy and the Association for the Conservation of Energy, joint authors of the report, made repeated requests to the Department for Energy and Climate Change to see the demand projections justifying nuclear claims. Finally, they received this admission: "DECC has not made any long-term projections of electricity demand supply. Our latest projections were published up to 2022 and we have previously published figures to 2025. DECC is developing scenarios of potential electricity demand/supply to 2050 but don’t have any definite figures for this yet."

The government claimed that by 2025 an additional 60 gigawatts of power generation would be needed. But the consultants employed by the government were not even asked to assess actual need for new capacity, and they did not do so. They simply assessed the options for achieving the government's stated goal of achieving 29% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As the report explains:

"In a nutshell what [the consultants] did was add up the government’s proposed policies, including the 29% renewables figure and the proposed new nuclear capacity (plus other proposed new capacity) and call that a ‘central assumption’ of need'. However this is not an assessment of need, it is an estimate of predicted generating capacity, which is altogether different."

Then the Brown New Labour government referenced this simple addition as the independent analytical source for their assumption of future need, say the two organisations who point out that they are not formally opposed to nuclear energy.

"In other words, the pre-determined policy of 10 new nuclear power stations created the ‘central assumption’ of the need for them. Rather than the need driving the policy, the policy dictated the so-called need," the report states.

The incoming coalition government commissioned some further research, modelling 16 different “pathways” to meeting both future energy needs and emissions targets by 2050. These were the basis for last year's vote accepting the need for an expansion nuclear power, but they were based on the same assumptions.

The claim is that the demand for electricity will double or even triple by 2050 but there is no evidence for this. In fact one of the government's own documents states that four different scenarios were modelled on the need for electricity until 2025 and these “scenarios all suggest that electricity demand in 2025 will be at approximately the same levels as today”. And the National Grid is planning on the basis of a similar assumption.

Just before this report was published, realising the cat was out of the bag, the DECC did finally publish some figures showing that focusing on funding for energy saving brought cost savings and greater CO2 reductions.

So it is clear that under pressure from the energy corporations, the government agreed in principle to build 10 new nuclear power stations and then manipulated the data to prove they were needed. These will cost the taxpayer billions of pounds, require public provision of storage for dangerous waste, and keep people on the treadmill of ever-increasing bills.

It would be cheaper for the public purse, and cheaper for consumers, to focus instead on energy saving. But there's no profit for the energy giants in that scenario, so it was hidden from MPs. Will they now revisit this decision and rescind it? Not likely!

Penny Cole
Environment editor

They were all in it together, not just Goodwin

2012-02-01T10:37:00.002Z

At last! Something we can agree with Labour’s former chancellor, Alistair Darling, on. Fred Goodwin (formerly Sir) should not be singled out by the establishment.

Goodwin certainly had a big hand in the virtual destruction of the three-century old Royal Bank of Scotland, but he was far from alone in his responsibility for the causal chain of events that brought the global financial system to the brink in 2008.

There’s an entire class of people whose positions should be on the line for allowing and encouraging the massive expansion of the system of credit and debt.

The Financial Services Authority, the toothless body created by the previous government, cheered from the sidelines as balance sheets more and more resembled a house of cards.

Darling’s New Labour government was at the forefront of ensuring London’s role as the base for the world’s banks and other gambling houses.

But can any of them be blamed for doing their jobs? Surely they were just doing what was necessary to keep the economy on the growth path? Yes indeed.

Having thrown in their lot with capitalism - the social and economic system that distributes profits extracted from the value-generating activities of those employed in the production of commodities to otherwise disinterested shareholders - they also became its playthings.

But it was their choice, and they are collectively responsible. And as the crisis intensifies it exposes more of those who constitute that collective web of responsibility.

Now the inner logic of the system has brought 25 of the 27 governments of the European Union together in a most terrible Faustian pact.

What they are calling a “fiscal union” is a drawing together of the otherwise helpless in an unprecedented assault on their populations. Their intention is to ensure that the entire population of Europe gets to experience the austerity conditions already wrecking the lives of the 50% of young people without jobs in Greece and Spain.

And all with the objective of a “return to growth” at some time in the distant future.

So what are the prospects?

Fresh from chairing the global economy session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, eminent Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf has this to say about the fiscal union:

“The IMF now forecasts a recession in the eurozone this year, with a decline of 0.5 per cent in overall gross domestic product. GDP is forecast to fall sharply in Italy and Spain, and stagnate in France and Germany. This is a terrible environment for countries seeking to cut fiscal deficits. Forecasts are far from satisfactory for other high-income countries. But the eurozone is the most dangerous part of the world economy: only there do we see important governments – Italy and Spain – menaced by a loss of creditworthiness.”

And in a chilling forecast, Wolf looks back to guess at the future:

“Just as it was not the dominant cause of the collapse, but rather sloppy lending and improvident private borrowing, so fiscal discipline is not the cure. This attempt to vindicate the catastrophic austerity of Heinrich Brüning, German chancellor in 1930-1932, is horrifying.”

A repeat of the ensuing events in Germany is indeed horrifying to contemplate. There can’t be such a repeat. The debt-fuelled growth that produced global corporations more powerful than any single country means that today’s crisis affects all countries simultaneously.

The capitalist system of production and its inseparable financial twin have been on life-support since 2008. It’s time to pull the plug.

Young, workers, the unemployed, students and older people must now draw together in a global network of People’s Assemblies. They can establish the power not only to settle accounts with those responsible for the crisis but build a society motivated by meeting human needs in place of the narrow interests of shareholders.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Whatever happens on bonuses, we lose out

2012-01-31T11:11:00.002Z

For all the excitement generated over the reluctant decision by Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, to decline his near £1 million bonus, this is not a zero sum game.

Hester forgoing his bonus, which would have been paid in shares, does not mean, for example, that as a result there is more money in the public purse to offset against the ConDem’s austerity cuts programme.

Nor does it help hard-pressed RBS borrowers – from small businesses to home owners with mortgages. They will not be treated any more sympathetically by the bank when they struggle to meet repayments.

Will it prevent RBS from punishing hard-pressed workers struggling to make ends meet when they accidentally drift into the overdraft zone? I don’t think so.

Paradoxically, it seems that the shares, if they had been cashed in over the next couple of years, would have produced a tax take of around £500,000 depending on their market value at the time.

In other words, if Hester hadn’t taken home more than £11m in shares and cash since being brought in by New Labour to run the bailed-out bank in October 2008 (with a golden hello of 10.4 million shares), we in the shape of the 99%, would not be better off by the same amount.

As RBS bankers outside the boardroom form an orderly queue to share in a bonus pool worth an estimated £500 million in the next month or so, some are waiting to see how many shares they get under a scheme approved in 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister. John Hourican, head of RBS’s investment bank, could receive up to 21.3m shares in April – worth around £5m at last night's price – and options on another 7.4m shares.

What all this demonstrates is not only that the bankers hold the aces – there is clear evidence that the RBS board threatened to resign if the Treasury had tried to block Hester’s bonus – but that they also have absolute control over resources.

While the financial system continues to be run for profit to benefit shareholders and senior staff, no good can come of it. Quite the reverse, as we have discovered to our cost since the meltdown began in 2007. The state’s resources – aka taxpayers’ money - are despatched to bail out the system without delay so that things can stay as they are. The sums committed are then added to the deficit and result in more cuts.

All the remedies suggested by either the government or Labour leader Ed Miliband are designed to maintain the status quo of capitalist-owned banks that serve their own interest. Miliband, of course, was a member of a government that gloried the achievements of the bankers and financed large amounts of public spending from tax revenues from the financial sector.

Ed Balls, now shadow chancellor but then a Treasury minister, speaking to business figures in Hong Kong in 2006, remarked: “The UK’s financial tradition as a free, fair and open global market has resulted in tremendous growth in London’s international financial markets in the past decade – over-the-counter derivatives turnover up by 770%, foreign equities turnover up by 260%, cross-border bank lending up by 160% and foreign exchange turnover up by over 60%.”

Miliband is not opposed to bonuses – so long as they are “merited”! As for a one-off tax on bonuses – which Labour actually introduced in 2009 – that is hardly going to change what goes on.

As one comment on the Financial Times website noted: “What difference does Hester's bonus make to the billions already allocated to the rest of the banking community. Given the trillion the banks are now borrowing from the ECB [European Central Bank], I can only conclude that the banking community remains impervious to their financial reality. I wish someone would give me a bonus for defrauding my customers and still managing to go bankrupt!”

The real issue is about who owns and controls the country’s financial resources and what they are used for. Massive bonuses are a symptom of the problem – but not the problem itself.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A Britain divided by class and wealth

2012-01-30T09:32:00.004Z

Sometimes it takes a comedian to tell it as it is. Rory Bremner just about summed up the real state of affairs as he mused in the columns of the Financial Times.

“I heard of a country where they are capping benefit payments and charging single parents for access to the Child Support Agency," observes. "And, there is also a country which plans to spend around £100bn on transport and the Olympics. I wonder, are these two countries related?”

He could have also pointed to the just-under £1m bonus payment offered to largely-state owned Royal Bank of Scotland head Stephen Hester. And while Hester has now turned it down, he won’t be short of money. He still has his salary of £1.2 million to look forward to. So he’s not likely to have to give up his chalet in Verbier, Switzerland or his 350-acre estate in Oxfordshire.

Bremner is right. There is the Britain inhabited by bankers, financiers, hedge fund owners and grandees of all kinds – and there is the rest. And as the dust settles, the only bleeping Labour can summon up is to claim credit for adding its voice to the complaints.

The reality is that the economy is deteriorating and that the issue of bankers’ bonuses will pale in comparison to what is coming up. Britain’s debt has now reached the £1 trillion and the UK economy shrank by 0.2 % at the end of 2011. Unemployment is rising fast, with one million 16-24 year-olds (22%) now out of work in the UK.

School leavers, students and other youth in the UK are joining the 23 million unemployed in the European Union, and some 200 million world wide. Spain has 50% youth unemployment while in the United States the figure stands at 23 %.

At the World Economic Forum meeting which has just ended in Davos, Switzerland, economic elites described youth unemployment as “a cancer in society”. The world is “sitting on a social and economic time bomb.... not a crisis but a disaster”, they said.

They are right. As around 40 million young people globally enter the workforce each year, it doesn’t take rocket science to work out that massive, long-term unemployment amongst young people will have explosive political results. Most people are aware knows that it was the lack of a real future – combined with years of political repression - which sparked the Arab Spring and the downfall of tyrants in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during 2011. The lack of a future for an entire generation, globally is what is at stake.

For all their wealth and power, the bankers, company bosses and politicians, the truth is that the so-called masters of the global capitalist economy remain at a loss and are deeply divided. While the IMF is calls for austerity, financier George Soros said that the fiscal cuts, which Germany supports, could even lead to a "lost decade" of economic stagnation in Europe.

"This German insistence on austerity could destroy the European Union," he said. "This is reality, this is the harsh reality that we need to face. It is not written in stone, the future is not predetermined. We determine the future, so it would be well within the possibilities of the authorities to change it."

We have to agree, at least partly, with Soros. Austerity and cuts are not the answer and we can determine the future (albeit in a different way to what Soros imagines would happen if policy makers followed his ideas for reviving capitalism).

The top 1% rely on the rest to remain in their places and accept that the system is what it is and can never be transformed in a fundamental way. So developing an alternative outlook to that which views Britain’s class-based, class-divided society as impregnable is absolutely vital.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Turn anger over RBS bonus into action

2012-01-27T10:47:00.001Z

The palpable anger over the £963,000 bonus in shares awarded to state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester has to turn into some direct political and industrial action if society is to see an end to this kind of obscenity.

Hester is effectively a public servant, as 81% of the shares are owned by the state following a bail-out of the bank by the previous New Labour government. Since he took over as CEO in November 2008, RBS has sacked 33,000 staff.

The aim, as always with a capitalist concern, was to shed staff in a bid to return the bank to profitability. This Hester has done with the blessing of both the ConDem coalition and the Brown government that preceded it.

The mistake some people have made is to think that because the state owns a bank or two they would be run along different lines, perhaps more ethically or fairly. But the state nationalised the banks to prevent a collapse of the entire financial system – not to set up an alternative banking network.

The banks were allowed, nay encouraged, to continue along their usual profit-driven path. Recently-sold Northern Rock, for example, went about repossessing people who were behind with their mortgages and calling in loans while state owned.

As one of hundreds of angry comments on the BBC news website noted: “This is interesting, we own 81% of RBS and still the government and board of this bank show nothing but contempt for the general public and small business. RBS are about to repossess my brothers house for approx the same amount and close his building company putting people out of work and on the dole. Can anyone explain this madness?”

What is “madness” to some is sanity to others who hold the reins of a state that to all intents and purposes is a plaything of economic and financial elites. They call the shots – and not the government. Or as another sharp comment put it: “It's another sign the politicians aren't running the country, or at least not for the people. Their bonus is the cushy job their friends in finance offer them when they quit parliament.”

Robert Peston, the BBC commentator who broke the Northern Rock debacle, says he was “reliably told” that had the government blocked Hester’s bonus, it would have triggered mass resignation from the RBS board and the CEO’s departure. This financial blackmail clearly worked. Only a junior LibDem minister has demanded that Hester rejects the bonus – elsewhere there is silence.
So there you have it – the state is an extended arm of business. That has been the case since the modern state was formed in the early 19th century to facilitate the development of capitalism in Britain. For a period, this role was disguised by consensus politics, a welfare state, full employment and trade union rights.

The globalisation process produced transnational corporations and global financial institutions that more openly wagged the tail of the state. One consequence is that large numbers of people believe that traditional politics is corrupt, unrepresentative, undemocratic and a waste of time.

They are right. The state needs deconstructing and rebuilding with people’s assemblies and the like to create a real, functioning democracy.

Trade union leaders have reacted with outrage at the bonus for Hester, whose basic salary is £1.2 million a year. David Fleming, the Unite national officer, said: "What planet does Stephen Hester and his banking chums live on? Taking almost £1m from taxpayers' pockets as a bonus is utterly disgusting and offensive to every working person across the country.” Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union, said: "A bonus of nearly a million pounds looks to ordinary people like he has won the lottery – with a ticket they paid for.”

Public sector workers, by contrast, are facing a pay cut as a result of the government’s 1% pay limit (backed by Labour). If the union leaders are to be taken seriously about their desire to remedy gross inequality, they ought to be organising indefinite strikes against the pay limit (and pension cuts) with the aim of bringing down the ConDems. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

'No' to war on Iran

2012-01-26T11:03:00.001Z

With evidence accumulating that Iran is not actually building a nuclear weapon, the sanctions and oil embargo imposed by the United States and Europe looks increasingly like the provocation that it is.

Behind the rhetoric, all sorts of interests are involved, political and economic, many of them connected to divisions emerging in the wake of a global recession that worsens by the day.

America, for example, does not used oil imported from Iran but the rising economic power of China does. So Washington will undoubtedly use the embargo to exert pressure on Beijing amidst a brewing trade and currency war.

President Obama is seeking re-election with the country’s cities, towns and rural communities enduring mass unemployment, homelessness, food stamps and poverty. Talking tough against Tehran is a useful diversion while brushing up Obama’s image as a man prepared to use the country’s military muscle.

Throw in the wild card of a weak Israeli government (which has fallen out with Obama) facing waves of social discontent and looking for any excuse to attack Iran, the danger signs are there. A miscalculation by either side could easily lead a full-scale war.

What you won’t find widely reported is the fact that intelligence and military agencies in the US and Israel don’t believe that Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon.

Ray McGovern, retired CIA analyst and co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, says: “In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defence establishments of the two countries – U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak.” He gives chapter and verse to back up his case. It is also a view shared by the Institute for Science and International Security.

But McGovern is concerned that the New York Times, which misled the world in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, is playing a similar role: “In this up-is-down world, America’s newspaper of record won’t even report accurately what Israel (or the CIA) thinks on this important issue, if that goes against the alarmist conventional wisdom that the neocons favour.”

He adds: “If Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, then the threats of pre-emptive war are not only unjustified, they could be exactly the motivation for Iran to decide that it does need a nuclear bomb to protect itself and its people.”

There is rhetoric on both sides. Iran doesn’t have the military capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, as it has threatened. Its navy is made up of a handful of small ships and would be obliterated within minutes of a confrontation with the American fleet on standby in the region.

The Islamic government is facing real economic difficulties as a result of the sanctions already in force. Unemployment and inflation have soared in recent months, while the currency, the Iranian rial, has lost 40% of its value against the US dollar within a year.
A huge black market is dominated by the Revolutionary Guards, who used wanton violence in the crackdown on street protests over the last couple of years.

Iran is surrounded by nuclear weapons in the shape of China, India, Pakistan and the American fleet. And, of course, Israel. The hypocrisy in the official denials that the Israelis have an arsenal of nuclear weapons is overwhelming. If all this was about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, where are the sanctions against Israel?

Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, is undoubtedly behind the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists over the past year. And prime minister Netanyahu doesn’t give a fig for Obama’s re-election prospects and could defy Washington with a pre-emptive strike this year.

In the end, the Iranians have a right to defend themselves. If nuclear weapons are a deterrent, and Israel has them, it is natural Iran should want one. The Iranian regime is reactionary and oppressive but is not an imperialist power. That’s why we have to say, no any attack on Iran by the US, Israel, Britain and France.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

UK heads for recession as '1930s moment' nears

2012-01-25T12:37:00.001Z

Greek debt is but one black hole among many in the eurozone crisis which threatens to tip the world into a ‘1930’s moment’ according to IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. But the problems facing global capitalism are far deeper.

Even Lagarde had to acknowledge that there is “little margin for manoeuvre” and that the real problem is "America's debt and deficit - the lack of a medium-term plan to reduce it”. Even that doesn’t begin to get to the heart of the matter.

Only yesterday the worst-case expectation was that the UK’s Gross Domestic Product – the key measure of growth - fell by 0.1% between October and December. But today’s official figure from the Office for National Statistics reveals that the UK economy actually shrank by 0.2% in the last quarter of 2011, and is heading for recession.

Accumulated UK government debt broke through the £1 trillion mark as a dual consequence of falling tax revenues, continued support for the financial sector and higher welfare bills as a result of soaring unemployment.

Despite the ConDem’s stated intention to reduce the country’s dependence on debt, its combined corporate, public and household debt has increased to 507% of GDP and the country remains where it was in the league table of the richer nations when the crisis broke in 2007/8 – right at the top.

Despite all the evidence, there are some like governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King, who try to present even the darkest of messages in a glowing halo of hope for the future of the capitalist society.

He said: “All crises come to an end, and businesses will find ways to trade with each other and meet the needs of consumers whatever the transitional problems posed by deleveraging.” Of how and why this might happen he gave no sign, making his message rather mystical in content.

Oliver Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist also tried to package his warning that Europe's debt crisis could tip the world economy into recession with the faintest hint of a rosy future "With the right set of measures, the worst can definitively be avoided and the recovery can be put back on track," he said. "These measures can be taken, need to be taken, and need to be taken urgently."

Only the first indications of the impact of these ‘measures’ have been seen so far in the millions of dispossessed American families, and hundreds of millions thrown out of their jobs worldwide.

But there are some who are, however reluctantly, coming to the conclusion that the game is up. In a wide-ranging article inspired by the Financial Times ‘capitalism in crisis’ series, its senior commentator Martin Wolf reviews the defining characteristics of civilisation.

Taking in the insolubility of the crisis of extreme financial instability, the prospect of a global economic collapse, the impact of humanity on the planet, and the role of leadership, he observes that states alone are now unable to supply the ‘public goods’ of education, health, control of crime and pollution.

“Ours is an ever more global civilisation that demands the provision of a wide range of public goods. The states on which humanity depends to provide these goods, from security to management of climate, are unpopular, overstretched and at odds. We need to think about how to manage such a world. It is going to take extraordinary creativity.”

Wolf doesn’t offer a solution, because the only ones available within the framework of capitalist civilisation are too brutal and unacceptable to liberal thinkers like him.

It is time to open a new era, based upon co-operation in a democratically-controlled, ecologically restorative system of production and distribution designed to satisfy the needs of the 99%.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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Israel stands accused of child 'torture'

2012-01-24T11:09:00.005Z

Imagine a child arrested and taken from the family home by heavily armed soldiers in the middle of the night. Bound with plastic ties and blindfolded, the child is transported to another country for interrogation.

Neither the child nor their parents are told the reason for arrest, which is frequently accompanied by both physical and verbal abuse. This is a daily experience suffered by Palestinian families on the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli army.

Since 2000, around 7,500 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in the military court system, established as part of the illegal Zionist occupation of the West Bank.

Children are questioned without a lawyer or family member present; they are not informed of their right to silence and they are frequently threatened and physically assaulted.

They are forced to sign forged confessions, in Hebrew - which they neither speak or write - and interrogators focus on getting them to name names of older siblings, family friends, even parents.

Children as young as 12 are brought before the military courts. Most are denied bail and most plead guilty. Some 99.74% of cases end in conviction and 98% of the children are given a custodial sentence.

Regular reports detailing this treatment are submitted to the UN Rapporteur on Torture, by children's rights organisation DCI and others.

Their most recent report states that children "continue to be systematically ill-treated during their arrest, transfer and interrogation. This treatment consists of both physical and verbal abuse, as well as threats and intimidation. Further, the cumulative effect of the ill-treatment each child is subjected to, may in some cases, amount to torture".

