Just what is happening with the pension funds…??

With the ongoing nightmare on Wall Street, banks being nationalised or going bust. The economy spiralling out of control. What has happened to pension funds…? Pensions are invested on the stock market and with some financial advisers it is more a demonstration of Russian roulette by gambling with your livelihood and security in old age. Many companies already have deficits and with the sudden crash expect more.

One London local authority pension fund was investing in Fannie Mae this summer. This after it was clear that the housing debt in the US was toxic. Local council workers seem to have been the fall guys lined up to be landed with some of the tab for the credit crunch…well you wouldn’t want the chaps to take the hit would you? The same pension fund took a huge hit on Lehman Brothers as well.

Do you know how your pension fund is invested? If not in toxic debt then in a company you were protesting against outside the Excel Centre arms fair or perhaps a company doing some viral marketing to get teenagers to smoke cigarettes. Unlikely though to be in anything making the world a decent place to grow old in. Where are the bonds to develop affordable housing or to make the existing housing stock energy efficient? What about investment in medical research or in alternative transport or sustainable agriculture? If you want something riskier with the potential for growth why not start-up funds for firms with something worthwhile to market? Or a whole vast array of things that need resources to produce the goods and service that are needed to make sure the world is a better place in the future?

The whole financial system is one vast con to make sure that the ordinary people of the world who have to work for a living get royally ripped off. Whatever the discontinuities of the last week this is the continuity that the bosses are looking to preserve. The example of the people in the US bombarding congress with phone calls and emails is one that we should all look to follow. We need to raise people’s understanding of these things. Not part of what makes your life worth living but if you do not understand it and do not think about it the bosses will be happy to do the thinking and deciding for you. Yes we will end up slaving away to 80…if we let them.

A couple of years ago local authority staff took a one-day strike throughout Britain to defend their pension rights. The strike was intended to be the opening shot in a long campaign to defend people’s pension rights. The turnout for the strike was good with successful picket lines. The union leadership spoke left and acted right. Bizarrely they announced a victory as they sold out the strike’s demands. People will strike if they know that they are defending their future standards of living. There needs to be campaigning around not just the level of pension provision but the nature of it. This will also help defeat attempts to use divide and rule tactics pitching private sector employees against public sector workers.

This is something that people can organise around. Organise, organise, organise and when you have finished organising…organise a whole lot more.

That way you might just be victorious.

Useful articles about the credit crunch can be viewed on the LRC website as part of LEAP.

Prescription charges to be abolished in the north of Ireland

Prescription charges will be abolished in the north of Ireland by April 2010 (the cost will be reduced to £3 in January 2009). Wales already abolished charges in 2007 and Scotland will do the same in 2011.

So that leaves…. England.

Dr Brian Dunn of the British Medical Association NI said: “The inequalities in the current system of charging are extremely unfair. For example, someone with diabetes who also has chronic bronchitis will be exempt from paying for his or her prescriptions yet a person with chronic bronchitis and suffering from heart failure must pay. This is a very positive step forward and all those patients who have found it very hard over the years to pay for their medication will welcome it – as does the BMA.”

This is one important progressive step for social justice and equality. And which should be applauded. Unfortunately, England is lagging behind when it comes to scrapping the charges…..

Wall Street in free fall: chickens coming home to roost

Bradford and Bingley has been nationalised and news has just been announced that US Congress has voted down the $700bn to bail out the banks. And lets not forget that Bradford and Bingley, the demutualised building society, had cornered the niche market of “buy to let” mortgages along with self-certification loans (“liar” loans). Oh, yes, those halcyon days of the housing market that has gone bust.

All this before an expected huge rise in unemployment. What will happen when half a million more in Britain are trying to get by on £60.50 each week? Lots more companies with serious cash flow issues. Lots more prime mortgages turning sub-prime. We may even see the neo-liberals of 3 weeks ago bypassing the current social democratic phase of nationalisation with big bucks from the taxpayer towards Bolshevik expropriation as the taxpayer will be fresh out of big bucks.

The last 30 years will be mulled over by economic historians yet to be born. The debt driven free market jamboree was meant to be the saving of capitalism following the exhaustion of Keynesian welfarism in the 1970′s. Except that it was a lie. The free market was said to be self regulating. This was an axiomatic truth that could not be denied for three decades. All it has achieved is that on top of the crisis of  arising from  capitalist overproduction there is a huge surplus of fictitious capital. The owners of this capital will not be pleased by its destruction.

This destruction will be carried out by expropriation at some stage. This destruction is necessary for the continued existence of capitalism as an economic system. The Bolshevik methods mentioned above will be carried out for the benefit of the property owning class as a whole. BTW whatever can or cannot be said whether the working class is ‘in’ or ‘for’ itself the bourgeoisie most certainly is the latter. The decades of neo-liberalism represent the most far reaching and most self conscious ideological training any social class has received in history.

What is certain is that ordinary people will be expected to bear the cost. If you like the working class will be expropriated of the things that have been so hard won and hard defended over the years. Lower living standards. Lower hours at work. Shivering to death as a pensioner. Never going away on holiday. Worrying about what to eat tonight. Getting visits from the bailiffs. Utility cut-offs. Being chucked out of your job and going on workfare. Cuts in public services so tough for you if you cannot pay for a top up charge for your op.

All this and worse if we do not get organised now. We need to be militant around pay, around housing, around tax for the low paid and around pensions. People will be angry and people will be ready for a lead. Remember: we need to make our own optimism. We need to do this by organising. Organising. Organising.

Disabled Peoples’ Direct Action Network – anti poverty demo

Gordon the fair..? Dream on…..

It’s a funny old capitalist world, isn’t it? Gordon Brown makes a speech and many media political pundits pontificate, bizarrely, that this was  “unashamedly” left-wing.

The stage managed, glitzy, hyped up and choreographed speech along with the standing ovation before Brown finished.

Obama-sque style where the missus introduces you (and just to ram the point home regarding power politics and personalities Sarah Brown is in the same picture taken with Sarah Palin!).

And just because there’s a “Brown bounce” in the polls doesn’t mean that NL’s woes are over. Far from it. A mixture of Brown looking like he has come out fighting and right-wing populism, the usual dog whistle politics has caused this surge in the polls.

And what is particularly funny is when Brown said: And just as those who supported the dogma of big government were proved wrong, so too those who argue for the dogma of unbridled free market forces have been proved wrong.

And what is even more remarkable is when Brown says: Nobody in Britain should get to take more out of the system than they are willing to put in. I am proud that Britain will honour our obligations to provide refuge from persecution. And we recognise the contribution that migrants make to our economy and our society, but the other side of welcoming newcomers who can help Britain is being tough about excluding those adults who won’t and can’t.

What is an attack on asylum seekers should be an attack on unfetted corporate capitalism. Something for nothing, exploiting off the backs of the poor. Brown attacks claimants in the usual judgemental and moralistic tone that means further punishing and victimising the poor by creating a hierarchy of deserving and underserving poor. Divide and rule, in other words: So our policy is that everyone who can work, must work. That’s why James Purnell has introduced reforms so that apart from genuine cases of illness, the dole is only for those looking for work or actively preparing for it. That’s only fair to the people pulling their weight.

So….how is NL going to save to the economy:

First, transparency – all transactions need to be transparent and not hidden.

Second, sound banking, a requirement to demonstrate that risks can be managed and priced for bad times as well as good.

Third, responsibility – no member of a bank’s board should be able to say they did not understand the risks they were running and walk away from them.

Fourth, integrity – removing conflicts of interest so that bonuses should not be based on short term speculative deals but on hard work, effort and enterprise.

And fifth, global standards and supervision because the flows of capital are global, then supervision can no longer just be national but has to be global.

All very well. But free market capitalism is all about getting and keeping your snout in the trough. It is about unloading social costs onto others: usually the working class. The alocation of resources is a private matter for the owners of capital to decide in their own best interest. Company law dictates that directors look to increase profits. Shareholders can sue the board if other considerations are taken into account in the making of business decisions. The bourgeoise will defend this dung hill of oppressive rubbish to the very end. Brown’s set of principles would need a revolution to be enforced. This begs the question why if you are going to have a revolution why keep the same bunch of parasites in charge?

‘Cool Hand Luke’ dies

I recall reading some months ago that Paul Newman had kinda dropped out of films due to cancer. And now the news that he has died. There’s a good obit by Philip French on him in today’s Observer. I liked his films obviously some more than others and he had thescreen idol good looks.