More than 70% of the detained children are transferred to prisons and detention centres inside Israel, in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As a result they get no family visits, because their parents can't get a permit to enter Israel. Palestinian children are not permitted to use the telephone or send and receive letters whilst in detention.

The soldiers act on frame-up reports made by the paramilitary settlers who roam the West Bank armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. In 67% of cases, the children report being ill-treated by soldiers or policemen whilst inside a settlement.

Here's testimony from Husam S aged 16:

They put me in a metal cage at the entrance to Huwwara interrogation centre. They made me stand against the wall and there were so many flies inside the cage. I tried to chase the flies off my body, but a soldier kept shouting at me and ordering me to face the wall. I kept standing there facing the wall for about an hour. About an hour later, the soldier said: “Come here motherfucker". He took me out of the cage and made me stand in the burning sun. "Take off all your clothes," he ordered me and I became scared of him. I took of all my clothes except my underwear. Then he ran a metal detector over my body and gave me big prison clothes and detained me in Room 2 with three adults

.

And from A, whose name and age were concealed as he named an Israeli officer:

“Don't you want to confess?" the interrogator kept shouting. "I got nothing to confess to," I kept responding, and he kept kicking me on my bottom. He grabbed my head and started slamming it against the metal closet while saying: "You son of a whore, I'll bring your mother down here." He would take a break and then resume hitting and kicking me. He kept doing this for about two hours. Then I got tired. "I threw Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers," I finally said [...] After that he took me to another room and removed the blindfold. A man talked to me and introduced himself as Captain Dawoud.

The state of Israel sanctions systematic brutality against Palestinian children, not only in military courts and prisons but in breach of all their rights - to education, to health care, to a childhood free of fear. These are crimes against humanity but they go unpunished because the major powers like the US and Britain in effect allow them to happen because Israel is their client state.

Penny Cole

St Paul's Occupation makes its mark

2012-01-23T10:43:00.003Z

As the tent city Occupation outside St Paul’s, supported by sister occupations at Finsbury Square and the Bank of Ideas, approaches its 100th day, it’s time to celebrate its achievements.

The Occupation has defied countless predictions of its demise, enabling thousands of people to manifest a collective will and powerful determination to challenge the existing order of things at many levels.

The state with its many arms has acted against those who, inspired by Occupy Wall Street in New York and other global occupations – in particular in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Sol Square - headed to the City of London’s Paternoster Square on October 15, 2011.

When the original intention to occupy Paternoster Square, where the London stock exchange is located, was thwarted by the laws of private property, the Occupation was forced on to the space outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The then canon, Rev Giles Fraser told the police to leave and gave the occupation permission to remain on the church’s property. Under pressure from the St Paul’s hierarchy, Fraser resigned his post.

Undaunted, St Paul’s activists have confronted the City of London police; the legal system which defends private property; misleading reportage by the London Evening Standard and Daily Mail in particular; hostility from sections of the Church of England hierarchy; and last but not least the antithesis of democracy in the shape of the City of London Corporation, which won its court action against the Occupation last week.

The Occupation has had to deal with the welfare problems that are rampant in society at large: ill health, substance abuse, mental instability, and homelessness. Many at St Paul’s courageously decided to try to help those suffering from these problems as best they could, a heavy task which at times threatened to overwhelm the action.

The greatest achievement of the Occupy movement is its struggle to liberate and colonise physical space – a highly political question in a London where public property has virtually vanished under the impact of corporate assimilation of the commons. Countless thousands who have walked past Tent City or had contact through other means have seen their preconceptions melt away when they have spoken directly to the occupiers or sat in on discussions. Inspired by the Occupation and the daily general assemblies and offshoot working groups and talks and discussions at Tent City University, the movement has built up a massive “virtual” presence. The Occupy website, its many Facebook and Twitter platforms are only the tip of an internet iceberg.

The publication of a hard copy and online newspaper, The Occupation Times, has formed a record of what has happened. The current edition includes a crucial discussion under the heading of “Revolution or Reform”. The working group offshoots have involved people from the Occupation itself as well as countless others who have take part in debates. These continue to function to develop concepts to take the movement forward.

Inspired by the US and Spanish occupations, the form of organisation has put into practice concepts of consensus democracy and “leaderlessness”. There have been many problems and criticisms associated with organising in this way. But these remain secondary to the undoubted need to find a really 21st century way of unleashing the democratic energies of those who have been hitherto excluded from decision-making processes.

The Occupation is a physical and mental learning process for all those who seek to change society. It has embodied and embraced a huge range of ideological tendencies. A World to Win has participated, with others, in raising the crucial questions of the need to transcend the cruelly limited and restrictive nature of capitalist democracy and the profit-driven economy which is in such turmoil and crisis. Facilitating these kinds of debates is one of the Occupation’s key achievements.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Using the C word to prop the system up

2012-01-20T11:15:00.001Z

Suddenly it’s alright, if not de rigueur, for the political elite to talk about capitalism – so long as you end up praising the system rather than burying it.

Yesterday it was prime minister Cameron’s turn. He came out against “turbo-charged” capitalism, declared that City bonuses were “out of control” and said the Tories favoured “social responsibility”.

Naturally, the leader of Britain’s most significant ruling class party was not about to propose a radical alternative. In fact, Cameron insisted that the “real solution” to the system’s current problems was “more enterprise, competition and innovation”.

Open markets, he declared, were the “the best imaginable force” no less for “improving human wealth and happiness” and could “actually promote morality”. Believe that and you’ll believe anything.

The question is: why is Cameron so desperate to preach the alleged virtues of capitalism and markets at this particular moment? Why did Clegg call for a John Lewis co-ownership model of capitalism? What made Miliband distinguish between “predatory” and “good capitalism”?

What unites them is their role as political custodians of the capitalist system, sharing out the management of the wider state’s responsibility for its development. Just as importantly, their job is sustain the system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the majority, which it requires if the 1% is to stay in control.

And that is what is under pressure, as every survey reveals. Trust in and support for mainstream politics and politicians, as well as the operations of big business and banks, is ebbing away.

The parliamentary democratic state system is rightly viewed as partisan for siding with corporate interests in the crisis, bailing out banks while taking it out on ordinary people. In practice, it is undemocratic. A million young people are out of work; living standards have been savaged; many require two or more low-paid jobs to make ends meet while key public services are being wrecked.

Enter Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. Together they are critical of “corporate greed” and other features but carefully avoid any censure of the fundamentals of the capitalist system let alone suggest there might (or ought to) be an alternative. Even Cameron’s criticism of New Labour’s “Faustian pact” with the banks (on which he is right) is another diversionary attack.

For it is neither corporate greed (capitalists down the ages have practised this) nor the excesses of banks and bankers (also not new) that lie at the heart of the present downward spiral into global depression on a scale scarcely imaginable because it has no parallels.

The financial system provided the credit (and its twin, debt) for a globalised economy that is required to grow year on year to sustain profit levels and satisfy shareholders. Going into reverse, destroying production and sacking people, is what happens when debt overwhelms consumers.

Banks collapsed because bad debts began to mount, calling into doubt the questionable value attributed to all sorts of assets that looked good on paper so long as they earned an income. Meltdown II is now on the cards. A new credit crunch already exists and the debt crisis overwhelming the eurozone is a reflection of the recession.

Reining in City bonuses or curbing executive pay will make not a jot of difference to how this crisis unfolds. This is merely the froth of capitalism as a system of production and exchange. Creating an alternative system which does not depend on constant expansion in search of profit is the basis of a sustainable, rational alternative.

Inevitably that means taking ownership and control of capital out the hands of the reckless minority and placing it under democratic stewardship. That is what distinguishes us from Cameron, Clegg and especially Miliband.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Food agency rewrites report to suit corporates

2012-01-19T11:14:00.003Z

Global agri-business is increasingly influencing the work of publicly-funded food and agriculture bodies such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Consultative Group on Agriculture Research (CGAR).

A new report from the biodiversity action group ETC charts this change with three case studies where private interest capped public benefit.

The first shows how the FAO rewrote a report on “greening agriculture” under the impact of demands from corporate interests. The original report was produced jointly by all the so-called “Rome-Based Agencies” (all the UN food agencies have their offices in Rome including FAO, CGAR, etc.). NGOs like Oxfam, and small farming interests were consulted.

But publication of the first draft brought demands for changes from Crop Life International, representing pesticide manufacturers, the International Fertilizer Industry Association, and the New Zealand Farmers association, amongst others.

Without consulting the original authors, FAO rewrote the report to emphasise the importance of high-tech in the food chain, muffle data implying that the industrial food system is leading to the doubling and tripling of type 2 diabetes, and defend the role of meat and dairy products in a green economy.

A warning that the big transnational seed/chemical companies are patenting multi-genome “climate ready” crops was muted. And the report includes the astonishing statement that “we need to ultimately move people out of farming.”

Challenged by ETC about this phrase, Ann Tutwiler, FAO Deputy Director General for Knowledge, retorted: “Sorry — why would we want to shift to more labour intensive practices? It seems to me that we want to reduce the labour intensity of farming and shift labour to more productive uses in the agrifood systems, science, etc. Farming needs to be more knowledge intensive and more capital (including natural capital) intensive, but we need to ultimately move people out of farming.”

This represents a modern version of the “green revolution” approach which is historically responsible for world hunger. The 20th century approach was based on intensive use of pesticides and fertiliser. The 21st century approach adds gene-manipulation to the mix.

It is transmitted into the agencies by staff recruited from big business, and by the growing influence of corporations and corporate foundations - such as the Gates Foundation - at the highest level. Tutwiler is herself a former agri-business lobbyist.

Case number two involves CGAR's International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas based in Syria. They signed a three-year contract with the Mexican beer industry to provide them with new strains of malting barley for assessment. In return, the industry partner would have a Mexico monopoly on any successful strains. This may actually breach CGAR rules, but how many other such deals are happening?

Case number three relates to the gene sequencing of pigeon peas by CGAR's Hyderabad-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Last November they made a headline grabbing announcement that they had completed the sequence - but in fact the complete sequence had been published a month before, by government-backed Indian scientists. Why was ICRISAT not working in partnership with them? Because they chose to replicate the work, partnered up with Beijing Genomics Institute (the world’s largest gene sequencing company) and Monsanto.

Industrialised food is now the world's biggest industry, bigger even than energy. To continue expanding, the corporations must exploit land in Africa and Asia. But there's a problem - these key areas are already being affected by climate change - both drought and extreme rainfall.

So the corporates are jumping on board the UN expert networks, to get a share of the public funding invested in new crop varieties. They are buying influence, often through big “charitable” foundations, to ensure the UN shares their market-driven approaches.

Some corporations buy US politicians by the dozen to promote the view that anthropogenic climate change does not exist. Other corporations busily climate proof their business and prepare to profit.

Planning to meet climate change with fairer land distribution and sustainable organic methods is increasingly blocked out of the picture under the influence of corporations. We urgently need to transform this, reminding ourselves that food and industrialised food are not at all the same thing.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

'Clueless' as global crisis worsens

2012-01-18T12:34:00.001Z

The World Bank is warning of a global downturn worse than that of 2008/09 which saw trade drop by 90% at it lowest point and production following suit. In a sharp about-face from the optimism of its June 2011 report, the Bank now says “the world economy has entered a dangerous period”.

It warns that countries do not have the “fiscal and monetary space” to stimulate the global economy or support the financial system to the same degree as they did in 2008/09. In other words, no rescue packages will be available this time round which is about as stark a message as it comes.

Following turmoil on the world’s financial markets in August, global trade volumes declined at an annualized pace of 8% during the three months ending October 2011, mainly reflecting a 17% annualized decline in European imports. On balance, the World Bank said global economic conditions were "fragile and there remains great uncertainty as to how markets will evolve over the medium term."

In an open admission that they, nor anyone else can do anything to prevent the worsening collapse, Andrew Burns, Manager of Global Macroeconomics and lead author of the report says “the importance of contingency planning cannot be stressed enough.”

The report admits: “An escalation of the crisis would spare no-one. Developed- and developing-country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09.”

Underlining the interconnected self-feeding spiral of decline of the global capitalist economy, the Bank’s latest report adds: "The downturn in Europe and weaker growth in developing countries raises the risk that the two developments reinforce one another, resulting in an even weaker outcome." Failure to resolve high debts and deficits in Japan and the United States and slow growth in other high-income countries, could trigger sudden shocks, the report says.

On top of that, political tensions in the Middle East and North Africa could disrupt oil supplies and add another blow to global prospects. In a sign that billions of people in developing countries are to be abandoned to their fate, the Bank warns that they “should evaluate their vulnerabilities and prepare contingencies to deal with a downturn”.

Meanwhile, the crisis in Europe is deepening by the day, as evidenced by the latest unemployment figures in Britain. The number out of work rose to its highest level in more than 17 years in November. The number of people without a job rose by 118,000 in the three months to November to 2.685 million, the highest level since August 1994. The number of young people without a job jumped to 1.043 million in the three months to November, taking the unemployment rate in the age group of 16-24 year-olds to 22.3%.

Unemployment looks set to rise further. Banks and retailers have cut jobs in recent weeks and Britain's largest food group Premier Foods announced yesterday that it would slash 600 jobs in the face of weak consumer demand.

None of this is surprising, given the ConDem coalition’s spending cuts and the crisis within the eurozone economies. In a sign of desperation, the Bank of England is expected to launch another round of “quantitative easing” – aka printing of money – next month in a bid to inject some life into the economy.

The sense of a loss of control at state level is palpable, as the unwinding of the economic and financial crisis continues to outrun governments. As one minister told the London Evening Standard this week: “The thing to remember, the unsayable thing, is that no one, not governments, not bond markets, not ratings agencies, not the World Bank, the ECB or the IMF has a bloody clue what to do about any of it.”

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

They are all in it together!

2012-01-17T11:25:00.002Z

The evidence of Labour’s collusion with the ConDem coalition has piled up so high that even Len McCluskey, the leader of the Unite union, can no longer ignore it. “The real points of differentiation between Labour and the government on the economy are now very hard to identify,” he admits today.

McCluskey’s union propelled Ed Miliband into the leadership in the vain hope that he would lead the party in a new direction, away from the Blairism of the previous 15 years towards a modernised version of Old Labour.

With shadow cabinet members lining up to support the government’s public sector pay freeze, cuts in education and saying that a Labour government would continue with the ConDems’ austerity policies, a shell-shocked McCluskey hit back – at least in words.

Writing in The Guardian, he says that “this year we have seen one shadow minister after another falling over themselves to endorse savage spending cuts which are hurting real people. Where does this leave the half a million people who joined the TUC's march for an alternative last year, and the half of the country at least who are against the cuts? Disenfranchised.”

The general secretary of Britain’s largest union, whose financial support keeps Labour afloat, says the country now has a “national government” consensus among the three major parliamentary parties. McCluskey tries, without success, to paint a picture of Miliband as a prisoner of the Blairites.

He claims that shadow chancellor Ed Balls's “sudden embrace of austerity and the public-sector pay squeeze” represents a victory for “discredited Blairism” and also “challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself”. This is desperate stuff.

Miliband has actually set the course himself. His front bench has backed many Tory policies and Miliband himself has declared that his policy is to build a fairer, more responsible, prosperous capitalism. It’s an approach that David Cameron himself has embraced enthusiastically if opportunistically.

The Labour leader attacked the mass strikes in defence of public sector pensions and instructed party-controlled councils to implement spending cuts passed down from the ConDem coalition (a policy backed by Labour-affiliated unions, by the way).

Blairism was an outright adaptation to and acceptance of capitalism and the power of financial markets. It marked the termination of the long social-democratic, reformist tradition in Labour politics, no longer viable within a globalised capitalist economy.

With the world economy in a profound crisis, Labour – along with similar parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal etc – has bent with the prevailing economic wind. It was either that or challenging the fundamentals of the capitalist system itself. Anyone expecting the latter to happen, whoever leads Labour, is living in a fool’s paradise.

McCluskey is also angry, rightly so, that as one of the party’s paymasters, he was not asked about the shift that has taken Labour into the arms of the ConDem coalition.Naturally, he has a remedy to hand if he serious about representing his members’ interests.

He could call a ballot on the case for disaffiliating from a party that clearly speaks for big business, the City and the bond dealers. As his members are, as he points out, disenfranchised, McCluskey could generate a discussion on how trade unionists and their supporters could be better served.

Unfortunately, there is no sign of that happening. McCluskey is desperate to keep the political fight inside a party that is now part of a national coalition against ordinary working people. This is, in practice, a great disservice to Unite members who will no doubt draw their own conclusions when they fight the ConDemLab pay freeze.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The bottom line and safety at sea

2012-01-16T10:31:00.004Z

The sinking of a 21st century hi-tech cruise ship in calm waters, on an established route in well-known waters off the coast of Tuscany has set alarm bells ringing for many reasons.

Travel experts are astonished since the less than six-year old £350m Costa Concordia was equipped with all the latest navigation technology which should have alerted the crew to the rocks that tore a hole in its side.

The Costa Concordia belongs to the Carnival Corporation, which is the world’s largest cruise company. Based in Miami, it owns legendary names including the Costa, P&O, Cunard, Holland American Line, Ibero and Seabourn brands.

With 3,200 passengers and around 1,000 crew on board, the Costa Concordia could strike you as a monstrously large ship. But cruise ships have become even larger as the corporations that own them seek economies of scale. Some, like the Allure of the Seas owned by Royal Caribbean International, can hold 6,360 passengers and over 1,000 crew.

Whilst some of us may view a maritime cruise as a luxury only for a small minority of the rich and idle, the industry sees passengers as cash cows to be relieved of their savings. The stats for Carnival’s latest ships, still in construction, sum it all up: the 130,000 tonne juggernauts are part of its Dream class group and feature amusements like a water park, a 2-deck miniature golf course and a whirlpool jacuzzi in four places along the outside edge of the deck.

There has been a massive growth in the industry over the last decade with around 1.7 million British people enjoying cruise holidays last year. So much so that some industry experts seem far more concerned about the impact the disaster could have on profits. “It’s a bad moment for the industry,” says Sara Macefield in The Sunday Telegraph. (But not too bad for the British market since there were only 24 Britons on this sailing, she adds, in nationalist tones.)

It has taken eye-witness accounts by passengers to reveal the truth behind all the glitz and prevarications of the cruise industry. When the Costa Concordia hit the rocks, passengers were simply told there was a technical problem, thereby losing precious time.

Minutes later, the ship listed so badly that they could not access some of the lifeboats. Many have spoken about the lack of evacuation drills or muster training to prepare for emergencies, not only on the Costa Concordia but on other Carnival-owned ships. They also spoke about the lack of leadership from the ship’s senior crew.

The maritime industry is institutionally ridden with disdain for most of its passengers and those who labour on and below decks. While officers are well trained and well-paid, lower-ranking crew are not. Andrew Linington, head of communications for Nautilus International, a trade union for ships’ officers, says that most of crew members on these big vessels receive only four to five days initial safety training, “a fraction of the safety training given to airline cabin crew.” On-board safety equipment has hardly changed since the Titanic disaster, Linington says.

The sinking of the Costa Concordia, like that of the Titanic 100 years ago, is symbolic of the state of the system itself. Capable of brilliant advances in technology, including navigation systems and shipbuilding, it is fatally compromised by its bottom-line motivation: shareholder profits. And, equally important, the best systems in the world are only as good as those who operate them.

Industry experts have written off Costa Concordia as “constructive total loss”. The same should be said of the capitalist system as a whole where profits come a long way before the interests of ordinary people, on cruise ships or not.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

TUC divides pensions fight

2012-01-13T11:23:00.001Z

At the first whiff of grapeshot, the right-wing leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), history will show, turned and ran straight into the arms of the ConDem coalition over cuts to public sector pensions.

Yesterday the TUC ruled out any further co-ordinated industrial action along the lines of the November 30 strike which brought two million public sector workers out on to the streets.

A fear of what a repeat of this action could lead to was undoubtedly instrumental in the decision of the TUC’s public sector liaison group to block calls for more strikes and, instead, to seek a deal with the government through further negotiations.

Last year, Derek Prentis, secretary of the million-strong Unison union, was making firebrand speeches at his conference and got the backing to hold a strike ballot. As one suspected, it was hot air and no substance.

Prentis, supported by TUC secretary Brendan Barber, saw November 30 as something to get out of the way before making a deal on the terms set out by the government. This will mean higher contributions, working longer and reduced pensions on retirement.

Other unions, representing another one million teachers, civil servants, local government and health workers, have declined to sign up to the general framework agreement announced by the government just before Christmas.

Most are willing to resume negotiations but one, the civil service PCS union, doesn’t even have that opportunity. It has been excluded from future talks because of its outright rejection of the “agreement”.

PCS's national executive committee yesterday unanimously reaffirmed the rejection of the government’s plans to increase contributions from April, link the retirement age to the state pension which is rising to 68, and impose a switch in indexation that means a cut in the value of pensions of around 15% to 20%.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: "We will continue to call for proper negotiations on the key issues of paying more and working longer for less.” The PCS will try and work separately with other unions holding out to organise more strikes.

Behind the split in union ranks, which will gladden the government no end, is undoubtedly the hand of Labour. The party distanced itself from the November 30 strike and wants no repeat. Prentis, who has refused to support action against spending cuts by local, often Labour-led, councils, would not have needed much persuasion.

It remains to be seen whether other Labour-affiliated unions like Unite take their resistance much further. Don’t put your money on it. Their aim is to wait until the next scheduled general election in 2015 (!) and hope that Labour is re-elected in the forlorn hope of a few favours returned. With Ed Miliband accepting that further spending cuts will have to be made and planning Labour’s very own austerity package, public sector pensions will stay under siege.

Ultimately, the TUC bureaucrats fear the consequences of the crisis of capitalism which is driving the government’s attack on the public sector. They hope that by appeasing the ConDems, ministers will back off. This is an illusion. As outright recession becomes a real possibility, the government is in no position to weaken its resolve, especially as it will have to borrow more not less on the international money markets.

The decision of the PCS to lead further resistance is welcome but it is in a position to go further. Politically, there are no solutions to hand, with a ConDemLab coalition taking shape, while the economy’s woes are revealed as a crisis of the system itself. By sponsoring a conference to initiate a discussion on creating political and economic alternatives the PCS could make a real contribution to the struggles ahead.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Self-determination for Scotland has to end minority rule as well

2012-01-12T10:09:00.003Z

It is hardly surprising that Scots hate rule from Westminster - they are not alone. Millions of workers all across the UK have come hate the ConDems Coalition for imposing the full burden of the economic crisis on their backs.

Whatever question is on the ballot paper for Scotland’s proposed referendum, there will be none that will bring about independence from cuts, closures, poverty, capitalism and the banks.

It will simply give people in Scotland the chance to swap rule of the 1% based at Westminster for the 1% based in Edinburgh. Or rather, continuing rule by the global corporations that rule everywhere, supported by their cohorts in the Scottish banks, the oil industry and the landowning, shareholding, political elite.

We will be asked to vote out the sham UK democracy and replace it with a sham Scottish democracy that will provide self-determination for an elite only.

The reality is that as a small economy, Scotland’s fate would be decided by global events and the decisions of the major capitalist states. This is the experience of Greece, Hungary, Iceland and Ireland among others.

It has been the experience of devolution, which has been unable to insulate Scots from the ravages of the global financial and economic crisis. One in three children in half of all local authority areas live in poverty, one in two in Glasgow. Unemployment is once again higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, and youth unemployment stands at 25%.

Further Education colleges face unprecedented cuts and an unwanted and badly-planned restructuring. The infrastructure of both Edinburgh and Glasgow is crumbling. Both cities’ councils are riven by scandals, waste and a ruthless determination to ignore the views of the people.

It is just crude nationalism to talk about being “free from England”. Who do we want to be free from? The tenacious battlers who continue to occupy at St Paul’s? The electricians striking across the UK to prevent the destruction of their wages and working conditions? The disabled people and their supporters fighting cruel cuts in benefits? Do Strathclyde Police have a kid glove where the Metropolitan Police have an iron fist?

There is not one England any more than there is one Scotland.

From Labour we get a kind of greater British nationalism, a support for the union that has more to do with the big fat prize of Westminster government jobs than any principles. It certainly has nothing to do with defending the unity of the British working class and trade unions.

Labour can only win at Westminster with Scottish votes, and Ed Miliband makes clear they would use those votes to continue with cuts and attacks on living standards. It is no wonder that Scots have come to detest Labour almost as much as they detest the Tories, and the SNP under Alex Salmond has benefited from that.

Cameron’s “defence of the union” is equally self, or rather power-seeking. Ditching Scotland might ensure a permanent Tory majority in England. That’s why they want just one question - independence, yes or no - on the referendum ballot paper.

And as a result, Cameron sets out to deny Scots the right to vote for a greater degree of devolution, even although polls suggest that is what they would prefer and even although people in Wales had a referendum on this in March 2011.

If it comes to a referendum, A World to Win will support the right of the Scottish people to self-determination but will campaign for real liberation from the likes of Salmond, the banks, landowners and the Scottish ruling elites.

What we need is to form People’s Assemblies all over Scotland now, to create the basis for a truly profound shift in decision-making, authority and ownership - directly to the people. We can’t vote for a revolutionary form of independence, that combines self-determination with an end to minority capitalist rule. They won’t put that question on the ballot paper. So we will have to put it on the agenda ourselves.

Penny Cole

The spectre of Marx haunts the debate

2012-01-11T12:05:00.001Z

Contributors to the debate about capitalism increasingly find themselves obliged to consult Marx, the primary authority on the system, and to try and refute his arguments for its replacement.

The deepening global economic crisis is driving the discussion. Every attempt to resolve it just makes matters worse. Every new set of figures negates the idea that the problems are temporary.

As the Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner has it today: ‘Normally, the economy will bounce back quite quickly from a cyclical contraction, fast rendering the anti-capitalist backlash redundant. But this time, there is no such recovery.”

He points out that more than three years since the recession started, Britain’s economic output is still below the level it reached in 2007. Prospects for growth do not appear on the radar.

Meanwhile, a redistribution of wealth is going on apace – from the poor to the rich. “There is no hardship for those seen to have caused the slump. Bankers and company bosses are paying themselves even more than they were during the boom; the wealth divide continues to widen.”

Warner, assistant editor and leading business commentator, uses his article to bash Ed Miliband (bit of an easy target) for failing to come to terms with changed conditions and declining to accept New Labour’s role in the build-up of debt that has overwhelmed the economy.

But he has to admit: “Rightly or wrongly, capitalism is seen to have failed. To counter rising forms of populism, it must find ways of recreating and reinvigorating itself.” Unfortunately for Warner, the patient’s vital life signs are heading in the opposite direction.

Enter Emanuel Derman, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, and one of the leading proponents of the financial engineering that propelled the credit boom to its catastrophic collapse. He opens his new book (Models Behaving Badly: Why Confusing illusion with reality can lead to disaster, on Wall Street and in Life) with a famous quote from Marx and Engels his co-thinker and factory owner: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Ultimately, however, like many other commentators, he thinks there is life in the old dog of capitalism yet if only the financial system abandoned its reliance on mathematical models. Ah, if the answer were so simple!

To his credit, Derman acknowledges the relevance of Marx while author and academic John Kay, visiting professor at the London School of Economics, tells the readers of the Financial Times that capitalism actually no longer exists (which is news to those under its heel). “The political and economic environment in which Marx wrote was a brief interlude in economic history.”

Kay argues that the nature of share ownership is so diffuse compared with the individual capitalist of 19th century England that “people do not know who owns their work tools because the answer does not matter” while “control over the means of production and exchange matters a great deal to the organisation of business and the power structures of society”. Kay suggests that we abandon the term capitalism and refer to the “market economy” instead.

But far from being a refutation, Kay’s analysis reinforces the method that Marx and Engels developed and used in their work, which revealed not just the inner, contradictory logic that drives the system to its alternating periods of credit-enhanced growth and catastrophic collapse, but the necessity of its continually changing its form.

Most importantly of all, Marx and Engels’ dialectical method showed the temporary, historical nature of the system and how it created the conditions for the socialisation of production. With due respect to Warner, capitalism has not just “seen to have failed”. It has failed in practice and it urgently needs replacing.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

A capitalism that lacks legitimacy

2012-01-10T12:01:00.001Z

While Ed Miliband brings Labour into an ever-closer alignment with Tory arguments (and policies) on the economy, it falls to the Financial Times to ask whether capitalism can respond to an historic crisis of legitimacy.

As the FT notes: “The system, in all its different varieties, is widely perceived to be failing to deliver.” This is a genuinely serious question which in turn raises real issues about democracy (or the absence of it) and whether the system is capable of re-enlisting the support it once enjoyed.

Miliband, naturally, is incapable of addressing these matters because they strike at the heart of the system of political rule which acts as a proxy for corporate and financial power in every country (and which he is so desperate to be part of).

In fact, his acceptance today of spending cuts to reduce the deficit, attacks on welfare (even questioning the winter fuel allowance for older people) – in effect, setting out Labour’s very own austerity package – will only deepen the growing hostility to the system itself.

Actually naming its series of articles “Capitalism in Crisis”, the paper of choice for business executives, acknowledges that “democratic legitimacy has been largely lacking” in the measures taken by governments over the last four years.

“On both sides of the Atlantic there is now a risk that reasonable aspirations to equality of opportunity are being undermined, accompanied by a growing threat of political instability. Support for open trade and free markets is also being adversely affected.”

The significance of this lack of consent should not be underestimated. As a system based on private control of wealth and resources, capitalism actually depends on a measure of acceptance by the 99% which is mostly expressed through the political process.

When consent declines in any significance, the nature of capitalism itself stands revealed and becomes more reviled (which the article points out has happened several times over the last 200 years). “Greedy bankers, overpaid executives, anaemic growth, stubbornly high unemployment – these are just a few of the things that have lately driven protesters on to the streets and caused the wider public in the developed world to become disgruntled about capitalism,” the FT remarks.

In a recent survey about trust, under 50% of Americans and British asked said they had “faith in business to do what is right”. The US and the UK were only just ahead of Russia.

The FT believes that growing income inequality is at the root of the discontent rather than growing poverty. In this they are partly right. In 1975, the ratio of the pay of a CEO to an average worker was 35 times greater; by 2010 the ratio had soared to 325 times. Large sections of the middle-class also did very well in the halcyon days of globalisation.

There’s no doubt that perceptions of unfairness drive many protests. But demands that workers pay for a crisis they did not create through lower pensions, reduced wages and unemployment is about defending an often modest standard of living and brought millions out on strike.

For the FT, as for Miliband, the question is “how to improve the existing model of capitalism”. Here they both run into a major difficulty. The globalisation process created a hydra-headed beast that knows no borders, has more power than nation states and is very much immune to political processes.

The trust survey showed an even greater mistrust of government than of business, which must in part be due to the fact that politics is seen to do the bidding of and be in the pockets of the wealthy. Meanwhile, as the FT admits, “efforts to re-regulate the banking system…have failed to convince many experts that an even larger financial crisis can be avoided”.

In sum, capitalism has little room for manoeuvre and a negligible chance of restoring consent for its continued rule. Of course, it’s not giving up power voluntarily time soon either. But the opportunities to argue for and achieve a revolutionary democratic transformation of capitalist society are more favourable than for a very long time.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Populist Cameron trumps pathetic Labour

2012-01-09T08:26:00.003Z

Interviewing the prime minister for the Sunday Telegraph, Matthew D’Ancona curiously concluded that David Cameron was a man with a mission – “to save capitalism from itself”.

Cameron is acutely aware that the system is in deep trouble and that vast numbers of people are increasingly angry about the widening gulf between them, the rich and the powerful.

A new poll has confirmed that economic fears are by far the greatest concerns. So Cameron is in a bidding war with Labour to fool a worried public that that action is being taken to curb the excesses of the system. With Ed Miliband’s party in practice a semi-detached part of the coalition government, Cameron’s task is made easier.

Cameron’s trumpeted curbs on executive pay, aimed at giving shareholders a direct say in determining salary packages and pay-offs, is aimed at soothing outrage over the earnings of company directors, as is his decision to maintain the top 50p rate of tax.

People are aware that the class divide is deeper than ever. The vast majority, are disgusted at the wealth of a tiny minority. Rising prices and bills combined with rapidly rising unemployment and wage freezes have cut deep into people’s standard of living.

Anger at top people’s wealth is of course totally justified. An independent survey finds that chief executives of 87 of the FTSE 100 firms helped themselves to a 33% rise in pay and perks in 2010-11, taking their average package to £5.1million. Other directors took pay rises of 49% over the year, walking away with £2.7million each.

Small wonder, then, that the Tent City occupation outside St Paul’s, which initially targeted the London Stock Exchange, has continued to strike a chord amongst large numbers of people, including City workers.

For a Conservative leader, Cameron has been harsher in his criticism than Labour of how economic growth and speculation on the markets has benefited a tiny minority. Edward Heath, the Tory prime minister before Margaret Thatcher, once famously talked of the “unacceptable face of capitalism”.

Cameron went one better in outright populist rhetoric directed at big business. He told BBC’s Andrew Marr show, that where “there was excessive growth of payment, unrelated to success, frankly ripping off the shareholder and the customer, [it] is crony capitalism and is wrong. It’s also, and this is the key point, payments for failure”.

It’s not the first time that Cameron and his strategy directors, who include Steve Hilton and Andrew Cooper, have invaded territory which Labour felt it could lay claim to. But that’s not difficult. Shadow Business secretary Chuka Umunna’s pathetic weekend call for a “responsible and better capitalism” hardly set the pulse racing.

The truth is that these political leaders hope to cash in on disquiet with the system simply to keep the show on the road, just as the spectre of uncontrolled financial markets and the greatest debt crisis in history is causing economic havoc.

The notion that the shareholders can somehow regulate the fortunes made out of the system is just as harebrained as the idea of that politicians can control or even influence the flows of capital through the world’s financial market.

Giving shareholders more power will do nothing to change the spots of the capitalist leopard. Institutional shareholders like insurance companies have already presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the majority in society to the minority. And many of them benefit from the same high earnings as the CEOs they are supposed to regulate.

Along with business secretary Vince Cable and the Labour leaders, Cameron is simply cashing in on the oh-so-threadbare but still powerful myth that capitalism can be reformed or tamed by pretending that “fairness” can be spread around. Behind all the rhetoric lies the awareness that they are impotent as the system careers further and further out of control.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Hungary crisis driven on by new credit crunch

2012-01-06T11:28:00.002Z

A chain under stress usually breaks at its weakest link. For the global financial system, the pressure point could well prove to be Hungary.

Although not in the single currency, Hungary’s depressed economy is entirely dependent on credit from banks that are in the eurozone, particularly those located in neighbouring Austria and Italy.

Those credit lines have dried up as a result as the drift to a full-scale banking crisis in Europe takes its toll on lending, leaving Hungary vulnerable to a sudden withdrawal of funds.

Banks everywhere, including the UK, are now reluctant to lend to anyone, including other financial institutions, for fear they won’t get their money back. And their scope for lending has been further reduced by a requirement to increase their asset base (which led to a run on Italian bank Unicredit’s shares yesterday).

Hungary’s beleaguered autocratic government led by the populist Viktor Orban yesterday had to pay interest of 10% to borrow some short-term money. A debt-swap auction was cancelled for lack of interest.

Hungary needs to roll over nearly €5bn of external debt this year and in February is due to start repaying a loan from the International Monetary Fund that saved the country from collapse in 2008.

The country is now asking for more help from the IMF. This won’t be straightforward as the IMF is demanding political and economic policy changes first. The danger of a Hungarian sovereign debt default remains high, which would have a contagion impact throughout Europe.

Orban’s nationalist posturing is adding to the risk, as does a growing political crisis which last weekend saw tens of thousands of people rally in Hungary against a new constitution that gives the state draconian new powers over its citizens (as well as the central bank, much to the angst of the EU and IMF who are not particularly bothered about the rest). A declaration on the “decline of democracy and the rise of dictatorship” in Hungary was circulated by a number of former political dissidents.

Other so-called periphery countries, like Rumania and Poland, are equally vulnerable to a credit crunch. Austrian, French, German, Greek and Italian banks are heavily committed to loans to these countries.

There are no “solutions” in sight, as billionaire investor George Soros acknowledged in relation to the eurozone crisis. Soros was only stating the obvious when he warned that a collapse of the single currency would be “catastrophic not only for Europe but also for the global financial system".

The stresses are showing up throughout the system. A survey by the Bank of England reveals that Britain's banks are more worried now about a credit crunch than at any time since the first one brought down Northern Rock in late 2007. Inter-bank lending rates have risen as a result of the eurozone crisis and these have been passed on to companies in the form of higher interest charges.

The survey also showed the first increase in default rates on loans by bigger business in two years. "For large and medium-sized corporates, default rates were reported to have picked up for the first time in two years and a further pick-up was expected," the survey said.

The central bank's quarterly Credit Conditions Survey also showed that small businesses' demand for credit had fallen sharply, and that banks expected demand for credit to drop in the coming months. The survey confirms that the UK economy is on a knife edge, heading from recession to outright slump.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The incorporation of Labour

2012-01-05T11:08:00.001Z

The assimilation of Labour into accepting the Tory Party’s narrative is moving at such a pace that it is no wonder that David Cameron finds his party ahead in the polls.

In virtually every major policy area, Labour’s own views are hardly distinguishable from those of the government; on crime, immigration and anti-terror laws, Ed Miliband’s crew are actually to the right of the ConDem coalition.

Only this week, Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, claimed that the benefits system had “skewed social behaviour”, provided “unearned support” and run up an unsustainable housing benefits bill.

In an articlefor the Guardian, Byrne called for “fresh thinking” and an abandonment of the party’s “old agenda”. In practice, Byrne and Labour are backing Iain Duncan Smith’s “welfare reform” bill.

On education, where Michael Gove is busily breaking up what remains of the comprehensive schools system, there is tacit backing from Labour. As the astute Tory commentator Peter Oborne
notes: “Gove is the first post-war education secretary to challenge effectively the power of the teaching unions – and move against an educational establishment that is constitutionally opposed to excellence and high standards. Amazingly, he seems to be bringing the Labour Party with him.”

Similarly on the economy. The ConDems have insisted draconian cuts in spending were made necessary partly because of the failed economic policies of the Blair/Brown governments. Shadow chancellor Ed Balls originally rejected this simplistic, half-truth.

Now, according to Oborne, even Balls agrees with “the need for drastic cuts in public spending” and only “the relatively minor detail of timing” is in dispute. “In all essentials, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party now accepts the fundamental economic insights of the Cameron Coalition.”

No surprise then that Miliband, propelled into the party’s leadership by the three largest trade unions in the hope he would be their prisoner, is struggling to find a coherent strategy that differentiates Labour from the Tories. Enter Lord Glasman, a founder of so-called Blue Labour and a Miliband advisor, whose statements on immigration could have come from the right-wing of the Tories.

Just to make sure Miliband gets the message, Glasman has told him that “there seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy” at the top of the party. Glasman urges the termination of what he terms “an unhappy and abusive relationship with the unions” and to end being identified with the interests of public sector workers.

Miliband is almost there. He opposed last year’s strikes in defence of public sector pensions and there are reports that he intends to reduce the reliance on trade union funding (Rod Aldridge, the former chief of outsourcing firm Capita who donated £1m to Labour was given a knighthood in the New Year list. One of Miliband's newest advisers is Andrew Rosenfeld, the property tycoon who has also given £1m)

Glasman is kicking at an open door when he urges Miliband to “leave behind stale orthodoxies and trust his instinct that change is essential”.

Oborne’s view that the “facts of life are Conservative” and that Labour has accepted this is, of course, used to damn what he terms the “Left” which he identifies with the 13 years of Blair/Brown governments.

This is historically inaccurate as well as misleading. New Labour long ago accepted the facts of corporate-driven globalisation and came to believe in a “new paradigm” of a crisis-free capitalism, with uninterrupted growth and riches for all. It was a view shared by many economists and politicians around the world, including the present Tory leadership.

The “facts of life” are actually those of an economic and financial system in profound crisis globally and not principally because governments spent too much. Reliance on credit/debt was the only way to sustain ever-growing consumption and, more significantly, profit levels.

So the credit crunch and financial meltdown was an expression of this permanent, inner-tension between production and profit that lies at the heart of capitalism. And the result is not just the wiping out of vast areas of capacity, leading to mass unemployment, but the integration of Labour into the ConDems’ desperate strategy to turn things round.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Institutionally beyond reform

2012-01-04T10:35:00.002Z

Wheeling out Cressida Dick to give the Metropolitan Police’s reaction to the conviction of two men for the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence almost 19 years ago says it all really.

Dick, acting deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, was notoriously in charge of the bungled police operation that resulted in the virtual execution of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes as he sat in a Tube carriage at Stockwell in 2005.

Menezes was shot seven times in the head after being mistaken for a terror suspect, denied a chance to identify himself. Immediately the Met went into cover-up mode, claiming that Menezes had vaulted the gates at the station and was wearing bulky clothing that could have hidden a bomb.

None of this was true, of course. Menezes’ simple misfortune was to be identified as a possible wanted man by watchers for whom one “foreigner” clearly looked like another. Not to mince words, this was racism in practice.

Now the police did not murder Lawrence. But they did their best to prevent his killers from being convicted by wilfully ignoring the evidence that this was a racist killing involving David Norris, Gary Dobson and other local gang members.

Dick claimed that the recommendations in the 1999 Macpherson inquiry report into the Met’s failures over the Lawrence killing “have transformed policing”. Oh really? Among other things, Macpherson found that the Met was “institutionally racist”.

Leaving aside the absolutely indifferent handling of the forensic evidence which threatened to wreck the case against Norris and Dobson, other facts do not back up Dick’s claim.

Statistics show that a black person is more than nine times more likely to be searched than a white person. This is a higher ratio than before the Macpherson report was published.

The number of black and Asian people stopped and searched by the police increased by more than 70% in the five years between 2004 and 2009, according to Ministry of Justice figures. They show that more than 310,000 black and Asian people were searched by the police on the streets in 2008/09, compared with 178,000 in 2004/05. Although the Met covers only 14% of the population of England and Wales, their officers carried out 42% of all stop and searches. The figures for 2008/09 show there were three times more arrests of black people than white people, based on per 1,000 population figures.

Ann Juliette Roberts, of Edmonton, north London, was initially targeted by officers in September 2010 because she did not have enough money on her Oyster card for her journey. But the situation soon escalated after they insisted on searching her bag because she was holding it "suspiciously", the High Court heard last year.

The black special needs assistant was restrained face down on the floor and handcuffed. Officers found bank cards with different identities, which she explained were in her name, her maiden name - having recently married - and her son's name. She was arrested on suspicion of fraud and given a drugs test.

Roberts is asking the High Court to rule Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act "incompatible" with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Section 60 allows officers to search anyone, without suspicion, for dangerous instruments or offensive weapons in a designated area for a 24-hour period.