Dammit, I even liked some of the salad dressings he sold! And there was something likable about Newman in a similar way to the late Jack Lemmon.

Politically he was kinda left-wing. And for the longevity of his marriage to the actress Joanne Woodward. His early films were about anti-heroes and kinda rebels without a cause (he was part of the New York Actors’ Studio). I liked him in Road to Perdition (but not sure of the accent), Shadow Makers, The Sting, even Towering Inferno, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Somebody up there likes me.

God, the father and the patriarchal straitjacket….

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” (Philip Larkin)

Watching the Cutting Edge’s The Virgin Daughters was rather reminiscent of a Channel 4 documentary shown a couple of years ago about virgin brides, abstinence and purity pledges in a town called Lubbock, Texas in the heart of bible belt country but dig deep beneath the abstinence and you come across soaring STDs and pregnancies. Lack of sex education and information coupled with lies and misinformation spread by the church that instilled ignorance and fear.

Last night’s Cutting Edge’s programme was a further dose of patriarchy intertwined with religion with women specifically under the cosh. The programme follows various families organising for the Purity Ball in Colorado Springs where they will sign a Purity Covenant.

Statistically, one in six American girls pledge to remain to a virgin until their wedding night and some won’t kiss a man until their wedding night. The programme actually unnerved and made me angry witnessing fathers controlling their daughters lives under the misguided belief they are instilling positve reinforcement, validation and a “wholesome” respect for themselves. Nothing more than power, control and property rights…chattels.

Many of the girls and young women reiterated the need for purity, God’s will and importance of a strong father figure. Everything revolved around the strong father figure, language that included chivalry. The exemplification of the ideal woman would be one who would be pure until her wedding night. The strong masculine father figure, the main provider to protect his family from the morass of temptations and vices, the usual suspects being sex, drugs and the rock ‘n roll kinda lifestyle. Girls and young women accepted the importance of getting their parents, their dads vetting their potential boyfriends and act as chaperones as you don’t want those raging hormones to interfere with God’s will such as holding hands.

What struck me was how easier it was for the young men that reflects the sexist double standards and hypocrisy, the pressure to conform isn’t as intense as it for girls and women. The personal narratives expose a real psychological maelstrom of control, conformity and coercion.

The parents have experienced bitterness, rejection, pain and generally life’s miseries in regards to personal and sexual relationships. What they seem intent on is projecting their own bad experiences onto their daughters by instilling this fear of the big insecure bad world and that only the family (along with religion) can “protect” them.

But surely, it is up to these young women to make their own mistakes and that means the trials and tribulations of sex, relationships and sexuality. And that life is one steep learning curve? Relationships are already minefields, you don’t need the extra head fuck of religion, guilt and obedience.

 It is all happy smiley faces of girls and young women in their cherished floaty dresses where they feel like a Princess for a day, being validated and supported by Dad…. But what happens when life isn’t that simple and nor can it be lived it in a vacuum?

What happens when one of these young women succumbs and ends up having sex out of wedlock… are the mums and dads still as welcoming, understanding, and forgiving? One young woman did all of that and ended up pregnant (later miscarried). Her parents made her aware in no uncertain terms that she was a failure, couldn’t trust her and made her feel guilty. She said that she had no knowledge of sex education and that her life was the church. Even now her parents try and control her relationships but it seems she has kicked against their authority and is now living her own life on her terms (hallelujah to that, sisters!). So is this what will happen to any of these girls and young women who, in the opinion of their parents, stray from the straight and narrow and transgress?

These parents may honestly believe that they have the best intentions at heart when they say that they want their daughters to have dignity and worth. But power and control is still being peddled with a diet of religion. These girls and young women are expected to live a life based on their parents own religious and fixed interpretation of the world. A scary and stifling understanding of the world where purity and Godliness is pitched against a society that they view has no values. These girls and young women are under the cosh of patriarchy and religion, dutiful daughters obeying the word of their fathers.

Rather like the young women in the programme about Lubbock I hope that these young women rebel and are able to express their own desires and needs based on their own terms without the rigidity of the Bible, fear and being able to break out of the straitjacket of patriarchy, conformity and the role of the family along with sticking their two fingers up to the patriarchal institution!!