Most recently, of course, are the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of black man Mark Duggan, shot by police in north London in August outside the vehicle he was travelling in. The official version of events indicated that Duggan fired a gun and a bullet lodged in a police radio. An investigation has since found no forensic evidence that Duggan was carrying a weapon at the time. Duggan’s killing triggered a wave of inner-city rioting across England.

The facts (including involvement with News International over phone hacking, leading to top resignations and Dick becoming acting no 2) point to a Met that is yet another unreformable section of a state that oppresses rather than serves most of its citizens – black and white – in one way or another, most of the time.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Scandal of German state's cover for far right

2012-01-03T11:37:00.002Z

News of an astonishing catalogue of wanton failures by Germany’s intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungschutz – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfS) – is sending shock waves through the country.

Details of a 30-page confidential investigation was commissioned for the German government and sent to the state authorities just before Christmas have been revealed by Der Spiegel magazine. They document how a murderous neo-Nazi terror group known as the Zwickau cell was well-known to the authorities and could have been stopped years ago.

Right-wing terrorism in post-unification Germany is nothing new. Germany was wracked by a spate of killings between 2000 and 2007 in which eight people were killed by two members of the terror group which called itself the National Socialist Underground. The men, Uwe Bohnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, later shot themselves after a failed bank robbery.

What is new is the sharp increase in acts of right-wing violence over the past year – from 300 to 9,800. But the neo-Nazis are not only targeting people of foreign descent, gays and the homeless. Recent months have seen some 100 attacks on members of Germany’s Left Party, including its leader Gregor Gysi.

Lists of names and addresses of Left Party officials were found amongst the Zwickau cell terrorists. The Left Party’s security policy spokeswoman, Ulla Jelpke, has seen her Dortmund office attacked by paving stones, graffiti, acid and steel balls fired through the window.

The exposure of the intelligence service’s failings, has brought to the surface a truly shambolic situation within the German state itself. Even mainstream media are asking how much of the state’s blind eye to right-wing terrorism is due to bungling and how much to protection from within the security agencies themselves.

Far from being a secret, the activities of the neo-Nazis in the former east Germany states of Saxony and Thuringia were closely monitored by the state.

But due to distrust between different branches of the German state and lack of action by local prosecutors, far right terrorists in groups like the Thuringian Homeland Protection and Jena Comradeship continued their bank robbing and murdering people of foreign descent.

As long ago as 1997, the Thuringian state sold a luxury mansion to a far right group of holocaust deniers and some accuse the Thuringian section of the state intelligence service of disrupting police investigations into the terror cells. The head of Thuringia’s state branch in Erfort, Helmut Roewer, was suspended in 2000 for a “range of irregularities” and a confidential report said that some sections of the agency had “failed completely” during his period in office.

Der Spiegel has long been known for exposing murky aspects of Germany’s state – but matters are now so bad that even authorities themselves are expressing shock at the scale of the inaction, bungling and bureaucratic infighting.

The president of the BfS, Heinz Fromm, who has headed the agency since 2000, professed shock in an extraordinarily apologetic interview with the Tagespiegel newspaper. He said the agency had transferred its attention from the far right to Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, but claimed not to know why investigations into neo-Nazis were halted in 2001.

Despite the state running 130 paid informants within Germany’s chief neo-Nazi organisation, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and within the Thüringer group itself, the security services failed to prevent the National Socialist Underground group’s terror activities.

Jorge Ziercke, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has said that public confidence in the rule of law has been “shaken to the core” while opposition parties in the Bundestag are calling for a parliamentary investigation.

But the Zwickau scandal is only one sign that the relations within the German state are under stress. Even the long-standing cosy relationship between Das Bild newspaper and Angel Merkel’s ruling CDU party is showing signs of breaking down. With German capitalism fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent a collapse of its cherished eurozone project, the divisions within the state indicate a deep turbulence in ruling class circles.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Make 2012 a year to settle accounts

2011-12-30T10:46:00.003Z

The year ends as it began, with great social movements of people who have taken to the streets because other means of democratic expression are either cut off, denied or wilfully ignored.

It coincides with a world economy teetering on the edge of a depression, overwhelmed by the very debt that it generated to lead an unsustainable, self-destructive expansion.

Italy, now run by an unelected government headed by a Goldman Sachs advisor, yesterday had to pay almost 7% to refinance a small portion of its huge debt. Europe’s banks only function because they have access to cheap money from the central bank. Everyone knows it can’t continue.

In the last few weeks, huge numbers have defied the authorities in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Russia; many have paid with their lives at the hands of authoritarian regimes that deny basic freedoms.

Across the United States, the occupy movement that began on Wall Street has sustained a stubborn foothold despite state repression and exposed the Obama presidency. In Britain, the biggest strike for 30 years was backed by the resilient and imaginative St Paul’s occupation.

No one can dispute that despite the different forms and apparent aims of people in different countries from Bahrain, Libya to Israel, this is a truly global phenomenon that signifies a new period of world history.

On October 15, various actions against the system were held simultaneously in almost 100 countries, initiated by the Democracy Now! movement in Spain. It was an event unique in human history that we must build on in the coming year.

New generations have driven the movement on, giving the lie to those who stupidly claim that modern capitalism has created hopeless individualism and despair in place of social solidarity.

People have rediscovered and enhanced their individuality in social movements that have emphasised inclusiveness, transparency, democracy and collective decision-making. Social media designed to reinforce corporate culture has become a key tool for mobilising against the self same system.

The movement will ebb and flow and new forms of struggle will emerge to enhance the occupation movement simply because the multi-sided crisis of the present social system is not going away any time soon.

In Britain, over a million young people are out of work, while more toil for a pittance or nothing at all. Prisons are full to bursting, partly as a result of the state’s revenge on summer rioters who were led to believe they were “worth it”.

The ConDem government’s cuts are magnifying the recession. Panic in ruling circles is mounting about the impact of a eurozone collapse. Yet the Tory-led regime rides high in polls, buoyed by the fact that Labour and most trade union leaders offer no alternative let alone leadership.

Although millions participated in the March demonstration against spending cuts and the November 30 strikes, TUC leaders are busily trying to end the fight over pensions. They are signing up to deals that mean paying more, working longer and getting less on retirement.

If 2011 witnessed a great social awakening around the world, while ruling political and business elites were befuddled by the global economic and financial crisis, we should make 2012 a year when historical accounts are settled in our favour.

Some argue, however, that A) a coherent strategy is unnecessary, B) that the system will give way under mass pressure, or that C) a package of reforms can rescue capitalism from itself. A and B ignore the realities of how power is wielded through the state while C disregards the system’s inherent contradictions.

Recent breakthroughs in physics about the smallest particles, the speed of light and dark matter show that humans have capacity to discover and learn about themselves and the world.

The point in 2012 is to change it by creating movements in the spirit of scientists, by working collaboratively to find solutions, developing forms of co-leadership that avoid hierarchy yet do not stifle bold decisions or strategy planning.

More 18-year-olds in Britain are on Facebook than are registered to vote. This does not mean we should turn away from politics because of the politicians - that gives the status quo a free hand. We have to make a politics of our own.

A World to Win campaigned throughout 2011 for a strategy based on People’s Assemblies. These could deconstruct the capitalist state and create the framework for a sustainable not-for-profit economy and financial system based on co-ownership and control.

We took the idea into student occupations, strike movements and the occupations at St Paul’s, Glasgow, Newcastle and other cities. We are looking to our members, supporters and friends to develop this strategy and make it happen in 2012.

A World to Win editors

Land grab drives famine in Africa

2011-12-22T12:03:00.001Z

Global corporations and governments are exploiting traditional forms of land tenure to force through a global land grab. It is leading to a net export of calories from Africa and Asia to richer countries and is a major contributor to famine.

In Africa in particular, the neo-colonial forms that have emerged since independence are being exploited to force people off their land and let the corporations in, according to an investigation by the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Of the 60m hectares driven on the world market since 2009, 70% is in Africa.

For many years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund bullied governments into enclosing and privatising land, in order to offer a stable capitalist land ownership model attractive to foreign investors.

The result has been the curse of big landlordism that has destroyed rural communities in India and Bangladesh, for example. Now many of those original private landlords have themselves grown into global corporations and are leading the thrust of Indian capitalism into Africa.

The process is taking an even cruder form under pressure from corporations and governments like the American who are not even waiting about for legal niceties.

Land tenure in many African countries is not by title or enclosure but by customary rights. This is being interpreted to mean that the government owns the land. And so governments are declaring huge tracts of land as “unused”, and declaring groups of their own people to be “squatters”.

This unused land includes millions of hectares used by pastoralists on a seasonal basis; tracts of land left fallow for some years in a centuries-old farming method that allows land to recover its fertility; and forest land that is crucial to people for timber and fruits and also for protecting the water supply. All of this is being classified as unused government-land and the corporations are being ushered in.

The US government is supporting a major push from corporations like Monsanto to force governments to repeal laws against GM crops, for example in Tanzania, where there was a legal framework designed to keep native species free of GM contamination. China is in stiff competition with the US in the rush for African land.

The resulting displacement of people and disruption of communities leads to a bizarre situation where formerly independent farmers are now reliant on food aid whilst the land they farmed is producing crops, using unsustainable modern farming methods, to be exported to richer countries.

Also coming into play are what the Oakland Institute calls “false climate solutions”, where the corrupt carbon emissions offsetting mechanisms are another driver of the global land grab. Some of the world's worst polluters can go on polluting if they plant a tree somewhere else, and often these trees are being inappropriately planted on land grabbed in Africa.

As the OI report says: "At the end of the day, Africans are losing their food-producing land and water resources to crops being used for agrofuels in other countries. The unwelcome surprise is that the production of these crops, with industrial fertilizers, equipment and processing, will do more harm heating the planet than provide climate solutions."

It may not be possible to restore the traditional land rights that prevailed across the world before capitalist forms of enclosure and privatisation, but we can develop and implement a new model.

We can only end famine, offer fair land rights and protect the ecology of the planets by formulating an idea for a democratic shared commons. There are plenty of models for this, from community land trusts on the Scottish islands to farmers' co-operatives, and of course traditional forms of tenure as well. The challenge is to bring about the political and economic transformation needed to implement such a project.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Global meltdown closer as risks pile up

2011-12-21T11:22:00.002Z

Action taken by governments of the rich capitalist countries to reduce their deficits has produced a dangerous accumulation of risks for the world economy, warns the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

A fully-fledged recession will hit key advanced economies in 2012, even dashing hopes for what is bizarrely termed “expansionary contraction”. UNCTAD warns: “In today’s highly integrated global economy, the contractionary contagion will affect all countries and … emerging and developing economies need to prepare contingency plans.”

Other end-of-year reports on the prospects for capitalism in 2012 do not make happy reading for the world of government and politics, let alone those operating the crisis-ridden financial system.

According to the European Central Bank’s latest financial stability review, the probability of two large eurozone banks defaulting simultaneously “has been sharper and larger than in the past, pushing this measure of systemic risk to heights not observed since its inception in 2007”.

Having warned on Monday that the eurozone debt crisis could spread to engulf further member states, “creating risks to financial stability that could reverberate around the world”, the ECB has announced emergency, unlimited three-year loans to the major commercial banks

The ECB hopes this will tide them over the holiday period and avert the catastrophic collapse they face in the New Year.

But where will the money come from? The UK government has failed to stump up its hoped-for contribution to the latest £200 billion eurozone. bail-out fund which is already £50 billion short.

This was despite it being brokered via the International Monetary Fund to make it appear that Britain wasn’t contributing directly to Europe. And this adds to the problems of the biggest US money market funds having cut their lending to European banks to a further record low.

Meanwhile, ratings agency Moody has warned that Cameron’s prized triple-A rating for Britain is under threat from slowing growth, a worsening crisis in Europe, or any hesitation in the Coalition’s assault on living standards
New York economics professor Nouriel Roubini has for years been a front-runner in facing-up to the reality of the crisis. His forecast is for “a perfect storm of a double-dip recession in the US, a disorderly scenario in the eurozone and a hard landing in China” should policymakers continue to avoid “the tough decisions that are required to address their fundamental economic, financial and fiscal problems.”

The trouble is, policymakers aren’t in control of the global meltdown. As a nameless European Commission official quoted in the Financial Times has it: “You kind of always hope that someone, somewhere has a solution. And then one day it sort of dawns on you that no one here does.”

Every action that the governments or central banks take falls short of what would be needed because the social and political consequences are so profound. On the one hand they’re trying to create conditions for a return to growth. On the other hand, they’re obliged to follow the logic of capitalist “creative destruction”. They have to eliminate surplus productive capacity left over from the decades of credit-financed boom – at whatever cost to the billions of ordinary people whose lives are being smashed.

If humanity is to have any kind of decent future, the worldwide protests against the financial system and the effects of austerity must merge with the Arab uprisings and form a global movement of revolutionary people’s assemblies. The aim for 2012 has to be the replacement of the destructive capitalist system of exploitation with a not-for-profit, democratically-controlled system of sustainable production for need.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Fight the great pensions betrayal

2011-12-20T10:50:00.001Z

Only a rank-and-file revolt in defence of their pension rights stands between leaders of most public sector trade unions and what will surely rank near the top of a long list of betrayals.

With the honourable except of Mark Serwotka, leader of the PCS civil servants’ union, virtually every other official – leader is definitely the wrong term in this context – signalled in one way or another the end of the short-lived campaign over pensions.

They almost fell over themselves to meet a pre-Christmas deadline set by the ConDem coalition to reach a negotiated settlement covering more than two million local government workers, NHS staff, teachers, lecturers and civil servants.

Whatever agreement is reached, it will inevitably cut further into the living standards of public sector workers who are already the victims of a government-imposed pay freeze (which union officials, with their own fat pensions preserved in aspic, have meekly accepted).

On the eve of the talks, the government announced that it would unilaterally impose higher pension contributions on teachers and civil servants. Most civil servants and teachers will pay an extra 0.6-2.4% from April. Did the teaching unions walk away in the face of such a provocation? Not at all.

The only outright opposition yesterday came from the PCS which said it had rejected “the government’s latest attempt to force public servants to pay more and work longer for less in retirement”. It was promptly excluded from further talks.

And so the apparent unity of the 29 unions who staged a one-day strike of at least 1.5 million workers less than a month ago was fragmented at a stroke. The government’s strategy of divide and rule proved more successful than this feeble coalition could ever have imagined.

At a meeting at the Trades Union Congress headquarters, general secretary Brendan Barber, who has been in secret talks with the government throughout, stressed that further industrial action was off the table and negotiations would resume in the new year.

“We have reached a stage where the emphasis in most cases is in giving active consideration to the new proposals that have emerged rather than considering the prospect of further industrial action.” The proposals include the abandonment of the final salary basis for pensions in favour of career average salaries.

To seek a negotiated settlement after giving it everything you’ve got is honourable; to run up the white flag with a hardly a short fired is nothing short of cowardice in the face of an enemy that is waging open class warfare.

For all the fiery talk of general secretary Dave Prentis, the leader of Unison, it was predictably hot air. The union’s head of health, Christina McAnea, admitted that “we always knew this would be a damage limitation exercise aimed at reducing the worst impacts of the government's pension changes."

The TUC and union bureaucrats have implicitly accepted the principal reason for the attack on pensions – the government’s budget deficit that is the result of a recession precipitated by capitalism’s financial meltdown.

Public sector workers are, in effect, being told to pay for the crisis through higher contributions and worse pensions. Behind the scenes, the leadership of the Labour Party has worked might and main to get unions to abandon further strikes and do a deal with a government.

The last thing Ed Miliband wanted was a long-running strike campaign that could have fatally wounded a weak and divided coalition whose policies his party barely opposes (except to demand a harder line on crime).

PCS general secretary Serwotka, urged unions to fight the changes: "We should call further industrial action in the new year because this is so unfair, we have got to stand up against it... Our message really is that those unions will have to be accountable to their members for what they do."

A campaign to reject the sell-out over pensions (and the wage freeze) has to mobilise rank-and-file anger in ways that are linked to the removal from their posts of all those involved in this shoddy surrender. In some ways, it’s a last chance to save the trade union movement from total disaster.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Havel and the 'power of the powerless'

2011-12-19T12:29:00.003Z

The laurels being heaped on former Czech president Václav Havel, who died at the weekend, by reactionary world leaders should not blind us to his courageous role in the break-up of Stalinist rule in eastern Europe.

Havel grew up in the aftermath of the grotesque anti-Semitic Slansky show trials in 1952 in which 11 leaders of the Czech Communist Party were put to death in a Stalinist purge. He reflected in an intense way the contradictory, often tormented lives of his countrywomen and men before and after the Prague Spring of 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into the country and crushed the reform movement led by Alexander Dubcek.

Havel served five years in jail – some of them with hard labour - for founding the Charter 77 movement and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. Being a liberal under Stalinism was no easy road to take. He broke what a fellow writer called the silence of the swamp in the grim years that followed the Soviet crackdown.

Along with other Czech writers and musicians, including the Plastic People of the Universe, Havel went outside and beyond his youthful calling as a playwright to mock and defy Stalinist officialdom.

Havel called his country Absurdistan, and this sense that reality was more surreal than the imagination pervaded his work and also his life. For someone with such undoubted talents as a playwright and political thinker to become a political leader, a president no less, is a tribute not only to the man’s inherent strengths but also the creativity of the Czech nation.

I had the privilege of seeing one of his last plays, Leaving, performed in Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre in 2008 during a Havel season. Havel’s ironic send-up of a politician on his way out of power brought together the ironic-surreal traditions of Czech culture with a self-mocking contemporary twist. On that score alone, Havel’s ability to embrace and deploy a host of contradictions with humour and grace revealed that no ordinary mind was at work here.

In 1978, he wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless which championed the notion of the self-movement of people from below and encapsulates both Havel’s political strengths and weaknesses. Havel wrote that “latent social crises can at any time... provoke a wide variety of political change...evoke unexpected and unforeseen social unrest and explosions of discontent.”

He saw the “dissident” movement against Stalinism as only one of many factors in political development focusing above all on the “defence of people” – clearly a vital issue for those living under bureaucratic, authoritarian rule. Although he did not like the word dissident, he saw the movement as addressing the “hidden spheres of society, since it is not a matter of confronting the regime on the level of actual power”.

Havel was acutely aware that the policies adopted by superpowers can bring about sudden changes and upsets. It was, in fact, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to hold multi-party elections in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989 and his refusal, made clear in July of that year, to deploy Warsaw Pact troops again in Eastern Europe that gave the green light to the 1989 political revolutions, first in Poland and Hungary and then in Czechoslovakia.

Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia in December 1989 and installed in Prague castle where he lightened up the atmosphere by zooming around on a child’s scooter. But while the end of Stalinism was a great achievement, the Czech people were before long embroiled in the rush to impose free market capitalism in the region.

In 1992 pro-capitalist leader Václav Klaus was elected and the movement for separating the country into two separate states gained momentum. Klaus and another politician Vladimír Mečiar pushed through the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two states even though it was supported by only a third of the population. Havel refused to back the break-up of the country.

His ethical but also highly practical approach, his espousal of green politics and vision of transcending present society, deserve respect. What outlives Havel is the task of embracing the spirit of 1989 in developing creative ways to mount a successful challenge to today’s ruling political-corporate elites who have created a global aburdistan.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Boycott the Olympic war games!

2011-12-16T10:47:00.003Z

Just in case you missed yesterday's news, next year will see the inauguration of the first Military and Security Olympics. They will take place over 17 days in London and other venues around the country.

That’s how it felt when defence secretary Philip Hammond announced that 7,500 military personnel would work as security guards checking visitors to Olympic venues. Another 5,000 military, including a 1,000-strong "quick reaction force", will assist the Met Police, which plans to deploy 12,000 officers. Another 1,000 military personnel will provide logistics.

The navy’s largest ship HMS Ocean will be moored at Greenwich. There will snipers in helicopters, fighter jets on standby and air defence missiles in place. In total, 41,7000 people will be involved in the so-called security operation at a cost of well over £1 billion.

With London becoming a war zone for the duration of the 2012 Olympics, you have to ask yourself, is it really worth hosting the games? Because however you look at it, the Olympics are a corporate-dominated, commercialised rip-off that has little to do with the ideals of sport.

Take the ticketing arrangements. A quarter of a million applicants failed to get a single ticket in the public ballot. Less than half the seats at showpiece events were earmarked for the public. The majority were made available to corporate sponsors like bailed out bank Lloyds and global accountancy firm Deloitte. Meanwhile, the government has spent more than £700,000 on tickets, for “dignitaries and business leaders”, MPs were told recently. The games look like being one giant hospitality event.

While we are on about sponsors, how sickening is that Dow Chemicals has been awarded the contract to “dress” the main stadium. The company owns Union Carbide, responsible for thousands of deaths from the 1984 Bhopal chemical lea. India’s Olympic body was so disgusted that it half-threatened a boycott of the London games.

Before Bhopal, Dow was infamous for the manufacture of napalm and Agent Orange, which US forces used to maim and poison millions during the Vietnam war. Other corporate sponsors include McDonald's and mining corporation Rio Tinto. Two of the six official “sustainability partners” for London 2012 are energy corporations EDF and BP.

As to the total cost, it looks likely to come in around £12 billion – about five times the promise made in 2005 when London won the bid for the 2012 Games. Most of it comes from taxpayers, with Londoners paying extra for the dubious privilege of hosting the event.

When it comes to the pledge of extra youth participation in sport, that’s gone by the board too. Sport England announced last week that the number of people playing sport aged 16-19 has fallen. Lord Moynihan, chair of the British Olympic Association, says that politicians have failed to honour pledges made after winning the games.

Pledges by the Labour government to deliver an average of five hours' sport a week in schools had not been met, and now further cuts were taking place. "At the moment I don't see the policies being put in place that will build on the inspiration of the games for young people and that will change their lives for a lasting sports legacy," he said.

Moynihan, a former Tory sports minister, told the Observer: "We have got tens of thousands of really gifted, talented young sports stars whose talent is never identified. There is no ladder for them to climb and there is no structure for them to get to the top of.”

What about the Olympic Village and the housing “legacy”? Most of the homes have been bought by a partnership including the Qatari royal family's company and will be private housing after the games. Other homes will be sold off to “key workers”. Social housing? Forget it.

With ordinary tourists planning to stay away from London in droves, alarmed by soaring hotel prices, massive traffic jams and heavy-handed security, these are hardly going to be the fun games which the capital’s diverse population can enjoy. The only hope is that the eurozone countries on the end of prime minister Cameron’s veto last week retaliate with a boycott all of their own!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Durban's 'death sentence' for millions

2011-12-15T10:25:00.002Z

The last-minute deal at the Durban climate summit was as believable as the climax of a reality TV show. Cheering, back-slapping delegates had just condemned millions to starvation and homelessness.

Any binding agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases must now wait until 2020. Negotiations will not begin until 2014, and will in effect start from scratch - as if the Kyoto protocol never existed.

All major polluters will be expected to agree to substantial cuts. But when it comes to it - will any of them agree to anything that limits profit-driven growth? Not as long as the corporations are calling the shots they won't.

Just to underline the point, the day after the talks concluded, the Canadian government abandoned the Kyoto treaty. They were not on course to meet their Kyoto target, and faced significant fines. Japan, Russia and possibly Australia, are likely to follow suit.

Now Canada can “focus on jobs and growth”, said the country’s environment minister. What he means is his government wants big oil corporations to go all out to extract huge deposits of oil from sand. This a high emissions process, that will also help lock the planet in to fossil fuel burning for the foreseeable future

As a result, the world is now on course for catastrophic outcomes. "Eight years from now is a death sentence on Africa," said Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International.

The International Energy Agency, in its annual outlook last month, said that without significant reductions in emissions over the next 25 years, there will be an average temperature rise of 3.5ºc.

The science is clear enough. Warming over 3°C will create feedback loops, causing runaway greenhouse effects: 
• the Amazon rainforest starts to die back
• coral reefs die and are replaced by algae and sea grass
• irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet occurs
• release of methane hydrates in ocean floor sediments further adds to warming
• permafrost thaws, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases currently fixed.

So what is to be done? Well, there are still options available and it is not too late to act. Much of the greenhouse gas that will cause significant warming is already up there, and the effects are already being felt across the planet.

But if we introduce cuts in emissions starting now, it may be possible to hold warming below 2ºC. At the same time as emergency plans to cut emissions, massive resources could be invested in mitigation – developing drought-resistant crops; more effective water use; improving natural flood defences on coasts and river deltas; switching to sustainable farming methods; fair shares of land.

In the UK, that could mean local and regional People’s Assemblies developing their own action plans, and also sending delegates to a national Assembly that could plan, for example, to immediately:
• close London’s carbon trading exchange
• fund insulation grants and solar panels for all households where suitable
• bring rail, air and bus networks into not-for-profit ownership, slashing fares and working for an integrated transport system
• take cars out of city centres with park and ride, and create public transport/cycle-only boxes in the centre of cities
• establish car pool schemes and car sharing schemes
• set upper limits on total flight miles in and out of Britain and distribute them fairly through an air miles system
• halt airport expansion
• halt plans to build a new generation of nuclear power stations
• launch a crash programme of renewable energy projects.

But the most urgent question we face is political. As long as profit-driven growth is the sole priority of government, nothing can change. But a global network of People’s Assemblies could quickly put together a binding agreement, and open the way for a new era of sustainable production to meet the needs of people and planet. Debating how to achieve this should become the focus for meetings and occupations up and down the country early in the New Year.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Thinking the unthinkable

2011-12-14T08:37:00.002Z

The name Terry Smith probably doesn’t mean anything to you, despite the fact that he is one of the biggest fans of David Cameron’s decision to walk away from a new European Union treaty designed to control member states’ budgets.

Smith’s company Tullett Prebon is one of the largest of the small number of inter-dealer money brokers in the world, acting as an intermediary between investment and commercial banks. As the global financial system grew in importance and influence, companies such as his developed into key nerve centres, becoming sensitive to every change in its fortunes, and making a packet at every turn.

The financial services industry makes up about 10% of the UK’s country’s gross domestic product and accounts for 11% of its total tax receipts. Financial services employ more than 1 million people in the UK. The industry wields enormous power throughout the world from its London base, and Tullett Prebon plays a key role.

Smith famously pooh-poohed those who claimed Britain had cut itself adrift from the rest of Europe and was marooned in mid-Atlantic following Cameron’s veto. He compared Britain's isolation from the EU to "someone who refused to join the Titanic before it sailed" as "there is nothing that guarantees that the euro will survive at all".

His analysis is widely echoed. New York University professor Nouriel – Dr Doom – Roubini, agree. "With Italy too big to fail, too big to save, and now at the point of no return, the endgame for the eurozone has begun,” the man who predicted the 2008 crash wrote in a recent assessment.

Back to Mr Smith because he tells it how it really is. He speaks with brutish confidence derived from success, having made a pile of money playing the markets. He says that Cameron shouldn’t try pushing for growth because he can’t have any effect on it.

And he’s right. Capitalism is following its own logic. Capital’s need for investment funds to support growth created the insane deregulated excesses of a globalising financial system which blew up in 2007/8. Subsequent “unconventional” measures of credit creation led to the debt tsunami now engulfing the world.

You can read about it in Tullett Prebon’s recent research paper cheeringly called “Thinking the unthinkable, might there be no way out for Britain? Project Armageddon – the final report”.

The report explains in detail the mammoth size of Britain’s total debts which, it says, are “unsupportable” without “sustained economic growth”, of which there is no prospect because the economy is not “aligned” to achieve it. The Coalition’s spending cuts are ridiculed as somewhat inadequate, while its policies will have no impact on growth.

His views are borne out by today’s UK unemployment figures, showing a rise of 128,000 in the three months to October to 2.64 million, the highest level since 1994. Youth unemployment rose to 1.027 million, the highest since records began in 1992, beating the previous record set only last month.

“Courtesy of massive and unsustainable public borrowing, the British public has been shielded thus far from the pain of recession. This exercise in damage limitation was necessarily-time limited.” Much deeper spending cuts and further sharp falls in living standards is what Tullet Prebon have in mind as the basis for a “return to growth”.

But Britain’s crisis wasn’t the result of “fiscal and economic mismanagement” by Blair and Brown, as the report would have it.. The phenomenal growth of the finance sector – and the UK’s dependence on it – was the essential lever needed to sustain corporate profits for as along as was possible. Every country in the world has become subsumed by debt mountains that were the result.

Neither Smith nor anyone else has any confidence that the weak agreement by 25 or so European countries will result in decisive action to reduce their sovereign debts, which has wrecked the euro.

Jean-Michel Six, Chief economist at credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s, attack dog for the capital markets, said on Monday: "There is probably yet another shock required before everybody in the euro zone reads from the same page, for instance a major German bank experiencing some real difficulties on the markets, which is a genuine possibility in the near term."

With European governments in disarray, include the ConDem coalition, Six could be accused of whistling in the dark. As the Tullett Prebon report indicates, “what comes next is going to be unpleasant”. Stopping capitalism going down that road will revolve around a struggle for power over the economy in which people’s assemblies will have to play a decisive role.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The 'national interest' con trick

2011-12-13T10:52:00.001Z

If there’s one phrase that’s dominated parliament, the airwaves and the media over the veto used by David Cameron to block a new European Union, it is the “national interest”. It’s an Orwellian phrase, designed to obscure rather than reveal the truth.

In the House of Commons yesterday, the debate on the prime minister’s Brussels veto was whether it was in the “national interest” or not.

Cameron claimed: "I went to Brussels with one objective – to protect Britain's national interest. And that is what I did."

Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, responded: “Faced with a choice between the national interest and his party interest, he has chosen the party interest.”

Using a phrase often enough does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes what’s going on. Especially when it’s deployed by a political class not exactly known for telling the truth.

Some self-evident, basic facts first. Presently, we live within a capitalist economic and political system. In our society, there those who own and control production and finance (aka capitalists) and those who are employed by them (aka the working class). This relationship extends to the public sector where the employer is the state.

The “interests” may appear identical in the sense, for example, that an employer needs workers and a worker needs resources and a place to labour. But it is an identity of opposites because ultimately the interests at stake are essentially different. Employers need to generate profits and will drive down costs, including wages when they can. Workers have an interest in maximising their income and defending what they have, which is why trade unions have had to strike to defend their pension rights.

None of this is exactly new. Nor is the use of the term “national interest” to disguise the very real social, class-based divisions in society. Yet people are not fooled into thinking that the interests of the banks, for example, are the same as theirs. Or that politicians represent ordinary people rather than powerful corporate interests.

In a the state of the nation survey 2006, only 17% questioned thought they had a great deal or a fair amount of power over government policies. compared with 67% that large corporations exercised. No doubt that figure would be higher today in the wake of the meltdown and bank bail-outs.

So a “national interest” actually doesn’t exist in practice. But it is a convenient smokescreen that can be rolled out to justify the odd invasion (Iraq for example), or to justify a veto exercised to protect the narrow interests of (global) bankers, or simply as a way to whip up patriotism and hatred of foreigners in general and France/Germany in particular.

Some like Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty accuse Cameron of being too narrow in his definition of “national interest” by overly focusing on the importance of the City of London and financial services in Brussels.

But Chakrabortty lends the term credibility it does not merit by suggesting that a real “national interest” would be better served if it included a whole range of other economic activities. His sociological, non-class viewpoint is simply a liberal acceptance of the status quo of capitalist social relations.

The interests of ordinary people cannot be served, defended or advanced by submerging them into those of the ruling economic and political elites – in any country. The political crisis within the European Union is driven by the global failure of a debt-driven capitalist economy and its impact on the euro. A new democratic, internationalist framework that unites ordinary people against corporate and financial power wherever it is located has to be our answer to nationalist rhetoric and downright lies.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Anti-Putin movement marks end of an era

2011-12-12T11:18:00.001Z

Russia’s street protest movement, which has shaken not only the Kremlin’s autocrats but global financial markets, is the largest for two decades, and is the end of an era.

The pro-capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s has turned into disenchantment, not just with the sham democracy which voters experienced earlier this month, but with the corruption of a mafia-style capitalism.

The demands for a fair election are part of a much bigger movement of discontent which is sweeping Russia under conditions of the global economic crisis.

On Saturday, up to a 100,000 Russians from Vladivostok in the east, to Moscow and St Petersburg, right through to central London, demonstrated against the rigged parliamentary elections.

A map on Spandex, Russia’s largest search engine, showed the protests scheduled for Saturday in around 100 cities around the country, with links to details for each event on a Russian social networking site.

Placards denounced "False elections, false laws, false authorities” and protesters shouted “rogues and thieves give us back our elections”, and called for a “Russia without Putin”. Up to 50,000 came to a rally held on an island in Moscow.

Their five-point demands are:

Freedom for political prisoners
Annulment of the election results
The resignation of Vladimir Churov, head of the election commission, and an official investigation of vote fraud
Registration of the opposition parties and new democratic legislation on parties and elections
New democratic and open elections.

The demonstrators defied pre-emptive strikes by the regime, which saw the arrest last week of opposition leaders like blogger Alexei Navalny, Solidarnost leader Ilya Nashin, Eduard Limonov of the unregistered Other Russia party and Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights group. In Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, all the protest leaders were arrested, but the protests went ahead nonetheless.

Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by Putin’s “cyber-warriors” also focused on preventing Russia’s 51 million internet users from accessing anti-regime media websites.

President Medvedev has announced an inquiry into voting procedures on his Facebook page, while rejecting a re-run of the election, the central demand of the protests. He was met with an immediate and often mocking response by people saying they did not believe him.

The protests are the largest since the turmoil in August 1990 when thousands took to the streets of Moscow to thwart a putsch aimed at removing the then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since replacing Boris Yeltsin, ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin has reversed the democratic gains promoted by Gorbachev to enable an oligarchy to establish capitalism in Russia. When Putin was barred from standing for election for a third term in 2008, he was appointed as prime minister. He insists he will run for president again in March.

From a massive majority in earlier elections, support for Putin and his United Russia party has fallen to an all-time low, especially as the global economy has swung into a downturn. On Friday, shares in Russian companies saw massive drops as investors fear continuing political instability, as well as lower demands for oil.

One school of thought claims the Russian democratic movement is funded and inspired from Washington, pointing to financial backing from the National Endowment for Democracy for bloggers like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov’s People’s Freedom Party and the election watchdog Golos.

But to denounce those angry with the Russian political system as pawns of the West is ludicrous and insulting. As one demonstrator said: “I don't think any citizen of the country can say he is very happy with anything. We don't have an independent judiciary, there is no freedom of expression – all this combined creates a situation where people are forced to protest.”

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The 99% lose out all over Europe

2011-12-09T11:08:00.001Z

In the end, the “choice” was between a British government determined to protect the City of London at all costs and the rest of the European Union agreeing to allow bureaucrats to impose co-ordinated spending cuts on their increasingly angry populations.

Thus the “interests” at stake in the all-night crisis summit in Brussels were essentially the same – whatever side of the Channel the member states happened to be located. And they weren’t those of ordinary people, the 99%.

Prime minister Cameron used Britain’s veto to try and keep the City free from any new EU taxes and regulations, while chancellor Merkel and president Sarkozy were driven by the financial markets towards a so-called fiscal union to save the euro. The 1% are the only potential winners here.

Cameron’s talk of “national interests” is in any case somewhat hollow, considering that the City is dominated entirely by global investment banks and dealers. Individuals n the UK own just 10% of the shares traded on the London stock exchange compared with 54% in 1963. Foreign investors, of all types, are the biggest group and now own 42% of shares on the London stock market.

All Cameron is concerned about – just like his New Labour predecessors – is protecting the tax revenue from a financial sector that was itself bailed out in 2008 to the tune of billions (while cutting the budget deficit at our expense). All Merkel and Sarkozy are worried about is cutting sovereign debt deep enough to appease the financial markets. Same difference.

The political breakdown in Brussels cannot disguise the summit’s failure to agree on a rescue plan for the single currency, or at least one that might impress the financial markets. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the permanent rescue mechanism due to come into force in July 2012, will be capped at €500bn while the Germany opposed giving it the banking licence sought by Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council.

Running in parallel is a profound banking crisis. Yesterday, “stress tests” showed European banks had a shortfall of €115bn compared to €106bn in October. Germany's banks were found to need more than double the amount of capital anticipated. And French banks are also under pressure. The rating agency Moody’s has downgraded three French banks including Societe Generale, which it says may need government support.

The banking crisis is directly connected to the sovereign debts overwhelming countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. Many banks are exposed to loans to these countries and do not have sufficient capital to handle a default, let alone the collapse of the euro. In a desperate move, the European Central Bank has cut interest rates, given loans to cash-strapped banks and is accepting virtually any collateral for loans, including the notorious mortgage-backed securities that drove the 2008 meltdown. ECB chief Mario Draghi admitted that a new credit crunch was under way, with banks refusing to lend to each other.

The EU was until the 2008 crisis a cosy, corporate, bureaucratic, undemocratic club run increasingly on free-market lines. It was the European arm of capitalism’s globalisation project. Deregulation of the financial system applied throughout the continent, not just in Britain.

Because the global economy’s growth was fuelled by debt, the recession exposed its soft underbelly and wrecked the finances of national governments. It wasn’t deregulation that did it for the capitalist economy but the in-built drive to grow or die to sustain profits that ultimately broke the back of finance.

A democratic Europe run in the interests of ordinary people, the disenfranchised majority, is a goal worth struggling for. The chances of the EU as presently designed being the vehicle for such a project are precisely nil. Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel have made that abundantly clear.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Coalition takes greenwash to a new level

2011-12-08T11:18:00.001Z

ConDem coalition energy policy is being made on the run, in secret and in cahoots with the energy corporations. The self-styled “greenest-ever government” is engaged in a behind-the-scenes dash for fossil fuel and nuclear.

Here’s the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Having closed down one loss-making fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield, the government has announced plans to build another at a cost of £3bn of taxpayers’ money. So much for claims that new nuclear plants will have to be financed privately, including dealing with waste. The plant will try to transform Britain’s stockpile of nuclear waste into mox (mixed-oxide) fuel for a new generation of thermal light water reactors. As Douglas Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said: "This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

2. The government has been passing on details of Greenpeace’s legal challenge to new nuclear plants, to the Nuclear Industry Association and even directly to French nuclear giant EDF, the most likely candidate to build any new plants. Greenpeace has complained to the High Court and says it is an abuse of power that “prevents democratic scrutiny”.

3. Green MP Caroline Lucas has exposed oil and nuclear industry penetration and influence in Whitehall. She has found that 50 employees from companies like EDF, Npower and Centrica have been seconded to work on energy issues in government departments, free of charge, over the past four years. "Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return," said Lucas, who also found that the government had met with the “big six” producers and the power trade associations almost 200 times since the May 2010 election.

4. The government has been covertly passing information to Canadian diplomats lobbying to stop the European Union classifying oil extracted from tar sands as having a heavy carbon footprint - which of course it does. This would make the oil less attractive to European fuel suppliers, trying to meet requirements under the Fuel Quality Directive.

5. In his autumn statement, Chancellor Osborne took £1bn out of the budget that had been set aside to develop carbon capture and storage to spend on other new infrastructure. He promised £250m of public money to help industries with high emissions of greenhouse gas subvert EU carbon caps, and also pledged a review of “green regulations” to “clear the way for development and economic growth”. In other words, dump them all.

6. The draft rules for the government’s much-vaunted Green Investment Bank would not allow it carry through a plan to make millions of homes more energy efficient. Instead the bank will have to invest on commercial terms and show a profit. As a result, it is unlikely to invest in areas that are good for the environment, but deemed too risky by other lenders, though that was supposed to be the point. The bank’s funding is no longer put at £3bn but “up to £3bn” and it will not start operating until 2016 at the earliest.

We hereby find this government guilty of greenwash, building extensively on the example of their New Labour predecessors, and we award environment secretary Chris Huhne the “hypocrite of the year award 2011”. How do they sleep at night? No problem because they are fulfilling their role as they see it - promoting growth at all costs during what is rapidly turning into a global slump of the capitalist system.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Capitalism has no moral dilemma

2011-12-07T11:31:00.001Z

An Occupy London delegation – not everyone at St Paul’s is happy with this – is due to debate prospects for an “ethical capitalism” tonight with city fund managers, religious leaders, former bankers, and tax reformers.

Leaving aside for the moment the somewhat fantastical notion that capitalism could/should have an ethical dimension, the question is at least a million miles away from the real world.

The global contraction is undermining belated attempts by leaders of the 17 eurozone countries to agree on a new treaty which would supersede national sovereignty. Pushed, prodded, warned and threatened by the credit rating agencies acting as the voice of capitalist finance, plans for further assaults on living standards are to be co-ordinated and enforced at supranational level. They call it “fiscal union”. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel believes it will take years to achieve.

China’s manufacturing output is contracting, undermining those who asserted that the country would drag the rest of the world economy out of recession, while Britain’s has nosedived; and Brazil’s economy has gone into decline.

The democratically-elected governments of Greece and Italy have already been pushed aside by administrations by the bankers for the bankers. Alongside the feverish political activity, central banks in the eurozone are following the Bank of England, making their survival-of-the-fittest plans for when the first of the commercial banks fail.

There is no precedence for the scale of this crisis. References to the 1930s abound but the so far slow-motion crash of 2011 is surely beyond comparison. Look to Ireland. The people there were amongst the first to feel the consequences of the ending of the long credit-fuelled boom as its property frenzy ended with the collapse of the Anglo-Irish bank in 2007/8.

The measures taken to pay off the punitive cost of bail-out funds from the EU-ECB-IMF Troika, and bring about a “return to growth” have meant an astonishing economic contraction and a reduction in real incomes. Real national output has contracted by 12.5%, but that conceals a bigger slump in the day-to-day economy. Nominal gross national product (GNP) has fallen by 22%. Consumer demand is down a third. Unemployment at 14.3 per cent is misleadingly low - with no work to be had many young people have emigrated – some to work on the tar sands of Alberta.

It is already a deeper depression than the 1930s. Public sector pay has already been cut 14% on average (with a pension levy), rising to 30% for the top managers. Entry-level jobs for graduates at the big four accounting firms have dropped by a third to €21,000. Office rental costs in Dublin have halved, and house prices are down 53%.

In common with the other 16 countries, membership of the eurozone meant that a currency devaluation to improve its export potential wasn’t possible. So Ireland was forced into an internal devaluation of the cost of labour, slashing wages, salaries, pensions and public sector spending.

The second wave of the global crisis is now underway with a vengeance. As the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal disintegrate, Ireland’s people will be in the firing line again. The Fine Gael/Labour coalition is already slashing deeper into living standards.