People should be allowed to make mistakes, make their own choices and decisions, fuck up like everyone else and learn from those mistakes as opposed to pledging yourself to something that you may regret and that may become unobtainable.

And this momentous occasion, the wedding night, is being built up and blown out of proportion. What happens if it isn’t all cracked up to be? It everything expected to miraculously fall into place, patience being that over rated virtue?

You build an unreal bubble mythical world based on rigid expectations that tries to be separate from the secular world, a life tainted with a Godless and valueless society. But you can’t separate the two and once you escape from your family, you enter the big wide world. People change and expectations change. But even if you stick to the pledge and obey your parents but it still doesn’t work out, what then?

Women should be able to be who they want to be without any interference from the family, religion and the state. It’s about women being themselves on their terms. Hallelujah to that…..

WTF Nick Cohen..???

I was aghast at reading Nick Cohen’s appalling apologia for the Met over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Really angry when I read it. I was ready to write something about his article when I saw Kevin Blowe’s excellent riposte to Cohen on the Justice4Jean website, please see below.

A response to Nick Cohen

I’m sure there was a time when the journalist Nick Cohen understood that to describe oneself as broadly part of ‘the Left’, or even a liberal, requires at least some understanding of the unequal relationship between the power of the state and its people. The history of the modern state – from the framing of America’s constitution to the development of international human rights law – has been founded on limiting the repressive power of governments over their citizens. But faced with a theocratic rejection of universal human rights by proponents of a radical form of Islam, itself a dismissal of the Enlightenment ideals that first challenged absolute power, Cohen has worked himself into such a fury that he chooses to reject them too.

Cohen’s argument are so thread-bare and confused, but so prevalent amongst those who denigrate the search for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes, that it’s worth refuting them point by point.

He says that “when the police kill an innocent man in a dictatorship, no one dares protest”, which may come as a surprise to those who protested against the death of Steve Biko in apartheid South Africa, but in general it’s true: dictatorships have a tendency to “shoot first and ask questions later”, often justifying their actions on the basis of national security and condemning and persecuting citizens who protest as ‘terrorist sympathisers’. Presumably Cohen believes that Brazil is not a dictatorship, for he acknowledges that in cities like Rio, “there are protests aplenty about police violence but they have scant effect on men who are little more than murderers in uniform.” But the subtext of his argument is clear enough: because the Rio police kill three people every day, we shouldn’t make such a fuss about the killing of one man in London.

Exactly how many people need to die at the hands of the police in a liberal democracy before it becomes ‘a national scandal’ is less clear. Perhaps there’s a mathematical formula or some graphs that Cohen knows about and we don’t. Or perhaps (and here Cohen’s logic becomes even more confused) every death is a disgrace, for “we don’t always realise it but we are lucky to live in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously.”

What Cohen fails to acknowledge is that the level of anger about the killing of an innocent individual by the state has particular national characteristics and a death becomes a scandal precisely because of its impact on others. In the UK, routine arming o the police is generally resisted by the public – even the police themselves oppose it. It’s not true, however, that deaths in police custody are exceptionally rare, for in truth, whilst deceitfully playing the numbers-game in comparing Britain with Brazil may encourage Cohen to feel lucky, we don’t live in a country that takes breaches of its rules as seriously as it should. Since 1993, there have been 674 recorded deaths in police custody. Forty six people have been shot dead by police since 1990. There have been fifteen inquest verdicts of ‘unlawful killing’ by police officers – and no convictions by the courts.

Most bereaved families would argue that these deaths (never mind the many deaths in other countries) have been largely ignored. It’s the idea that, suddenly, anyone who has brown skin or looks like a Muslim or happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is at an increased risk of being gunned down by those charged with protecting the public, and that this might actually be acceptable at a time when people already face the terrifying threat of morbidly zealous fanatics with rucksack bombs, that is precisely the reason why Jean Charles de Menezes’ death has particularly horrified so many when other deaths have not.