As a concept, “ethical capitalism” is more about theology than political economy. The bottom line is necessarily the primary concern of an economic system based on profit which in turn demands continuous growth. This is how the Protestant ethic works out in practice in present-day society.

In the end, a moral shift here or there can make no difference to dealing with a profound, historic and fundamental crisis of the system of production itself. The pressing debate to be held within the occupation and strike movements is on developing not-for-profit sustainable alternatives and how we get from A to B.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Headless chickens rule EU roost

2011-12-06T10:47:00.001Z

A French president playing second fiddle to a German chancellor announcing a “fiscal union” to keep eurozone spending under control was patently an uncomfortable moment for Nicolas Sarkozy. His misery was written all over his face.

Perhaps Sarkozy was reflecting on historical precedents from past conflicts between the two countries while he was standing next to Angela Merkel. More likely, Sarkozy realised that the idea of Germany laying down the rules about a country’s national spending could only harm his re-election prospects.

Whatever was going through his mind, the announcement itself was more wordy than substantial. Within hours, the agency Standard & Poor said that the credit ratings of all 17 eurozone countries – including Germany and France – was threatened with a downgrade. All except Greece, whose debt now carries the dubious sobriquet of “junk status”.

As financial commentator Jeremy Warner noted, the agreement between Germany and France was about “as clear as mud” and notably failed to “address the immediate crisis” of the sovereign debt burden that is overwhelming country after country.

Warner’s concern that a long-term plan to keep spending under tighter control, reinforced by plans for a new European Union treaty, is hardly what the markets were waiting to hear, is all too real. But the inaction in the eurozone is not simply the result of German intransigence over using the European Central Bank to buy up a country’s bad debt.

Debt mountains express not simply profligate spending by member states but the consequence of the collapse of a credit-fuelled period of rapid economic expansion. While it lasted, debt could be repaid out of higher tax revenues. Bond dealers, banks and non-EU states couldn’t get enough of the interest-bearing debt.

The economic recession was not caused by the financial collapse of 2008, as is usually stated. In Britain, for example, the economy slowed markedly in the first years of the century. This trend was obscured by easy credit and rising house values (which many used to borrow against). When the meltdown came, it exposed the deep flaws within the capitalist system of production which requires year-on-year growth to sustain profit levels.

Merkel and Sarkozy can only address the debt issues because the nature of the capitalist economy is a given and not up for debate or change. Even so, creating more debt to “solve” existing debt is hardly a solution. Nor do cuts in state spending help. That only intensifies the recession by reducing consumer demand still further. And printing new money, as central banks are doing, simply adds to inflationary pressures while providing speculators with more resources.

All in all, policy makers and political elites are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. In management speak, it’s a lose-lose situation. Their predicament is made more complicated by a political system based on individual nation states in the midst of an entirely globalised, transnational economic and financial system.

The political class resemble headless chickens right now and is mostly concerned with self-preservation and gaining an edge over competitor nations. Democratic procedures are being jettisoned as too lengthy, too costly and too bothersome. Italy and Greece have non-elected governments run by bankers, while EU bureaucrats intend to determine spending on social welfare programmes under the Merkel-Sarkozy project.

Turning things round into a “win-win situation” will require bold strategic thinking and action – sooner rather than later – that aims at a political and economic transformation. We have to extend democracy in new ways beyond the all-too-narrow confines of capitalist ownership and control which is the root problem.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Russians revolt against fraud elections

2011-12-05T11:24:00.003Z

The dramatic slump in United Russia’s share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections shows that voters defied a massive campaign of intimidation aimed at bolstering support for the ruling party.

President Medvedev and prime minister Putin’s party saw its share fall from around 64% to just under half after a campaign in which the Kremlin tried to bully the electorate.

In the run-up to the election, Russia experienced a ferocious crackdown by the authorities to muzzle the media, control the Internet and arrest opposition politicians. On polling day, eyewitnesses talked of ballot boxes being stuffed while “voters” were bussed around polling stations to cast multiple ballots for United Russia.

Videos posted to YouTube showed election workers opening ballot boxes with pre-marked ballots for United Russia. One poll worker told NK TV that ballot boxes were filled with checked-off ballots while she and others were in a meeting. At one polling station pens with disappearing ink were discovered, a video reported.

Members of the right wing youth group, Nashi, were brought in to Moscow as key squares were blocked off by police. Triumph Square – a popular place for oppositionists – has been fenced off since 2010. A Twitter user (@agoodtreaty) spotted a mocking sign on the fence surrounding the square saying: “Dear Muscovites! This fence has been erected in the event of popular unrest due to massively fraudulent elections. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Countless blatant acts of repression – varying from brutal to comical – included the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front and Eduard Limonov, leader of the opposition The Other Russia movement. Limonov supporters were also detained while Udaltsov was hustled into an unmarked car by unidentified men and then sentenced to five days’ arrest by a district court for “disobedience”.

Campaign ads by opposition parties were banned on state television by order of the Central Elections Commission. Intimidation and censorship by federal and local authorities included attacks on journalists, with a Moscow Times reporter ejected from a polling station in Oktyabrsky.

The ruling United Russia party was clearly behind denial of service attacks on a host of independent, business and liberal websites and media including Live Journal, a popular blogging platform, Ekho Mosvky, the New Times, the independent election monitor Golos, Bolshoi Gorod, Kommersant and the Slon.ru business news portal. Election commission officials confiscated the media accreditation of Radio Liberty reporters.

The authorities’ clampdown was easier in rural areas, where fewer people have internet connections. But Putin’s brutal state, which has overseen massive corruption and scores of journalists beaten and murdered in recent years, has not succeeded in preventing Russians – 51 million of whom have access to the Internet - from denouncing electoral manipulation.

Attempts to subvert the electoral process – shown on YouTube and social media - have increased voter scepticism about what one Muscovite derided as a “jackass democracy”.

Editor Grigory Okhotin resigned from an offshoot of the Ria Novosti news agency , after receiving an internal email asking employees “not to post any article hostile to Putin and United Russia on the site” during the week before the elections.

Ekho Moskvy’s editor-in-chief wrote on Twitter that the cyber attacks were an attempt to stop evidence of election violations from leaking out. The radio station fought back with a screenshot of its site full of Bad Gateway messages, which it jokingly called the “new site design”, on its Facebook page.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the restoration of capitalism, Russia is run by oligarchs and a brutal, one-party state. Yesterday’s elections show a rising tide of anger against the regime throughout the country. Replacing the Putin’s “jackass democracy” with a Russia under the control of its people with true economic and democratic rights is surely the order of the day.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Useful links

http://journalists-in-russia.org/

http://www.rightsinrussia.info/

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/Pashentsev.html

Climate talks ignore the evidence

2011-12-02T09:42:00.002Z

As Durban suffered unseasonable heavy rain and flooding that killed six people in the South African city playing host to the current round of UN Climate Talks, European representative Artur Runge-Metzger asked delegates:

“How high needs the water to get in this conference centre before negotiators start deciding on things?"

The answer is, it doesn't matter how high, or how horrific the impacts of extreme weather on populations across the world because there can’t be a new treaty on climate change within the present profit-driven system.

Right across the world there is evidence of more extreme and unseasonal weather, outside the natural variability of the climate. Glaciers crucial for water supplies are melting.

In Afghanistan, Oxfam says serious drought helped send prices of wheat and wheat flour in July 2011 up to 79% higher in affected areas over their levels a year before. In south-east Asia, heavy monsoon rainfall and multiple typhoons have killed more than 1,100 people and helped increase rice prices by about 25% and 30% in Thailand and Vietnam. Floods have devastated Pakistan’s Sindh province for a second year.

The United States has suffered hurricanes, droughts, out-of-the ordinary snowstorms and even freezing rains in California. Food prices are soaring as a result. Canada, which has become of the main opponents of a binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions, saw freak gales roaring through Alberta, ironically the province where they are determined to go ahead with extracting tar sands.

Closer to home, southern England is facing a water shortage in December, whilst floods are spreading across Scotland.

But none of these events has any impact in the conference centre, and there is no limit to the ability of governments to ignore reality and continue down the same disastrous road.

Before the talks opened, it was said that rich nations had already decided to push any substantive talks on a binding agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 2015 - now it seems unlikely they will accept even that timetable. The truth is, there isn’t going to a successor treaty to Kyoto which will end next year and be quietly forgotten.

Another major element of the talks was to be the launch of the “Green Climate Fund”, which requires developed countries to provide $100 billion to poorer countries by 2020 to help them reduce their own carbon emissions and adapt to climate change.

Now the United States has held up the deal, saying they won't sign anything unless developing nations - wealthy ones, like China, India and Brazil - contribute too.

Countries who would have benefited were also deeply unhappy that the proposed framework for the fund would have allowed corporations to apply directly for money, bypassing governments.

They were prepared to let it go through unchanged, however, because no more funding for mitigating the effects of climate change would have been forthcoming. But outside the conference, a group of leading NGOs wrote an open letter strongly objecting "to any resources going from the Green Climate Fund directly to the private sector, particularly through the establishment of a private sector facility."

They warn that projects that help poor people to adapt to climate change, or tackle their energy problems, are not going to generate corporate profit. Letting corporations and “green investment funds” get their hands on the money would mean it poured into the existing discredited and scandal-ridden carbon markets, or into the new “risky financial instruments” that "green economy" speculators are designing. So in effect, the fund would become yet another means of transferring public money and assets into the hands of the private sector and the speculators.

The message is that the climate crisis, which is a direct result of the operation of capitalist forms of commodity production, cannot be solved within the system that caused it. Our answer to this shameful failure on the part of our governments must be to replace them with a truly democratic power that can then make a binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Don't lose pension strike momentum

2011-12-01T10:48:00.002Z

The commitment shown by at least 1.5 million workers in 29 unions who staged a 24-hour strike against attacks on the pensions, and marched in cities and towns in their tens of thousands, is now in jeopardy.

Union leaders are resuming talks with the ConDem coalition today in a bid to reach a settlement before the government’s imposed deadline of December 31.

But if they were really serious about defending their members’ interests, union bureaucrats would be boycotting the talks because, in reality, there is nothing really to negotiate about.

For yesterday’s historic action was, as every striker knows, not about winning an improvement in their hard-won pensions but about stopping the government from cutting them through higher contributions and having to work longer before entitlement.

So any “compromise”, along the lines called for by the wretched Ed Miliband – by the way just nine out of 258 Labour MPs backed a Commons motion supporting the strike – must mean worse pensions in one form or another.

A contributions increase will slice even more off the value of real wages, already reduced by a government-imposed, pay freeze – which union leaders did nothing to oppose. With chancellor Osborne imposing a below-inflation 1% pay limit for the next two years, incomes in the public are set to plummet by 15% by 2014.

We repeat: what is there to negotiate about?

While the government has declared class war on behalf of the banks and corporations, union leaders continue to live in a fantasy world where “common sense” will prevail and an all-out conflict can be avoided.

Worse, they consider their members as cannon fodder to be sent over the top before suing for peace. Conscious of the feebleness of their opponents’ officer class, the Coalition is playing a divide-and-rule game. Their plan is to get the teaching unions to agree a separate deal and split them from other unions.

The major Labour-affiliated unions like Unison have no plans for further co-ordinated national action – not least because of the dangers (for them) that it could lead to calls for strikes that are more than a one-day affair (which the government can handle).

Instead, if there is no deal by Christmas, there is talk of local, rolling so-called “smart” strikes. These will have no impact whatsoever and contain the danger of demoralising and isolating groups of workers.

Yet the conditions exist to maintain the momentum of yesterday’s tremendous strike. Osborne’s budget will slash the incomes of every household, not just those in the public sector as the Institute for Fiscal Studies report today shows.

The British economy is heading for recession, along with the rest of global capitalism. While trade unions were marching for their rights, the major central banks took desperate measures to try and prop up the euro. But it’s too late – another credit crunch is under way, leading to a second financial meltdown worse than that of 2008.

The deepening crisis will hit everyone very hard and provides the opportunity to bring all sectors of society together in new ways. Local, alternative seats of power such as people’s assemblies can maintain the energy of November 30 and more.

Limiting our response to calls for more strikes or days of action is inadequate. In Greece, for example, a number of general strikes have failed to end the massive attack on living standards.

Overriding every government’s actions are the demands of the financial markets and the recession that makes it impossible to return to the “growth” that is the lifeblood of the capitalist system.

The success of the pensions strike confirms without a shadow of a doubt the will to confront the government. Now is the moment for the rank and file to demand an end to negotiations and seize the initiative through the creation of democratic assemblies that can mount a serious challenge to the failed profit system itself.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Osborne declares class war

2011-11-30T08:04:00.002Z

On the eve of today’s historic strike by public sector workers in defence of hard-won pensions, the unelected coalition ConDem government yesterday delivered a new, more vicious, sustained assault on living standards.

What chancellor George Osborne announced in his autumn statement was a blatant transfer of wealth from working people to the corporations and bankers who are responsible for the accelerating crisis of capitalism. In doing so, he effectively ushered in an unprecedented period of social conflict.

With imagined growth failing to materialise, the global economic crisis deteriorating rapidly, government borrowing soaring by a shock £111bn, and the credit rating agencies looking over his shoulders, breathing heavily, chancellor Osborne slashed his way through public spending.

Before the statement, ratings agency Fitch threatened that Britain's ability to absorb further economic shocks while keeping its top triple-A credit rating was "largely exhausted" unless the government took further steps to cut its deficit.

And so it has.

Public sector job losses will rise to 710,000 from an original estimate of around 400,000. Government spending will fall by 0.9 per cent in real terms for the period 2015-17. That is a bigger cut than in the period from 2011 to 2015. Public sector pay will be held well below the rate of inflation - a pay cut by another name.

The new, much bigger attack is certain to intensify the slow-burning anger over pensions that built over months into today’s strike by as many as two million trades unionists.

According to RMT transport union leader Bob Crow:

"George Osborne has ratcheted up the class war and has made it clear through his attack on pay and employment rights that he wants the workers to keep taking the hit while the rich get richer. After two years of a freeze, pay for millions of key workers will go up by 1 percent in the next two years.

With inflation over 5 percent, and the increase in pension contributions, that means nurses and the others we rely on will be around 25 percent worse off after four years of this ConDem government while top bosses pay goes up by 12 percent a year. That's a scandal."

After the statement, Fitch patted Osborne on the back, but warned further steps will be needed.

Former Conservative minister Michael Portillo also says it won’t be enough. Foreshadowing a much more brutal style of bankers’ government, like those recently installed in Greece and Italy he says:

“Britain will have to reduce welfare and public sector employment dramatically. The state will need to step back from education and health where it simply doesn’t do a good enough job. Such changes may be too draconian for a coalition, yet the public may find them too radical to accept from a single-party government. The only question, however, is whether we will tackle those big issues soon, or merely ensure prolonged stagnation by postponing the inevitable.”

The stark reality is that capitalist society can no longer sustain the public sector no matter how loud the protest. A series of general strikes in Greece have failed to stop repeated attacks on living standards demanded by the ratings agencies and imposed by the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The conflict moved to a new stage with the sweeping away of the elected PASOK government and its replacing by a coalition (including an ultra-right party) led by an advisor to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

With the eurozone careering towards an apocalyptic collapse, the ramifications are being felt throughout the world. Late last night, ratings agency Standard and Poor downgraded the biggest banks in the US, including the Bank of America which is heavily exposed to euro loans.

The response to Osborne and the ConDems from rallies in towns and cities throughout Britain should be to support the worldwide occupy movement and form People’s Assemblies. These can become the power which will lead and shape a new democratically-owned and controlled, sustainable economic, social and political system. As someone once said, there is no alternative.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Militarized policing comes to America

2011-11-29T10:43:00.004Z

The crackdown on the Wall Street occupation and similar actions around the country have prompted two authors to warn about an increasing militarization of America’s policing.

Tom Engelhardt, whose latest book, The United States of Fear is out this month, has dubbed the space in New York that police brutally cleared of occupiers as “Zuccotti Prison”. He says that there are no tents, no kitchen, no library left in the park.

Just 30 protesters and 100 police plus private security guards. Parts of the park are cordoned off with yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene. When he went there last week, a young protestor was being arrested, evidently for the “crime” of lying down on a bench.

Engelhardt writes gloomily about a “distinctly up-armoured, post-9/11 American world”, citing the example of the “police” who so notoriously pepper-sprayed non-violent, seated students at University of California Davis. They were, in fact, campus cops who in his days wore civilians clothes and had no real powers.

“Now, around the country, they are armed with chemical weapons,Tasers, tear gas, side arms, you name it. Meanwhile, some police departments, militarizing at a rapid rate, have tank-like vehicles, and the first police surveillance drones are taking to the air in field tests and capable of being weaponized.”

He warns: “In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law. Instead, they make it up to suit their needs. In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our ‘right’, are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons. This may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which the blue coats [police], armed to the teeth, act with remarkable impunity.”

William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and a collection of essays, Inventing American History writes how the crackdowns around America “have brought a military level of combativeness” to the scene.

It's not as if officers have been resorting to battle gear under otherwise unmanageable pressure or initiating violence only as a last resort. They've been arriving in battle gear. They've been construing noncompliance as potential attack. They've moved pre-emptively to disable attack where none existed, not just trying to evict but seemingly hoping to inspire fear, to punish and defeat. The mood these operations convey is that failure to achieve police objectives must result in something awful for the body politic. In reality, leaving citizens sitting around a park or campus a few more days, even possibly illegally, might be frustrating for police and others; it's hardly the end of the world. Sometimes taking a few deep breaths is the only thing to do. But military training, tactics, and weaponry seem to inspire the idea in civic strategists that failure to achieve an objective is tantamount to fatal defeat by a hostile enemy. Intolerable. Not an option.

He shows how creating a clear distinction between the police and military is fundamental to American constitutional law, history and ideology. Hogeland's article reviews tendencies both toward and against police militarization that go all the way back to the country's founding.

Some like Naomi Wolf see a conspiracy by the federal state to galvanise local authorities into action (see a sound demolition of her argument by Alternet’s Joshua Holland) against the occupation movement. No conspiracy is required, however. There is a nervousness within the state at all levels as the economic crisis worsens and the American dream looks more like a nightmare. The result is a lashing out by authorities whose legitimacy, not to say democratic credentials, is seeping away at federal and state level. Time for another American revolution to protect, enhance and advance democracy in new ways.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Corporate body snatchers at work

2011-11-28T10:59:00.007Z

The patenting of human genes is going on at a terrifying rate. And most people don’t even know that their bodies are being used to generate vast corporate profits.

Harriet Washington has researched major changes in United States law which have legalised the “corporate takeover of life itself”.

In an interview with AlterNet, she outlines how a crucial piece of legislation, the Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980, unleashed the granting of 40,000 patents over the past 30 years.

Before the legislation, universities that did the gene research were not allowed to sell their patents to private corporations, on the grounds that the discoveries had been developed with public money or “tax dollars”.

The US Supreme Court, in the 1980 landmark case in Diamond v Chakrabarty, went much further than the researcher (Ananda Chakrabarty) and the patent office expected. Rather than patenting Chakrabarty’s invention of process of creating bacteria which could “eat crude oil”, the court decided that living things themselves could be patented.

More recently, the ruling has allowed not only genetic sequences in our bodies to be patented but even entire living creatures, such as the OncoMouse which “is guaranteed to get cancer”, developed by Harvard University.

Washington points to the cases of two patients whose cells were used to make millions of dollars in profits for the medical-industrial complex. The patients concerned were never consulted or compensated. Adding insult to injury, the family of African-American Henrietta Lacks were lied to. They believe that researcher Dr George Gey of the prestigious John Hopkins university “did not want the world to know that this was a black lady helping science”.

In the case of leukaemia patient John Moore whose spleen was used to create a lucrative cell line, Dr David Golde of the University of California got a contract for $3 million in 1980 with generic drug manufacturer, the pharma giant Sandoz, a subsidiary of Novartis.

Many hospitals ask unsuspecting patients to sign consent forms before surgery which hand over the rights to any tissues of cells taken from the body to private corporations.

The gene/body-part sell-off is even more widespread after someone dies. Medical examiners laws or presumed consent laws allow coroners to take tissues and then sell them on to brokers who transfer them to surgeons or hospitals. “At each step, there is a hefty fee paid,” Washington says.

What about the argument that companies are saving lives through medical research which would otherwise not be carried out? The reality is that corporations like Myriad Genetics, which hold patents on the genes that predispose women to breast cancer, do not allow researchers to work on the genes without their permission. The American Civil Liberties Union and a patent body have mounted a legal challenge.

Washington’s accounts of how companies use and abuse the African continent for cheap drugs trials are even more shocking. During a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria, Pfizer set up tents directly next to those operated by Doctors Without Borders to draw in desperate parents.

As Washington notes: “Maximising the profit on the patient is the focus, not curing the maximum number of people.” Of the 1,233 new drugs devised by Big Pharma between 1975 and 1997, only four were designed for people in the developing world.

Attempts by benevolent capitalists like Bill Gates to bring vaccines to the developing world are problematic. His initiative, called GAVI, is already $3 billion in debt.

In case we lull ourselves into seeing this as American madness, in the UK things are possibly even more dangerous. Over a decade ago, New Labour drove through legislation allowing private companies to claim plant and animal genes and even human organs.

The UK Supreme Court overturned an earlier decision so that the Nasdaq-listed Human Genome Sciences corporation now has greater patent rights in the UK than under current US law.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Don't let the ConDems off the hook

2011-11-25T10:48:00.002Z

Seldom has a government looked in such disarray as the ConDems do in the countdown to what is effectively a mini-general strike in defence of public sector pensions. All that keeps them from crumbling is the weakness of the opposition ranged against them.

In past industrial confrontations, Tory governments have succeeded in mobilising state forces, middle-class volunteers (1926 general strike) and in dividing strikers (miners’ 1984-5).

Such is the contempt in which this Coalition is held that even normally-reliable parts of the state are in revolt while volunteers are in short supply. Middle-managers who were expected to take over immigration points at airports on November 30 – as they did in June – instead plan to join the walk-out.

They are undoubtedly acting in revenge for the way home secretary Theresa May recently scapegoated Brodie Clark, the head of the Border Agency, in a row over immigration checks. He quit his job after 30 years as a civil servant following his suspension by May.

In desperation, the government is offering volunteers £450 to break the strike at Heathrow and elsewhere and is bringing in the contractor Serco. Meanwhile, prime minister Cameron has made himself a laughing stock by suggesting mothers take their children to work because teachers are walking out next Wednesday.

Fortunately for the ConDems, November 30 is restricted to a one-day action against plans to cut pension entitlements for public sector workers while telling them they have to pay higher contributions for longer periods.

There are no plans for further co-ordinated strikes. Instead, the leaders of unions like Unison and the GMB are planning a guerrilla campaign of what are being called “smart strikes” at local level.

This is a recipe for grinding the struggle into the dust, leaving the government the option of imposing the changes over the winter or union leaders signing up to some rotten compromise deal such as protecting present staff at the expense of future generations.

Urging caution, naturally, is the Labour leadership under Ed Miliband. This week’s shadow cabinet declined to endorse the pensions’ strike. Instead, Michael Dugher, the shadow cabinet office minister, called for a settlement “fair to low-paid workers and taxpayers alike”.

Clearly, the last thing Labour wants is to return to power a) on the back of industrial action against the government b) when the economic and financial crisis is worsening by the day.

Miliband acknowledged once more yesterday that Labour would also cut the public spending deficit, and attacked the government’s policies – but only because they might leave his party with more to do if they were re-elected in 2015.

That’s alright then. Of course we can wait another three-and-a-half years for a general election to oust this reactionary, destructive government that is busily building on New Labour’s “achievements”. Then Miliband will sweep into Downing Street to build the “prosperous capitalism” he is promising us – and carry on cutting.

Put like that and it reads like the nonsense it is. The UK economy is going to hell in a handcart and is about to be hit by what one commentator is calling the “biggest mass default in history”.

Investors are pulling out of euro bonds, including Germany’s, because they sense that the single currency is on the verge of collapse, overwhelmed by the debts of member states. No one wants to be left holding euro-dominated bonds when the music stops. UK banks were warned this week to prepare for a disorderly break-up of the euro.

So the November 30 strike coincides with a government looking out of its depth as it faces a perfect storm blowing in from Europe and with the loyalty of parts of the state in question. You can be sure, however, that less public sides of the state are paying great attention to the building crisis and have contingency plans. The Coalition was thrown together to appease the financial markets. Who is to say that Labour itself won’t yet find itself part of a grand coalition to act in the “national interest”?

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Kyoto II abandoned as corporates call the shots

2011-11-24T09:22:00.004Z

Any attempt to reduce the risk of runaway climate change with a new international treaty to limit carbon emissions is off the table for the foreseeable future as corporate profits take precedence.

The next round of UN climate talks in Durban next week will be a waste of time, since the richest countries have already made clear in private they are not ready to even make a start on negotiating a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol before 2016.

As former Bolivian UN climate change representative Pablo Solon says: “The Kyoto Protocol has many weaknesses, but to turn it into an empty shell or make it disappear in Durban would be suicide. The only responsible alternative is to preserve the Kyoto Protocol with an emissions reductions goal that allows us to avoid incinerating the planet.”

The Alliance of Small Island States, which represents countries that would disappear in a “business-as-usual” scenario say the delay is "reckless and irresponsible". Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), warned that without an international agreement working by 2017 the chance to hold a rise in global temperatures below 2ºC “will be closed forever".

The failure to make a serious start on cutting emissions means global output of CO2 has already jumped again, rising by the biggest amount on record in 2010. The world pumped out about 564 million more tons of carbon than it did in 2009.

That's an increase of 6% a "monster" rise that is unheard of, says Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate the figures for the US Department of Energy.

As a result, the scenario for climate change is beyond than the worst case scenario outlined by scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only four years ago.

At the last round of talks in Cancun, developed capitalist countries promised to pledge emissions cuts (to be achieved between 2012-2020) that would limit warming to 2ºC. This rise in itself would mean millions of deaths from drought and flood, and putt some 20-30% of animal and plant species at risk of extinction. Many coastal zones and island states would sink below the waves and glaciers disappear entirely.

But the actual pledges made since Cancun would lead to an average increase in global temperature of around 4°C or more – a catastrophic level which it seems likely the ecosystem could not survive.

The complex impact of global warming on weather was highlighted this week in a new IPCC report. It warns that in a high emissions scenario “it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world” and that “heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease”.

No measures are being taken to prepare for these problems – quite the opposite. More fossil fuels – the major contributor to global emissions – are being burned than ever before. No attempts have been made to support serious development of renewables. Air travel has contributed to the leap in emissions measured by the US Energy Department, and as far as manufacturing is concerned “from an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over,’ says Tom Boden, who chairs the US Energy Department’s carbon dioxide information analysis centre.

And that’s the heart of the matter: Capitalism and its political proxies at state level will pay any price to achieve growth. The only diplomacy that will achieve the kinds of cuts in emissions needed to halt climate change is the open discussion and debate taking place between global assemblies of free peoples. Liberated from the drive for profit, they will shift to a system of planned production for need, and start to try to repair the damage.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

An economic system beyond reform

2011-11-23T10:52:00.003Z

Some 170 economists have issued a statement in support of the occupation movement in the United States and put forward policies which they say will “liberate the economy from the short-term greed of the rich and powerful one percent”.

The predominantly American grouping calling itself Econ4 is opposed to the market fundamentalists whose theory has failed, they say. Instead, they want an economy that works for the people, for the planet and for the future. They are concerned about human health, the consequences of pollution and fairness.

It is stirring and attractive stuff and their support is welcome because it shows that the hostility to the present economic system demonstrated at Occupy Wall Street and throughout America is hitting home.

But with calls to end capitalist rule bubbling up from occupations around the world, in reality Econ4’s policies will only confuse those searching for a really new start because in practice they are a variant on the status quo.

The four principles of Econ4’s “profound departure from the orthodox economics of the past” hardly differ from the aims of the social democratic, welfare-supported parliamentary democracies which emerged in the wake of the Second World War: equality of opportunity, an economy able to withstand unexpected shocks, prices determined by full cost-benefit accounting, and “real” democracy.

These are aims which have long been buried under the rubble left by the capitalist credit-fuelled push for growth which took over the world in the process generally known as globalisation. For the capitalist system there was no alternative, and it was this growth imperative that forced the deregulation needed to allow credit to expand.

In a table in their mission statement, Econ4 set out their differences with “orthodox” economics, and it is there that you’ll find the only reference to capitalism in the whole document. They want to replace “managerial capitalism” with “shareholder democracy”.

That too is an old-fashioned look back to the even earlier days of capitalism when the issue of shares enabled the formation of joint-stock companies providing the additional capital needed to fund the investment needs of competing manufacturers. Shareholders had rights. The richer you were, the bigger the share you could buy, and the more rights you had. Something to aspire to? I think not.

Econ4 say they are not starting from scratch. They’re putting together a programme built around the funds of billionaire speculator George Soros who has committed $50 million to the Institute for New Economic Ideas, the Schumacher Society, and the UK-based New Economics Foundation. All accept the capitalist system of production – they just want it to operate more fairly. No doubt they would endorse Labour leader Ed Miliband’s call for a “responsible” capitalism.

But the crash of 2011 is ensuring that the orthodoxy of market fundamentalism is giving way to something much more brutal and a far more profound struggle is under way. The economic crisis has created and now coincides with a political crisis. In attempting to prevent economic collapse, bankers are replacing elected governments.

Agencies like the IMF and the European Central Bank act on behalf of the tight network of global corporations. They have their men in power in Athens and Italy and have put the new Spanish government under notice.

On the other side, the 99 per cent are rising up against capital and finding their voice in occupations throughout the world. The takeover of the long-empty UBS building in London and its transformation into an Ideas Bank is far more inspiring than half-baked plans for a more decent capitalism. And from the global spread of occupations can come a global network of People’s Assemblies as the democratic framework for a new economy.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Time to sack the watchdog

2011-11-22T10:34:00.004Z

Two advisors have resigned from the community group set up by the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham last August.

The move marks a serious breakdown of relations between the black community and the body that is supposed to monitor police behaviour.

A statement by Stafford Scott reveals the IPCC’s complicity in a process of deliberate disinformation. Scott, who has engaged with the police since the Macpherson report, says that police removal of the vehicle that Duggan travelled in shortly before he was shot has so tainted the investigation that “we will never be able to have faith in their final report into the killing.”

Scott says the IPCC broke its own guidelines “by giving out erroneous information to journalists regarding the 'shoot-out' involving Mark Duggan and police that didn't actually happen.”

Both the Met and the IPCC are now threatening to report the Guardian to the Press Complaints Commission for stating that Mark Duggan was unarmed at the time he was shot by a police marksman.

Scott, who was an advisor to the Met, now believes the IPCC suffers worse flaws than the force it is investigating.”

But the police killing of Duggan is, human rights campaign group Black Mental Health UK, says, is not simply an isolated example of cover-ups. It forms part of a pattern and a “hidden history” of black people in Britain.

Matilda MacAttram, editor of the BMH’s Solution Magazine , told A World to Win that “a very important part of the black experience is marked by deaths in custody. This is something as live today in the recent cases of Kingsley Burrell-Brown and Mark Duggan as it was over 42 years ago when police hounded David Oluvale to death and threw him into a river.”

The second-ever edition of the on-line magazine, produced during Black History Month, has Oluwale and five other black men on its commemorative cover. Oluwale, Orville Blackwood, David Bennett, Mikey Powell, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell-Brown - none of them over 40 years of age - all died in custody between 1969 and 2011.

“It is a pattern, which is the same whether or not you are a mental health user. The deaths of these men may not seem linked, but for their families, a fit and healthy man, their loved one, no longer exists,” MacAttram says.

The Solution Magazine highlights the long-term effect of deaths in custody or during police raids on the children left behind, by interviewing the sons of Orville Blackwood and Cherry Groce.

African Caribbeans are 50% more likely to enter the psychiatric health system, 44% are more likely to be sectioned, 29% more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion. Detention rates for people from the UK African Caribbean community has doubled over 2005-2010 and over half the deaths of people in police custody are mental health users.

Stafford Scott and his fellow adviser John Noblemunn should be commended for refusing to serve on the community reference group set up by the IPCC. Scott has courageously broken the confidentiality agreement he signed when agreeing to serve on the group. He is now calling for “a body truly willing and able to investigate the police,” which he says, “is the only way to ensure that they will learn from their mistakes; and that, when mistakes occur, communities do not believe the one route to justice lies in taking matters into their own hands.”

But the lack of progress in the treatment of ethnic minority and black people in custody, whether directly by police or in mental health institutions, shows that existing institutions are far more than just flawed. It is a powerful argument for the disbanding not only of the IPCC, but of the police and the prison system and their replacement by bodies under the control of communities they are intended to serve.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Arab Spring leads to winter revolution

2011-11-21T12:07:00.002Z

The prospect of Egypt’s second uprising inside a year is more than a challenge to continuing military rule; it also poses the transformation of the democratic into the social revolution.

Many had hoped, wrongly, that the army which facilitated the removal of Hosni Mubarak by standing aside from the January revolution, would step aside once parliamentary elections had been held. "The army and the people are one hand," many chanted when Mubarak quit.

But there was too much at stake for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) to allow that to happen. They are part of the Egyptian ruling class in the most literal sense, owning large chunks of the economy.

As much as one-third of Egypt's economy is under military control through a host of government-owned service and manufacturing companies, at least 14 of them under the auspices of the Military Production Ministry. El Nasr Co. for Services and Maintenance, for instance, has 7,750 employees in such sectors as child care, car repair, and hotel administration.

In a secret cable dated September 2008 signed by U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey, the embassy in Cairo told Washington that the Egyptian military was "becoming a “quasi-commercial” enterprise itself.

Other military companies produce small arms, tank shells, and explosives — as well as exercise equipment and fire engines. These companies add up to "a very large, unaccountable, non-transparent Military Inc.," says Robert Springborg, author of Mubarak's Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order.

The generals "will try to massage the new order so that it does not seek to impose civilian control on the armed forces," he said in February. "It's not just a question of preserving the institution of the army. It's a question of preserving the financial base of its members."

And that is just what has happened. Next Sunday’s scheduled elections would result in a powerless parliament and a military that is exempt from political oversight and control, according to a protocol that the generals got the interim government to sign up to.

The army has been tightening its grip on power since Mubarak was overthrown. They have processed 12,000 civilians through military tribunals, more in 10 months than the former president managed in his 30 years of rule.

Outspoken critics are in jail while blogger Maikel Nabil has been on hunger strike for almost three months in protest against military trials. There are official bans on strikes and demonstrations and the army provoked sectarian violence against Coptic Christians as part of its divide and rule strategy.

Some activists now realise that the euphoria of January masked the tasks that still lay out ahead. “We handed power to the military on a silver platter," said Ahmed Imam, a 33-year-old activist, of the January uprising. "The revolutionaries went home too soon. We collected the spoils and left before the battle was over."

The removal of the army from power will require a strategy that goes beyond the creation of a parliamentary democracy. In itself, that would not be able to deliver on the needs of the Egyptian people in terms of jobs and a better standard of living.

A parliament that leaves economic relations unchanged would, be at the mercy of global banks and the International Monetary Fund, as is patently the case already in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain.

As the November revolution gets under way in Egypt, it can inspire the rest of the world by going beyond capitalist-army economic ownership and handinf over the productive resources to people in the cities, towns and countryside. That is something the Egyptian people could unite around and the people’s assemblies created in January can take on the job of achieving this transformation.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

London banks in doomsday planning

2011-11-18T11:04:00.003Z

Reports that London-based global banks are playing “war games” to work out what to do if a country quits the eurozone or the currency collapses, is a stark indication that the financial crisis is out of control. Survival is the only item on the agenda as meltdown looms.

The scenario planning coincides with rising political tensions across Europe, with the Franco-German alliance seeking to sideline Britain. Der Spiegel has dubbed Britain the “sick Empire” in advance of today’s meeting between chancellor Merkel and prime minister Cameron. Other right-wing papers and members of her ruling party have stoked up old enmities between the two countries.

Merkel and French president Sarkozy want, it seems, to make Frankfurt and not London the pre-eminent financial centre in Europe. It is hard to see how that squares with the deepening crisis of the euro itself, with Spain and other countries facing unsustainable interest rates on new loans.

Traders are selling bonds (fixed-term loans) as fast as they can. No one wants to be holding Spanish, Italian or anyone else’s debt when the music stops. And stop it will, with

Terry Pratt of IG Markets remarking that Spain’s difficulties are “the latest blow to the common currency, which is now looking ever more moribund as each day passes”.

According to the Bank of England, UK banks do about half their lending outside Britain, with Europe accounting for about a third of the total. But it’s their ability to absorb large losses that is in the spotlight. Their exposure to France and Germany alone is equal to 130% of their core capital. At least one lender has Italian exposure equivalent to 54% of capital, according to the Financial Times.

And then there are indirect exposures which no one seems to be able to total up. A UK-based bank may have lent to an overseas hedge fund which in turn is tied up in Greek or Italian bonds. Hence the “war games”, with the FT reporting:

It is Friday night, after stock markets have closed across Europe, and there is some shocking news: Greece has pulled out of the euro. By the time markets reopen on Monday morning, UK banks must be prepared for the worst. How dangerous could this be for other eurozone governments and banks? What would it mean for customers? Investors? Would funding markets freeze instantly? These are some of the war-game scenarios UK bankers are acting out – often in real time over a weekend – as they plan for some grim possible consequences of the eurozone debt crisis.

A new credit crunch is well under way, with inter-bank lending crucial to sustaining the financial system, drying up. As in 2008, the fear is of lending to another institution and then finding they can’t pay it back. This only adds to growing liquidity problems and the UK authorities are apparently monitoring funding levels twice daily.

Not all the FT’s readers are sympathetic about the plight of the banks, with one writing: “Looks like the bank's bonus pools are finally under threat owing to the destruction of the real economy through excessive leverage, reckless mortgage lending based on fraud and deceit, financial speculation and looting. The sooner the banks are nationalised, bonus pools used to invest in the real economy and bank management put in jail the better.”

The question is, how do we achieve that goal? Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has again committed his party to building a “responsible capitalism” and the parliamentary system is a proxy for corporate and financial power. While the bankers do doomsday planning, a strategy for a new political and economic democracy ought to be top of our agenda.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Unions should block sanctions against unemployed

2011-11-17T10:07:00.003Z

Thousands of unemployed young people are working for supermarkets without pay for months on end, with the constant threat of losing their measly benefits if they leave, while others are on enforced “mandatory work activity” schemes.

The ConDems, building on New Labour’s regime of withholding benefits from the unemployed, have created a reserve army of young people simply to boost employers’ profits and cut public spending.

More than a million aged between 15-24 out of work. That is 20% of economically active people in that age group. Unemployment, which has been rising since 2007, is as high as in the early 1980s and now stands at 2.62m, the highest since 1994,

Of course that does not include many formerly self-employed, who wait a long time to qualify for benefits, people on disability benefits who are looking for but can’t find appropriate work, and women at home with small children prevented from finding work by soaring childcare costs. The real figure is closer to 4 million.

The unemployment figure includes 286,000 students looking for part-time work to get them through their studies. Some 80% of teachers surveyed earlier this year said they were encountering students in schools and colleges who did not get enough to eat, or to buy clothing.

Many good job and training schemes for young people have had their funding cut. So far the Coalition’s main contribution is a scheme where young people work for companies like Sainsbury, Poundland, Tesco for up to six weeks with no pay. It is meant to be voluntary, but if they even express a slight interest in the scheme, and then withdraw, they lose their miserable £53 a week job seekers allowance for up to six months.

It is suggested that some retailers are exploiting this scheme to get ready for the Christmas rush, instead of taking on temporary workers as they would normally. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, employers are using government subsidies for apprenticeships to train people aged over 25 they would have hired anyway. Only 37,000 of 126,000 apprenticeships went to 16-24 year olds.

Under the new “mandatory work activity” scheme, young people are given no choice from the moment they sign on and can be sent to work for private firms or the voluntary sector for months on end. Lawyers say this is a modern form of slavery and are challenging it in the courts.

Brendan Barber of the Trades Union Congress says the Coalition must “stop the risk of losing a generation to unemployment and under-achievement by guaranteeing a job or high quality training to every young person out of work for six months”. Pathetic! What about: “The TUC will organise every unemployed worker into a mass movement to remove the Coalition government.” You won’t hear that any time soon!

Young people have done everything asked of them. The number without a qualification has decreased dramatically, and more and more make sacrifices to stay on at college or university. In 2004, 33% of 19-year-olds lacked a basic qualification; by 2010 that figure was down to 18%. Though almost half of young adults do not have a Level 2 qualification (such as GCSEs) at age 16, by the time they reach 21, most have remedied this and the proportion is down to one fifth.

Young people were the driving force of the movements that toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and, before NATO intervention, Libya. They have everything to gain from political and social change and nothing to lose. With the economy heading for recession and more spending cuts on the way, it is clear that capitalism isn’t working and we should make it history. Offering young people the opportunity to join a people’s assemblies movement to transform society is the most important thing we can do.

In the meantime, the trade unions should instruct their Jobcentre Plus members to refuse to impose sanctions on young people looking for work, training and decent pay. Carrying out government orders which turn people into slaves is unacceptable.

Penny Cole

Spain's voters disenfranchised by markets

2011-11-16T10:03:00.003Z

There can be only one winner in Sunday’s general election in Spain. And it won’t be the voters, many of whom are so disillusioned with the country’s political system that they seem set to stay at home in droves.

Even though the discredited Socialist Party (SP) looks likely to hand over the reins of state power to the right-wing People’s Party (PP), the financial markets are closing in. They know that the PP has no policies to tackle the country’s budget deficit or the growing debt crisis in the regions and is winning with anti-SP rhetoric.

So yesterday, the effective interest rate on Spanish government borrowing soared beyond 6% into what is considered the danger zone. Mariano Rajoy, the PP leader, will find himself in the firing line next Monday morning when Moody’s, Standard and Poor, Goldman Sachs and the other predatory operators in the financial markets move in.

In a mass sell-off of government bonds on Tuesday, investors’ fears spread beyond Italy and Spain to triple A-rated France, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. Neil Williams, chief economist at UK fund manager Hermes, said “Markets are losing patience so they are going for the jugular, which is the core countries and not the periphery.”

In dealing with the crash of 2008 governments, central banks and global agencies added many trillions to the global accumulation of credit and debt, yet the growth the system needs to pay it off has not been forthcoming.

The “recovery” has now given way to a contraction. So the interest can never be paid, let alone the inflated capital, at least while forms of parliamentary democracy – however enfeebled – stand between the corporations, financial markets and living conditions of ordinary people. These must all be swept away in futile attempts to minimise the impact of the crash of 2011 on profits.