Cohen prefers to see other motives, but the example he chooses in order to make a sweeping generalisation about the “partisans in the vicious arguments over London’s policing” is frankly bizarre. His anecdote about a radio producer, asking for a comment that the Met is as much a threat to the lives of Londoners as radical Islam, says more about the nature of Cohen’s own profession and its eagerness to sensationalise and simplify, traits that Cohen is himself a master of and that are described in forensic detail in fellow Guardian journalist Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News. Nevertheless, with all the obsession of a conspiracy theorist, Cohen sees this as evidence, where no evidence exists, that thousands have a “psychological need to deny the horrors of the world” for daring to protest (something no-one in a dictatorship has the courage to do, but clearly no-one anywhere, in Cohen’s view, should ever consider).

Finally, Cohen then psychologically projects his own prejudices onto “the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes” by suggesting that we would be the first to denounce the police if a terrorist detonated a bomb on the London Underground. Somehow, I imagine that no-one would be issuing louder denunciations than Nick Cohen himself in such circumstances. The rest of us would probably recognise that fault for a bombing would lie squarely with the bombers, that sometimes it is impossible to stop those who are really determined to murder, but that questions about the quality of police intelligence, how it is acted upon and what steps were taken to stop a suspect from entering a Tube station are legitimate tests of the accountability of public servants – just as they are in the case of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, a scientist and a giant of the Enlightenment that theocracy stands opposed to, said that “those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I wonder what he would have made of someone who says, “I don’t want to defend the Met’s mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later.”

Franklin also advised that that we should ”use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.” More in hope than expectation, I’d suggest that at some point soon, Nick Cohen would do well to follow this wisest of counsel.

Kevin Blowe
Justice4Jean Campaign Supporter

Hat tip: Ten Percent

Brief update on Jean Charles de Menezes inquest

Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the inquest today so I missed DAC McDowall being questioned by Jean Charles’s family representative Michael Mansfield. And his first question sets the scene:

Michael Mansfield: “The general question, therefore, in that context, is this: what went so wrong that a totally innocent man me this death”?

McDowall: “It’s my belief, sir, that there was a mistaken identification and then there was doubt about whether that identification was correct or not. And I think that was instrumental in bringing about the tragic outcome that we know of”.

Looking at the transcripts for today show that the questions Mansfield asks are pertinent and further expose incompetent decision making, the lack of information gathering (the house at 21 Scotia Road…why didn’t someone check what kind of house it was, single occupancy, series of flats and so on. The surveillance team only found out when they arrived it had a communal door), the chain of command, revising operational strategy and breakdown in communication.

And the following answer from DAC McDowall regarding lack of positive identification and short timeframes:

McDowall: “I would say it’s a situation where officers are sent into action daily. It is quite commonplace for timeframes to be short, it is quite commonplace for identifications to be made in that sort of timeframe”.

Michael Mansfield: “You are not suggesting therefore that this is likely to happen again, are you”?

McDowall: “I very much hope that this will never happen again. But at the same time, with human beings, it is entirelyfeasible that some such tragedy may occur again, with just the way that circumstances sometimes unravel themselves”.

That doesn’t bode well, does it?

And Michael Mansfield rightly makes the observation that an obvious lack of a positive id wasn’t a satisfactory basis for a critical shot.

Elizabeth Windsor refused pay increase…..

What a heartrending and heartbreaking story that can only create a deep sense of shock and brings tears of…… laughter and mirth. Oh, the inhumanity, oh, the sadness…. oh, the injustice and oh, my sarcasm has gone into overload (sarcasm and irony isn’t easy to illustrate in the blog-o-sphere).

Picture the scene Elizabeth Windsor begging the government to increase, by over £7m,  the Civil List as it is rather paltry and can’t keep the royals and their hangers on in the lavish lifestyle they have become accustomed to.

And this is all going on in private, no public scrutiny or transparency. What the hell does she spend her cash on, do we know?

Her finances have also been hit by rising fuel costs and the crash in the stock market, where some of the Civil List reserve has been invested.

So has everyone else been hit by rising fuel costs and overall the cost of living. Does she think of the pensioners who will have problems paying for their fuel bills?

A Palace source said: “We have spent a lot of time convincing the Department for Culture Media and Sport of the merits of our case but I am not convinced they are listening very carefully to our arguments. It is a major disappointment.”

And funnily enough, they too are blaming the Olympics swallowing up the cash when it could be HRH’s. And she has been forced to sell off some of her many many acres of land to make ends meet. Heartbreaking!

Vive la Republique!