After a weekend of frenetic activity, two non-elected US trained economists have been appointed to spearhead the next round of assaults on the population of Europe. Mario Monti has been installed as replacement for the odious Berlusconi, and Lucas Papademos is the new prime minister of Greece, which includes anti-Semitic, far right LAOS – the Popular Orthodox Rally Party in its provisional government.

They’ll all be getting their instructions from the “Frankfurt group” which includes the International Monetary Fund, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, a bevy of European Union officials, with Barack Obama, USA and Hu Jintao, China’s President lurking threateningly in the background.

Every one of the now 7 billion occupants of the 200 or so states is directly and immediately affected by the unfolding of the interacting social, financial, economic, political and ecological crises of humanity and its planetary home. In Britain, youth unemployment has hit a record high of 1.016 million, as the overall jobless total rises to 2.62 million in the midst of a recession deepened by spending cuts.

The ruling classes everywhere fear any challenge to their rule, concerned that they might inspire others into revolt. Peaceful protests claiming the authority of the 99% find themselves confronting the forces of the state in its many forms. The brutal clearance of Zucotti Park won’t be the last to be seen of Occupy Wall Street. The Corporation of London has restarted legal proceedings against Occupy LSX, and its maturing programme of discussions on the economy, democracy and the state.

Amongst the most recent, but shortest-lived of the occupations, Cardiff, delivered one of the clearest objectives so far: “The monetary market system itself must be replaced with a resource-based economic model where everyone’s needs are provided for free.”

The collapse of the eurozone, the appearance of mass unemployment, the attacks on pensions, services and welfare, demands the alternative called for in Cardiff. On November 30, millions will strike in Britain against the government’s attack on public sector pension rights. To maintain the momentum, trade unionists should seize the initiative and create people’s assemblies in every community to carry the struggle forward towards a new political and economic democracy.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

The invasion of the commons

2011-11-15T10:18:00.001Z

One of the transformations in London over recent decades has been the opening out of the Thames embankments to the public. You can now meander from Vauxhall Bridge in the west to beyond Tower Bridge in the east, along the city’s historic riverside.

Stunning views of the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge and Tate Modern - are unobstructed by traffic. Unlike Rome and Venice, where architectural gems like the Spanish Steps and the Doge’s Palace are often spoiled by garish corporate logos, there are no jarring advertising hoarding. This entirely free pleasure in Europe’s largest city is one of the success stories of Ken Livingstone’s eight-year mayoral stint.

But now, the process is going into reverse. London’s bridges and its squares and open spaces are being appropriated and privatised. And increasingly, under the false flag of the 2012 Olympic Games, vast schemes are being devised which will subvert past gains.

So much so that architectural writer Rowan Moore has coined the words “publoid, publate, privlid” to describe the sinister process by which corporate owners convert areas once open to the public into “managed and controlled spaces with uniformed wardens”.

This is what happened in Broadgate, Canary Wharf, City Hall and Paternoster Square. “Ultimate control”, as Moore notes,“ is in the hands of private landowners”.

That’s why the protesters who sought to occupy the space outside the London stock exchange found all entrances to Paternoster Square sealed off by police cordons and they ended up at the foot of St Paul’s at the mercy of the church fathers. This was despite the redevelopment of the square being billed as a “public space”.

Now, a £50 million proposal by the Singaporean asset-management company Venus for a floating park to run from the Millennium Bridge to Tower Bridge is currently under scrutiny. Under the shiny corporate-speak it is the latest and insidious move of a widespread hybrid beast that has reared its head in the last decade. This is “the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders”, as Moore notes.

English Heritage and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment are voicing disquiet. English Heritage says the view of St Paul’s would be affected by “flashy and corporate” features of what is fundamentally “a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it”.

And it is not only the high property value City part of the Thames that is being threatened. Further down river in Stratford, locals are worried about a plan for an “experiential, hospitality and entertainment” venue. Former accountant Lance Forman hopes to bring 8,000 visitors a day to a tiny island on the Thames, day and night. Olympic corporate guests will be comfy on a gigantic sofa and watch the games on a 30x 7 metre screen.

Like the Olympics themselves, this proposal is promoted as “building a lasting legacy for the area”. But those who live and work there say it is a disaster waiting to happen.

The invasion of the “commons” is not a new process and not unique to London. The turbo-charged hey-day of globalisation saw the entire planet subjected to this process. With the growing resistance to the crisis, to the banks and corporate power, the state is showing the mailed fist in favour of the owners of private property. Out go security guards, in come riot police with tasers, tear gas, pepper spray and batons.

The clearing out of occupiers in New York’s Zucotti Park and the arrest of several St Paul’s activists outside the Guildhall in the last 24 hours makes it crystal clear that not only the right to protest, but simply to live, breathe and look at the world around you in a relatively free way is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Goldman Sachs adds Italy and Greece to its portfolio

2011-11-14T10:26:00.001Z

When trader Alessio Rastani told the BBC that "governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world", jaws dropped in the news room at his brazen candour. Seven weeks later, Rastani is looking more right than ever.

The global investment bank’s advisors have in the past week taken control of the Italian and Greek governments, replacing elected administrations with faceless economists, academics and bureaucrats.

These events are nothing less than corporate-driven coups in the heart of Europe, through which the financial markets have demanded and got the heads of government on a platter.

George Papandreou and Silvio Berlusconi were what they were, politically speaking. Their mistake was to try and ignore the European Central Bank (ECB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the leading lights in the European Union, Germany and France, in dealing with their respective debt crises.

So they had to go.

In Italy, Mario Monti, former EU competition commissioner and advisor to Goldman Sachs for the last six years, was appointed prime minister by the ageing president Giorgio Napolitano, who undoubtedly got his marching orders from somewhere in the Brussels region. Monti is planning a cabinet entirely made up of unelected appointees.

In Greece, prime minister Papandreou was ousted by Lucas Papademos, yet another advisor to Goldman Sachs and former vice-president of the ECB. Both men are going to try and impose savage cuts in living standards to keep the international loan sharks – aka the bond market – at bay, temporarily.

Normally, when governments collapse, a date is set for a general election. But this right is also being denied the Greeks and Italians. Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, together with the markets, have declared that elections will take too long and may not even lead to a conclusive outcome. As for Papandreou’s plan for a referendum, don’t even go there.

Just in case you think this process doesn’t apply to Britain, let’s not forget that weekend in May 2010 after the general election here produced a stalemate. The Tories and Lib Dems were literally propelled into a shotgun marriage by the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell.

He made it perfectly clear that the financial markets would not tolerate weeks of political instability in Britain. The ConDem coalition – a government without a mandate and for which no one voted - was the result.

The financial markets have effectively “bought” capitalist democracy, turned it into a commodity. They demanded and got deregulation from the politicians. And when they went bust, they demanded and got bail-outs. When governments have proved incapable of imposing the debt crisis on their people, an out-and-out takeover is the result in Athens and Rome.

So the democratic achievements of past generations in terms of the right to vote and influence course of events through parties committed to reform are negated. There is even less meaning to voting than ever before, as the people of Spain will discover next Sunday.

The corporate coups should drive us to renew the struggle for democracy. The global occupation movement, the revolutions in North Africa and the real democracy movement in Spain point the way forward.

As the present political system is ossified, alienated and generally in someone else’s pockets, then it follows that entirely new forms of democracy are needed. The assemblies that have been a feature of 2011’s uprisings are an experiment in democracy that actually works.

Democracy here is not an add-on, to obscure some other power relations but a conscious effort to do things better. The general assemblies have the potential to go further than the spaces they currently occupy. People’s Assemblies can become not just the voice but also the power of the silenced, disenfranchised 99%

They could reach out to neighbourhoods and communities and offer new forms of representation, participation and direct democracy. A network of assemblies could begin to draw up strategies and plans for a democratic alternative to the power and rule of the market capitalist economy.

Utopian? Yes. Possible? Undoubtedly. Necessary? Absolutely!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The great 'deception' that killed millions

2011-11-11T10:51:00.004Z

Perhaps it is fitting on the day that the slaughter of World War One finally ended, the Treasury is said to be preparing for “economic Armageddon”.

Vince Cable’s admission refers to the consequences for Britain of a disorderly (it can’t be orderly) break-up of the euro as a currency and the resultant depression that will sweep not just Europe but the global economy.

But there’s no hiding the connection with the world wars of the 20^th century that cost tens of millions their lives. They were essentially the product of inter-imperialist conflict over trade, empire and markets.

Let no-one claim otherwise, although the political establishment tries might and main to do so every November when the official line is that millions went off to fight “for their country” in 1914.

Wearing a poppy becomes almost compulsory in official circles. Everyone on TV wears one. Those called in for an interview are asked to wear one, whether they want to or not. Of course, it is not wrong to honour the dead but we have to cut through the hypocrisy.

What is never up for discussion is that within months, soldiers on both sides realised that they had been trapped, even duped into a conflict from which they could not escape. A war which was not of their making exacted an intolerable price.

With the first global conflict unresolved, another one arose out of the break-down of the capitalist economy in Europe and the United States. And less than 70 years after its conclusion, with the mass murder of Japanese civilians, the storm clouds are gathering again.

The European Union, which was designed in part to prevent a repeat of 20^th century wars by bringing nations together, is in disarray. Governments in two member states were brought down this week by the economic crisis.

In Greece, the unelected former vice-president of the European Central Bank is to become prime minister of a national government. In Italy, the financial markets are demanding a government of technocrats. In both countries, early general elections were ruled out by the financial markets because they would take too long! Democratic procedures are now considered dispensable.

Now the talk is of a core of richer countries like Germany and France ganging up to exclude the poorer economies within the EU as well as Britain. So the seeds for conflict of all kinds are being sown. A system driven by the need to access and grow markets has no other direction to travel.

So perhaps the best way to mark armistice day is with the letter that the great war poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote to his commanding officer in July 1917, declining to return to duty after recovering from his wounds:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Triple whammy of warming planet, high prices and energy insecurity

2011-11-10T11:08:00.001Z

In the most comprehensive study yet of the global energy market, the International Energy Authority (IEA) has warned that within five years the planet will be on course to breach the limit of 2ºC of global warming which is said to be a “safe” level.

Of course, it is just the only level that supine corporate-serving politicians would agree at the UN's climate talks. Millions of people are already feeling the effects of global warming - ferocious rainfall causing floods in Thailand, Sindh province in Pakistan, the United States, Spain and Italy – and at the same time widespread drought. With 2ºC higher temperatures, such extreme weather will be commonplace, along with rising sea levels.

Over the last decade most of the world's growing energy needs have been met by burning coal; now not only China but also the United States is committed to building new coal power stations. The IEA projection shows that keeping to this course, the use of coal will increase by 65% by 2035.

Four-fifths of the CO2 emissions that would keep to the 2ºC limit are already locked in. Even if governments deliver on their weak, non-binding, greenwash targets, the cumulative CO2 emissions over the next 25 years will likely create a long-term average temperature rise of 3.5°C. And if, as seems likely, they fail to meet their targets, we are looking at a catastrophic 6ºC rise.

"As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the ‘lock-in’ of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals," said Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist.

This week's BBC Panorama programme, made a crude attempt to blame soaring energy bills on the government's modest (to put it politely) efforts to promote alternative energy from wind, tide and solar.

The programme was a complete fraud. According to Ofgem, recent fuel price increases, which have left hundreds of thousands in fuel poverty, are due to the energy companies passing wholesale market price increases on to consumers, whilst never reducing them when the market falls.

Panorama tried to argue that because renewables require investment, and because the government is making some of that investment, consumers are being hit by subsidies.

But why are subsidies needed? Surely it is in the nature of an industry that if changes to new technology are required, these are paid for by investment by the companies that will profit in the long term.

Not on your life! In reality, the big six energy companies in Britain, and others throughout the world, are on an investment strike. They will go on dragging profits out of old-style power stations as long as they can, adapting them to dirtier and dirtier fossil fuels and they will never put a penny into developing the alternatives.

Their goal is NOT a clean, secure energy supply - it is profit, and that's a fact!

And where there is an increase in world market prices for gas and oil - and these will be ever-steeper as fossil fuels become scarcer and harder to extract - the consumer must pay.

We are left with a triple whammy of a warming planet, high energy prices and growing energy insecurity.

"Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system," said Birol, adding that there is still time to act but the window of opportunity is closing.

The only action open to us is to achieve such a transformation is to take energy generation and supply out of private ownership and place it into a not-for-profit social trust, with raw materials becoming part of a new global commons.

A democratic network of People's Assemblies could then agree, with the help of experts and the collectively-owned power generating firms, a transitional plan to reduce, and then replace, fossil fuels. That is the only way to cut emissions, end fuel poverty and ensure that the lights stay on.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Pay to work and cheap interns future for young workers

2011-11-09T10:50:00.001Z

During the 40-or so months since the crash of 2008 a new wave of caring, sharing philanthropy has risen slowly to the surface, culminating in the Bellagio “summit” now under way on Lake Como.

The summit’s origins are traceable back to Standard Oil’s profits in the 19th century, so it’s hardly a new idea. But it seems it’s time has come, at least for those extremely rich entrepreneurs trying big time to salve their consciences, and save their skins whilst finding a new way forward for the capitalist system.

Bill Gates, the one individual with the highest public profile, made his mark with his wife by establishing the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, and in 2010 launchin “the Giving Pledge”. This encourages the world’s richest to give much of their accumulated wealth to good causes. And it’s all of a piece with the turn to self-reliant, “resilient” communities.

Their good work is clearly a big part of the inspiration behind the Big Society of David Cameron (who yesterday refuted the idea put to him by a parliamentary committee that the occupation of St Paul’s was an example of communities taking on more responsibility).

As economic growth gives way to contraction and austerity bites, the softer edge of services that can no longer be afforded like libraries, luncheon clubs for the elderly and infirm, rural shops and post offices, are being offered to those that value them to run them for nothing as the charitable acts of philanthropic volunteers.

But with the crisis biting ever harder, things are moving on apace. Capitalist society is at the crossroads. Not only are (some of) the already rich giving away their money (well, at least some of it), but those who are still hoping to get rich are breaking the wage labour contract or inverting the direction of value that traverses it.

For some years, young people have been first encouraged, then more or less obliged to seek “work experience”, either unpaid or at the minimum wage, in order to make themselves attractive in the jobs market.

More recently the Coalition has been promoting the wider use of internships as part of its drive to improve social mobility, but government lawyers have warned that growing numbers of companies may be breaking the law, turning to interns to carry out work that lasts far longer than traditional work experience placements, yet refusing to pay them.

Entrepreneurs have seized upon young workers as a source of low cost and enthusiastic labour. Steve Lowy, founder of three-star hotel brand Umi, has used 100 interns since he set up his business in 2007, from one week slots for GCSE pupils on work experience to year-long placements for hospitality students.

Of the arts internships advertised on the Department for Business Innovation and Skills-sponsored website, 92% were unpaid. Almost 80% of advertised fashion internships were unpaid, and 76% of PR internships were unpaid. Half of the media internships were unpaid.

According to Chartered Institute of Personnel figures, there are between 50,000 and 70,000 internships a year. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of these are unpaid. And in the largest online UK internship survey to date, carried out by Interns Anonymous, out of 594 respondents 87% said they were paid below the national minimum wage.

And now it’s becoming a case of pay to work. Selling internships has become a business in itself. The Tories auctioned off internships at City hedge funds at its Black and White ball in February to raise thousands of pounds for party coffers. Start-up company Etsio has made selling internships its business model. They charge interns up to £100 a day to get work experience in small, specialised businesses.

Nice work if your parents can pay to get it.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Bond dealers put a price on democracy

2011-11-08T11:07:00.003Z

The financial markets that have forced out the Greek government and are on the verge of bringing down Italy’s, now instinctively prefer to sideline what is left of the democratic process if it means they have a better chance of getting their money back.

Not only that, they would rather have a non-government of so-called technocrats in place of politicians in some cobbled together coalition. So whatever you think of Berlusconi or Papandreou's wretched politics, their impending demise is a sinister development with echoes of past European history.

Politics, even of the bourgeois variety, increasingly stands in the way of capital’s interests because it is a time-consuming process. Putting together governments of national unity, agreeing a strategy for spending cuts, holding referenda – all this takes too long when time is not on capitalism’s side.

So Papandreou’s call for a general election in Greece is off the agenda. It would only result in more uncertainty, the markets declared. France and Germany’s leaders agreed and so that was that. A national government without a mandate will take over in Greece.

In Italy, Reuters, the financial sector’s news agency, writes that Berlusconi's departure would offer "no speedy solution to a debt crisis threatening the whole euro zone”.

A “worst-case scenario” could see weeks or months of instability and continued “reform inertia”. The answer? “Markets want an unelected technocrat government appointed to pass unpopular reforms needed to improve growth potential in one the world's most chronically sluggish economies.”

So that’s alright then. If the markets want it – and today they were charging an unsustainable 6.73% to lend to Italy – who are ordinary people to deny them their wish? Elections in January? Far too long to wait. And what would they resolve? Nothing!

In one sense, of course, the markets are right. Elections can’t solve the crisis. Debt reduction requires so much pain through spending cuts, unemployment, lower living standards and rising prices that it can’t be achieved with popular consent.

Which means, logically, that some kind of authoritarian rule, a 21st century European dictatorship, is necessary. Dispensing with politicians, even if they are as obnoxious as Papandreou and Berlusconi, is the first step on a slippery road.

Even the right-wing press is getting the frighteners. Janet Daley, the former left-winger turned commentator for the Daily Telegraph, has noted: “Last week, the European Union effectively undermined the democratically elected government of one member state and put another one [Italy’s] on notice.”

In line with Tory anti-EU sentiment, she blames the “Eurocracy” led by Germany and France for denying Greece a referendum and telling Berlusconi that his time is up, adding:

“All those quaint assumptions about the legitimacy of government coming from the consent of the governed must be cashed in for the ‘economic stability’ that the rules of euro membership will provide.”

Interestingly she contrasts the achievements of the Arab Spring with the decline of democracy in the West, “the wilful dismantling of its political inheritance” with the loss of the “right to choose who governs you”.

While her target in the shape of the EU bureaucracy rather than financial markets and capitalism, smacks of small-time nationalism, Daley is perceptive enough to acknowledge that an historical turning point has arrived.

Capitalism and democracy are not natural bedfellows but in conflict with one another. At times of emergency – and that’s what we are in now – the niceties of elections, parliaments etc come under strain. The next step, to outright dictatorship, is a massive one to take. But don’t for one moment think that the ruling elites are not capable of going down that road.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Their morals and ours

2011-11-07T11:08:00.002Z

Teaching a fish to ride a bicycle. That’s how even a Daily Telegraph reader describes the pipedream of making the City of London, bankers et al act in some kind of “ethical” way.

And that is a lot more down to earth than Labour leader Ed Miliband, who says that the campaigners at St Paul’s and Finsbury Square reflect “a crisis of concern for millions of people about the biggest issue of our time: the gap between their values and the way our country is run”.

In a patronising and devious way, Miliband implies that the protesters have nothing better to do than camp outside St Paul’s. He opines that the problem is “a system of irresponsible, predatory capitalism based on the short term, rather than productive, responsible behaviour which benefits business and most people in the long term”.

Using the word “values” no fewer than nine times, he calls for “big changes in the way our country works”. But in case anyone is deluded into thinking that Labour has suddenly become hostile to capitalism, he proposes – sharp intake of breath – to “tell the top CEOs that if they are unwilling to justify their rewards – they will not get it”.

So, for the Labour leader, the problem is NOT that there is a huge divide in society between a tiny minority of super rich and the rest of us. The rich have just not worked hard enough to prove that “they are worth it”!

Miliband is simply trying to cash in on the widespread support for the occupations in the City of London and around the world – and to channel it into the safe vehicle of Labour electoral politics. In his dreams!

Along with the CEOs and some bankers, many of whom have admitted they are overpaid, he is worried that things are spinning out of control, ideologically speaking.

The conflicting views amongst those who are supposed to look after morals and values are deepening by the day. On Saturday former St Paul’s Canon Giles Fraser, who resigned over the cathedral’s lack of support for the occupation, said:

"St Paul's Cathedral is built on a deep theological fault line. On the one hand it's set within the boiler room of global capitalism, and on the other it proclaims a theological story that has some pretty fierce things to say about money and wealth.” He was joined by the Archbishop of York of York in denouncing the super rich and unbridled greed.

The history of capitalism in Britain has seen the established church, politicians and the heads of finance and industry working together to keep the lid on discontent and maintain at least a semblance of control over things.

And that is why the church and the City are working might and main to “bridge the differences between the protesters and the City”, as Ken Costa, former chair of Lazards International, puts it.

Costa claims that “the market economy has shifted from its moral foundations with disastrous consequences. I cannot recall when public feeling worldwide has run so high.”

Costa has been asked to work on a “form of ethical capitalism”. He has come up with a far more shocking proposal than Miliband could ever align himself with.

The ex-banker says that “maximising shareholder value” cannot continue to be the sole criteria or object for all companies.

But making profits is the very basis – the bottom line - of capitalism as an economic system. These are the system’s actual “moral foundations”, its heart. A kinder, more caring, not-for-profit ethical capitalism has never existed – and never can.

Yes we need a moral compass and a set of values. But we should reject as hypocritical and compromised those the ruling elites constantly try to impose on us. An alternative set of values and a progressive moral outlook is to be found in the growing numbers of people around the world who seek a democratic future free from corporate power. It really is a case of their morals and ours.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary