BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
THE NEWS AND BLOGS WEBSITE AT:
www.news-and-blogs.tk
www.news-and-blogs.tk
posted by Barry Fockler at 10:23 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
McCain Would Privatize Social Security
Published on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
by Dean Baker
The Republicans have already turned to sick sexual innuendo and nonsense about their vice-presidential candidate, pigs and lipstick in order to distract the public from the real issues in this campaign. One of the items that should be on top of the list of real issues is Senator McCain's plans to privatize and cut Social Security.
McCain has repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing Social Security along the lines proposed by President Bush. For those who have forgotten that nightmare, Bush's plan would have reduced benefits by approximately one percent a year for many workers.
Workers who retired 10 years after the plan was put in place would see a 10 percent reduction in benefits compared with the currently projected levels. Workers who retired 20 years after the plan was implemented would see approximately a 20 percent cut in benefits and workers who retired 40 years after the plan started would see their benefits cut by close to 40 percent.
This schedule of cuts would apply to workers who earn $100,000 a year. Workers who earn $60,000 a year would see cuts of about half this size.
The losses to retired workers could mean big benefits for the financial industry. Under some versions of the plan, the financial industry would rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in fees and commissions over the next 40 years.
According to a recent World Bank analysis, the financial industry pocketed 15-20 percent of the money paid into the privatized Social Security system in Chile, which has often been held up as a model by privatizers in the United States. Given the losses that the millionaire Wall Street bozos have incurred with the housing crash, it is understandable that Senator McCain would want to help the very rich needy.
Privatization would be especially painful coming now, in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble. The huge baby boom cohort that is just now reaching retirement age has seen most of their wealth wiped out by the housing crash.
A recent analysis that I did with David Rosnick, my colleague at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, showed that a typical late-baby-boomer household (between the ages of 45 and 54) will have less than $100,000 in wealth in 2009. This figure includes 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts, personal savings and home equity.
A relatively small share of these late baby boomers has traditional defined-benefit pensions. In other words, these families are going to have very little to support themselves in retirement other than the Social Security that Senator McCain is so anxious to cut.
While the Bush-McCain crew has long been trying to whip up fears about Social Security's finances, the reality is that the program is financially solid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently updated its analysis of the program's finances.
The analysis projects that Social Security will be able to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2049 with no changes whatsoever. Even after 2049, when the program is first projected to face a shortfall, the payable benefit is projected to be more than 30 percent higher than what the average retiree gets today, and the payable amount would continue to rise from that level every year.
The privatizers have worked hard to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs, but this is simply a lie. We are going to face many problems that dwarf the dimensions of the projected Social Security shortfall. For example, the annual costs of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan are approximately three times as large as the annual revenue that would be needed to eliminate the projected Social Security shortfall.
The 2049 date when Social Security is first projected to face a shortfall is more than three decades after the latest date when the next president can leave office. John McCain will be 113 when Social Security is first projected to be unable to pay full benefits. In a country where millions of families are struggling to hang onto their homes, and tens of millions are struggling to pay for health care and child care, a distant and relatively minor problem like the projected Social Security shortfall hardly warrants center stage.
The public should know that Social Security is fundamentally sound today and is projected to be sound far into the future. The line about Social Security going bankrupt is just a scare tactic pushed by the privatizers.
The presidential debate must return to Social Security and other issues that affect people's lives. The sleaze that Senator McCain and his vice-presidential candidate throw out as a distraction should be left to the pigs.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
by Dean Baker
The Republicans have already turned to sick sexual innuendo and nonsense about their vice-presidential candidate, pigs and lipstick in order to distract the public from the real issues in this campaign. One of the items that should be on top of the list of real issues is Senator McCain's plans to privatize and cut Social Security.
McCain has repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing Social Security along the lines proposed by President Bush. For those who have forgotten that nightmare, Bush's plan would have reduced benefits by approximately one percent a year for many workers.
Workers who retired 10 years after the plan was put in place would see a 10 percent reduction in benefits compared with the currently projected levels. Workers who retired 20 years after the plan was implemented would see approximately a 20 percent cut in benefits and workers who retired 40 years after the plan started would see their benefits cut by close to 40 percent.
This schedule of cuts would apply to workers who earn $100,000 a year. Workers who earn $60,000 a year would see cuts of about half this size.
The losses to retired workers could mean big benefits for the financial industry. Under some versions of the plan, the financial industry would rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in fees and commissions over the next 40 years.
According to a recent World Bank analysis, the financial industry pocketed 15-20 percent of the money paid into the privatized Social Security system in Chile, which has often been held up as a model by privatizers in the United States. Given the losses that the millionaire Wall Street bozos have incurred with the housing crash, it is understandable that Senator McCain would want to help the very rich needy.
Privatization would be especially painful coming now, in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble. The huge baby boom cohort that is just now reaching retirement age has seen most of their wealth wiped out by the housing crash.
A recent analysis that I did with David Rosnick, my colleague at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, showed that a typical late-baby-boomer household (between the ages of 45 and 54) will have less than $100,000 in wealth in 2009. This figure includes 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts, personal savings and home equity.
A relatively small share of these late baby boomers has traditional defined-benefit pensions. In other words, these families are going to have very little to support themselves in retirement other than the Social Security that Senator McCain is so anxious to cut.
While the Bush-McCain crew has long been trying to whip up fears about Social Security's finances, the reality is that the program is financially solid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently updated its analysis of the program's finances.
The analysis projects that Social Security will be able to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2049 with no changes whatsoever. Even after 2049, when the program is first projected to face a shortfall, the payable benefit is projected to be more than 30 percent higher than what the average retiree gets today, and the payable amount would continue to rise from that level every year.
The privatizers have worked hard to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs, but this is simply a lie. We are going to face many problems that dwarf the dimensions of the projected Social Security shortfall. For example, the annual costs of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan are approximately three times as large as the annual revenue that would be needed to eliminate the projected Social Security shortfall.
The 2049 date when Social Security is first projected to face a shortfall is more than three decades after the latest date when the next president can leave office. John McCain will be 113 when Social Security is first projected to be unable to pay full benefits. In a country where millions of families are struggling to hang onto their homes, and tens of millions are struggling to pay for health care and child care, a distant and relatively minor problem like the projected Social Security shortfall hardly warrants center stage.
The public should know that Social Security is fundamentally sound today and is projected to be sound far into the future. The line about Social Security going bankrupt is just a scare tactic pushed by the privatizers.
The presidential debate must return to Social Security and other issues that affect people's lives. The sleaze that Senator McCain and his vice-presidential candidate throw out as a distraction should be left to the pigs.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
posted by Barry Fockler at 10:21 AM
0 comments
Sunday, August 31, 2008
BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
THE NEWS AND BLOGS WEBSITE AT:
posted by Barry Fockler at 11:27 AM
0 comments
Exclusive: Chief Fired by Palin Speaks Out
Washington Post
29/08/08 "Washington Post" -- - The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.
Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.
Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.
"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.
But he said Todd Palin told him Wooten "shouldn't be a trooper. I've tried to explain to him, you can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.
"I think he's emotionally committed in trying to see that his former brother-in-law is punished."
The allegation against Palin, "undercuts one of the points they are making that she is an ethical reformer," said Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who is managing a $100,000 investigation into the firing of Walter Monegan.
29/08/08 "Washington Post" -- - The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.
Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.
Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.
"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.
But he said Todd Palin told him Wooten "shouldn't be a trooper. I've tried to explain to him, you can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.
"I think he's emotionally committed in trying to see that his former brother-in-law is punished."
The allegation against Palin, "undercuts one of the points they are making that she is an ethical reformer," said Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who is managing a $100,000 investigation into the firing of Walter Monegan.
posted by Barry Fockler at 11:26 AM
0 comments
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Chávez announces socialist development project
Granma, Havana, August 22, 2008
CARACAS, August 21.—Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has announced the Orinoco Socialist Development Project, the central objective of which is to give integral impetus to the area in which Venezuela’s oil reserves are located – on the banks of this river – the ABN agency reports.
Appearing on Venezuelan Television’s “Dando y Dando” program, the leader emphasized that the project is to run parallel with the development of the Orinoco Belt Oil Project in order to do away with the scheme of exploitation for profit that has ignored social investment.
During the program Chávez also referred to the nationalization of cement companies in line with government policy on industrial development, which seeks to offer better goods and services to the population.
Translated by Granma International
CARACAS, August 21.—Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has announced the Orinoco Socialist Development Project, the central objective of which is to give integral impetus to the area in which Venezuela’s oil reserves are located – on the banks of this river – the ABN agency reports.
Appearing on Venezuelan Television’s “Dando y Dando” program, the leader emphasized that the project is to run parallel with the development of the Orinoco Belt Oil Project in order to do away with the scheme of exploitation for profit that has ignored social investment.
During the program Chávez also referred to the nationalization of cement companies in line with government policy on industrial development, which seeks to offer better goods and services to the population.
Translated by Granma International
posted by Barry Fockler at 6:55 AM
0 comments
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
The Web of Debt
Introduction
CAPTURED BY THE DEBT SPIDER
by Ellen Hodgson Brown
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Andrew Jackson called the banking cartel a "hydra-headed monster eating the flesh of the common man." New York Mayor John Hylan, writing in the 1920s, called it a "giant octopus" that "seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection." The debt spider has devoured farms, homes and whole countries that have become trapped in its web. In a February 2005 article called "The Death of Banking," financial commentator Hans Schicht wrote:
The fact that the Banker is allowed to extend credit several times his own capital base and that the Banking Cartels, the Central Banks, are licensed to issue fresh paper money in exchange for treasury paper, [has] provided them with free lunch for eternity. . . . Through a network of anonymous financial spider webbing only a handful of global King Bankers own and control it all. . . . Everybody, people, enterprise, State and foreign countries, all have become slaves chained to the Banker's credit ropes.1
Schicht writes that he had an opportunity in his career to observe the wizards of finance as an insider at close range. The game has gotten so centralized and concentrated, he says, that the greater part of U.S. banking and enterprise is now under the control of a small inner circle of men. He calls the game "spider webbing." Its rules include:
Making any concentration of wealth invisible.
Exercising control through "leverage" – mergers, takeovers, chain share holdings where one company holds shares of other companies, conditions annexed to loans, and so forth.
Exercising tight personal management and control, with a minimum of insiders and front-men who themselves have only partial knowledge of the game.
The late Dr. Carroll Quigley was a writer and professor of history at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton's mentor. Dr. Quigley wrote from personal knowledge of an elite clique of global financiers bent on controlling the world. Their aim, he said, was "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." This system was "to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements."2 He called this clique simply the "international bankers." Their essence was not race, religion or nationality but was just a passion for control over other humans. The key to their success was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.
The international bankers have succeeded in doing more than just controlling the money supply. Today they actually create the money supply, while making it appear to be created by the government. This devious scheme was revealed by Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s. Speaking at the University of Texas in 1927, he dropped this bombshell:
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.3
Professor Henry C. K. Liu is an economist who graduated from Harvard and chaired a graduate department at UCLA before becoming an investment adviser for developing countries. He calls the current monetary scheme a "cruel hoax." When we wake up to that fact, he says, our entire economic world view will need to be reordered, "just as physics was subject to reordering when man's world view changed with the realization that the earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe."4 The hoax is that there is virtually no "real" money in the system, only debts. Except for coins, which are issued by the government and make up only about one one-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply now consists of debt to private banks, for money they created with accounting entries on their books. It is all done by sleight of hand; and like a magician's trick, we have to see it many times before we realize what is going on. But when we do, it changes everything. All of history has to be rewritten.
The following chapters track the web of deceit that has engulfed us in debt, and present a simple solution that could make the country solvent once again. It is not a new solution but dates back to the Constitution: the power to create money needs to be returned to the government and the people it represents. The federal debt could be paid, income taxes could be eliminated, and social programs could be expanded; and this could all be done without imposing austerity measures on the people or sparking runaway inflation. Utopian as that may sound, it represents the thinking of some of America's brightest and best, historical and contemporary, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Among other arresting facts explored in this book are that:
The "Federal" Reserve is not actually federal. It is a private corporation owned by a consortium of very large multinational banks. (Chapter 13)
Except for coins, the government does not create money. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are created by the private Federal Reserve, which lends them to the government. (Chapter 2)
Tangible currency (coins and dollar bills) together make up less than 3 percent of the U.S. money supply. The other 97 percent exists only as data entries on computer screens, and all of this money was created by banks in the form of loans. (Chapters 2 and 17)
The money that banks lend is not recycled from pre-existing deposits. It is new money, which did not exist until it was lent. (Chapters 17 and 18)
Thirty percent of the money created by banks with accounting entries is invested for their own accounts. (Chapter 18)
The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry, has today become a giant betting machine. An estimated $370 trillion are now riding on complex high-risk bets known as derivatives – 28 times the $13 trillion annual output of the entire U.S. economy. These bets are funded by big U.S. banks and are made largely with borrowed money created on a computer screen. Derivatives can be and have been used to manipulate markets, loot businesses, and destroy competitor economies. (Chapters 20 and 32)
The U.S. federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson. Only the interest gets paid, while the principal portion continues to grow. (Chapter 2)
The federal income tax was instituted specifically to coerce taxpayers to pay the interest due to the banks on the federal debt. If the money supply had been created by the government rather than borrowed from banks that created it, the income tax would have been unnecessary. (Chapters 13 and 43)
The interest alone on the federal debt will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay. When we can't pay, the Federal Reserve's debt-based dollar system must collapse. (Chapter 29)
Contrary to popular belief, creeping inflation is not caused by the government irresponsibly printing dollars. It is caused by banks expanding the money supply with loans. (Chapter 10)
Most of the runaway inflation seen in "banana republics" has been caused, not by national governments over-printing money, but by global institutional speculators attacking local currencies and devaluing them on international markets. (Chapter 25)
The same sort of speculative devaluation could happen to the U.S. dollar if international investors were to abandon it as a global "reserve" currency, something they are now threatening to do in retaliation for what they perceive to be American economic imperialism. (Chapters 29 and 37)
There is a way out of this morass. The early American colonists found it, and so did Abraham Lincoln and some other national leaders: the government can take back the money-issuing power from the banks. (Chapters 8 and 24)
The bankers' Federal Reserve Notes and the government's coins represent two separate money systems that have been competing for dominance throughout recorded history. At one time, the right to issue money was the sovereign right of the king; but that right got usurped by private moneylenders. Today the sovereigns are the people, and the coins that make up less than one one-thousandth of the money supply are all that are left of our sovereign money. Many nations have successfully issued their own money, at least for a time; but the bankers' debt-money has generally infiltrated the system and taken over in the end. These concepts are so foreign to what we have been taught that it can be hard to wrap our minds around them, but the facts have been substantiated by many reliable authorities. To cite a few –
Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in 1934:
We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. 5
Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955, acknowledged:
Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . . Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.6
Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower, said in an interview reported in the August 31, 1959 issue of U.S. News and World Report:
[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, wrote during the Asian currency crisis of 1998:
[P]rivately held money reserves in the hands of "institutional speculators" far exceed the limited capabilities of the World's central banks. The latter acting individually or collectively are no longer able to fight the tide of speculative activity. Monetary policy is in the hands of private creditors who have the ability to freeze State budgets, paralyse the payments process, thwart the regular disbursement of wages to millions of workers (as in the former Soviet Union) and precipitate the collapse of production and social programmes.7
Today, Federal Reserve Notes and U.S. dollar loans dominate the economy of the world; but this international currency is not money issued by the American people or their government. It is money created and lent by a private cartel of international bankers, and this cartel has the United States itself hopelessly entangled in a web of debt. By 2006, combined personal, corporate and federal debt in the United States had reached a staggering 44 trillion dollars – four times the collective national income, or $147,312 for every man, woman and child in the country.8 The United States is legally bankrupt, defined in the dictionary as being unable to pay one's debts, being insolvent, or having liabilities in excess of a reasonable market value of assets held. By October 2006, the debt of the U.S. government had hit a breath-taking $8.5 trillion. Local, state and national governments are all so heavily in debt that they have been forced to sell off public assets to satisfy creditors. Crowded schools, crowded roads, and cutbacks in public transportation are eroding the quality of American life. A 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure an overall grade of D, including its roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works. "Americans are spending more time stuck in traffic and less time at home with their families," said the group's president. "We need to establish a comprehensive, long-term infrastructure plan."9 We need to but we can't, because government at every level is broke.
Money in the Land of Oz
If governments everywhere are in debt, who are they in debt to? The answer is that they are in debt to private banks. The "cruel hoax" is that governments are in debt for money created on a computer screen, money they could have created themselves. The vast power acquired through this sleight of hand by a small clique of men pulling the strings of government behind the scenes evokes images from The Wizard of Oz, a classic American fairytale that has become a rich source of imagery for financial commentators. Editorialist Christopher Mark wrote in a series called "The Grand Deception":
Welcome to the world of the International Banker, who like the famous film, The Wizard of Oz, stands behind the curtain of orchestrated national and international policymakers and so-called elected leaders. 10
The late Murray Rothbard, an economist of the classical Austrian School, wrote:
Money and banking have been made to appear as mysterious and arcane processes that must be guided and operated by a technocratic elite. They are nothing of the sort. In money, even more than the rest of our affairs, we have been tricked by a malignant Wizard of Oz.11
In a 2002 article titled "Who Controls the Federal Reserve System?", Victor Thorn wrote:
In essence, money has become nothing more than illusion -- an electronic figure or amount on a computer screen. . . . As time goes on, we have an increasing tendency toward being sucked into this Wizard of Oz vortex of unreality [by] magician-priests that use the illusion of money as their control device.12
James Galbraith wrote in The New American Prospect:
We are left . . . with the thought that the Federal Reserve Board does not know what it is doing. This is the "Wizard of Oz" theory, in which we pull away the curtains only to find an old man with a wrinkled face, playing with lights and loudspeakers.13
The analogies to The Wizard of Oz work for a reason. According to later commentators, the tale was actually written as a monetary allegory, at a time when the "money question" was a key issue in American politics. In the 1890s, politicians were still hotly debating who should create the nation's money and what it should consist of. Should it be created by the government, with full accountability to the people? Or should it be created by private banks behind closed doors, for the banks' own private ends?
William Jennings Bryan, the Populist candidate for President in 1896 and again in 1900, mounted the last serious challenge to the right of private bankers to create the national money supply. According to the commentators, Bryan was represented in Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by the Cowardly Lion. The Lion finally proved he was the King of Beasts by decapitating a giant spider that was terrorizing everyone in the forest. The giant spider Bryan challenged at the turn of the twentieth century was the Morgan/Rockefeller banking cartel, which was bent on usurping the power to create the nation's money from the people and their representative government.
Before World War I, two opposing systems of political economy competed for dominance in the United States. One operated out of Wall Street, the New York financial district that came to be the symbol of American finance. Its most important address was 23 Wall Street, known as the "House of Morgan." J. P. Morgan was an agent of powerful British banking interests. The Wizards of Wall Street and the Old World bankers pulling their strings sought to establish a national currency that was based on the "gold standard," one created privately by the financial elite who controlled the gold. The other system dated back to Benjamin Franklin and operated out of Philadelphia, the country's first capital, where the Constitutional Convention was held and Franklin's "Society for Political Inquiries" planned the industrialization and public works that would free the new republic from economic slavery to England.14 The Philadelphia faction favored a bank on the model established in provincial Pennsylvania, where a state loan office issued and lent money, collected the interest, and returned it to the provincial government to be used in place of taxes. President Abraham Lincoln returned to the colonial system of government-issued money during the Civil War; but he was assassinated, and the bankers reclaimed control of the money machine. The silent coup of the Wall Street faction culminated with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, something they achieved by misleading Bryan and other wary Congressmen into thinking the Federal Reserve was actually federal.
Today the debate over who should create the national money supply is rarely heard, mainly because few people even realize it is an issue. Politicians and economists, along with everybody else, simply assume that money is created by the government, and that the "inflation" everybody complains about is caused by an out-of-control government running the dollar printing presses. The puppeteers working the money machine were more visible in the 1890s than they are today, largely because they had not yet succeeded in buying up the media and cornering public opinion.
Economics is a dry and forbidding subject that has been made intentionally complex by banking interests intent on concealing what is really going on. It is a subject that sorely needs lightening up, with imagery, metaphors, characters and a plot; so before we get into the ponderous details of the modern system of money-based-on-debt, we'll take an excursion back to a simpler time, when the money issues were more obvious and were still a burning topic of discussion. The plot line for The Wizard of Oz has been traced to the first-ever march on Washington, led by an obscure Ohio businessman who sought to persuade Congress to return to Lincoln's system of government-issued money in 1894. Besides sparking a century of protest marches and the country's most famous fairytale, this little-known visionary and the band of unemployed men he led may actually have had the solution to the whole money problem, then and now . . . .
CAPTURED BY THE DEBT SPIDER
by Ellen Hodgson Brown
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Andrew Jackson called the banking cartel a "hydra-headed monster eating the flesh of the common man." New York Mayor John Hylan, writing in the 1920s, called it a "giant octopus" that "seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection." The debt spider has devoured farms, homes and whole countries that have become trapped in its web. In a February 2005 article called "The Death of Banking," financial commentator Hans Schicht wrote:
The fact that the Banker is allowed to extend credit several times his own capital base and that the Banking Cartels, the Central Banks, are licensed to issue fresh paper money in exchange for treasury paper, [has] provided them with free lunch for eternity. . . . Through a network of anonymous financial spider webbing only a handful of global King Bankers own and control it all. . . . Everybody, people, enterprise, State and foreign countries, all have become slaves chained to the Banker's credit ropes.1
Schicht writes that he had an opportunity in his career to observe the wizards of finance as an insider at close range. The game has gotten so centralized and concentrated, he says, that the greater part of U.S. banking and enterprise is now under the control of a small inner circle of men. He calls the game "spider webbing." Its rules include:
Making any concentration of wealth invisible.
Exercising control through "leverage" – mergers, takeovers, chain share holdings where one company holds shares of other companies, conditions annexed to loans, and so forth.
Exercising tight personal management and control, with a minimum of insiders and front-men who themselves have only partial knowledge of the game.
The late Dr. Carroll Quigley was a writer and professor of history at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton's mentor. Dr. Quigley wrote from personal knowledge of an elite clique of global financiers bent on controlling the world. Their aim, he said, was "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." This system was "to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements."2 He called this clique simply the "international bankers." Their essence was not race, religion or nationality but was just a passion for control over other humans. The key to their success was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.
The international bankers have succeeded in doing more than just controlling the money supply. Today they actually create the money supply, while making it appear to be created by the government. This devious scheme was revealed by Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s. Speaking at the University of Texas in 1927, he dropped this bombshell:
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.3
Professor Henry C. K. Liu is an economist who graduated from Harvard and chaired a graduate department at UCLA before becoming an investment adviser for developing countries. He calls the current monetary scheme a "cruel hoax." When we wake up to that fact, he says, our entire economic world view will need to be reordered, "just as physics was subject to reordering when man's world view changed with the realization that the earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe."4 The hoax is that there is virtually no "real" money in the system, only debts. Except for coins, which are issued by the government and make up only about one one-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply now consists of debt to private banks, for money they created with accounting entries on their books. It is all done by sleight of hand; and like a magician's trick, we have to see it many times before we realize what is going on. But when we do, it changes everything. All of history has to be rewritten.
The following chapters track the web of deceit that has engulfed us in debt, and present a simple solution that could make the country solvent once again. It is not a new solution but dates back to the Constitution: the power to create money needs to be returned to the government and the people it represents. The federal debt could be paid, income taxes could be eliminated, and social programs could be expanded; and this could all be done without imposing austerity measures on the people or sparking runaway inflation. Utopian as that may sound, it represents the thinking of some of America's brightest and best, historical and contemporary, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Among other arresting facts explored in this book are that:
The "Federal" Reserve is not actually federal. It is a private corporation owned by a consortium of very large multinational banks. (Chapter 13)
Except for coins, the government does not create money. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are created by the private Federal Reserve, which lends them to the government. (Chapter 2)
Tangible currency (coins and dollar bills) together make up less than 3 percent of the U.S. money supply. The other 97 percent exists only as data entries on computer screens, and all of this money was created by banks in the form of loans. (Chapters 2 and 17)
The money that banks lend is not recycled from pre-existing deposits. It is new money, which did not exist until it was lent. (Chapters 17 and 18)
Thirty percent of the money created by banks with accounting entries is invested for their own accounts. (Chapter 18)
The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry, has today become a giant betting machine. An estimated $370 trillion are now riding on complex high-risk bets known as derivatives – 28 times the $13 trillion annual output of the entire U.S. economy. These bets are funded by big U.S. banks and are made largely with borrowed money created on a computer screen. Derivatives can be and have been used to manipulate markets, loot businesses, and destroy competitor economies. (Chapters 20 and 32)
The U.S. federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson. Only the interest gets paid, while the principal portion continues to grow. (Chapter 2)
The federal income tax was instituted specifically to coerce taxpayers to pay the interest due to the banks on the federal debt. If the money supply had been created by the government rather than borrowed from banks that created it, the income tax would have been unnecessary. (Chapters 13 and 43)
The interest alone on the federal debt will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay. When we can't pay, the Federal Reserve's debt-based dollar system must collapse. (Chapter 29)
Contrary to popular belief, creeping inflation is not caused by the government irresponsibly printing dollars. It is caused by banks expanding the money supply with loans. (Chapter 10)
Most of the runaway inflation seen in "banana republics" has been caused, not by national governments over-printing money, but by global institutional speculators attacking local currencies and devaluing them on international markets. (Chapter 25)
The same sort of speculative devaluation could happen to the U.S. dollar if international investors were to abandon it as a global "reserve" currency, something they are now threatening to do in retaliation for what they perceive to be American economic imperialism. (Chapters 29 and 37)
There is a way out of this morass. The early American colonists found it, and so did Abraham Lincoln and some other national leaders: the government can take back the money-issuing power from the banks. (Chapters 8 and 24)
The bankers' Federal Reserve Notes and the government's coins represent two separate money systems that have been competing for dominance throughout recorded history. At one time, the right to issue money was the sovereign right of the king; but that right got usurped by private moneylenders. Today the sovereigns are the people, and the coins that make up less than one one-thousandth of the money supply are all that are left of our sovereign money. Many nations have successfully issued their own money, at least for a time; but the bankers' debt-money has generally infiltrated the system and taken over in the end. These concepts are so foreign to what we have been taught that it can be hard to wrap our minds around them, but the facts have been substantiated by many reliable authorities. To cite a few –
Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in 1934:
We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. 5
Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955, acknowledged:
Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . . Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.6
Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower, said in an interview reported in the August 31, 1959 issue of U.S. News and World Report:
[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, wrote during the Asian currency crisis of 1998:
[P]rivately held money reserves in the hands of "institutional speculators" far exceed the limited capabilities of the World's central banks. The latter acting individually or collectively are no longer able to fight the tide of speculative activity. Monetary policy is in the hands of private creditors who have the ability to freeze State budgets, paralyse the payments process, thwart the regular disbursement of wages to millions of workers (as in the former Soviet Union) and precipitate the collapse of production and social programmes.7
Today, Federal Reserve Notes and U.S. dollar loans dominate the economy of the world; but this international currency is not money issued by the American people or their government. It is money created and lent by a private cartel of international bankers, and this cartel has the United States itself hopelessly entangled in a web of debt. By 2006, combined personal, corporate and federal debt in the United States had reached a staggering 44 trillion dollars – four times the collective national income, or $147,312 for every man, woman and child in the country.8 The United States is legally bankrupt, defined in the dictionary as being unable to pay one's debts, being insolvent, or having liabilities in excess of a reasonable market value of assets held. By October 2006, the debt of the U.S. government had hit a breath-taking $8.5 trillion. Local, state and national governments are all so heavily in debt that they have been forced to sell off public assets to satisfy creditors. Crowded schools, crowded roads, and cutbacks in public transportation are eroding the quality of American life. A 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure an overall grade of D, including its roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works. "Americans are spending more time stuck in traffic and less time at home with their families," said the group's president. "We need to establish a comprehensive, long-term infrastructure plan."9 We need to but we can't, because government at every level is broke.
Money in the Land of Oz
If governments everywhere are in debt, who are they in debt to? The answer is that they are in debt to private banks. The "cruel hoax" is that governments are in debt for money created on a computer screen, money they could have created themselves. The vast power acquired through this sleight of hand by a small clique of men pulling the strings of government behind the scenes evokes images from The Wizard of Oz, a classic American fairytale that has become a rich source of imagery for financial commentators. Editorialist Christopher Mark wrote in a series called "The Grand Deception":
Welcome to the world of the International Banker, who like the famous film, The Wizard of Oz, stands behind the curtain of orchestrated national and international policymakers and so-called elected leaders. 10
The late Murray Rothbard, an economist of the classical Austrian School, wrote:
Money and banking have been made to appear as mysterious and arcane processes that must be guided and operated by a technocratic elite. They are nothing of the sort. In money, even more than the rest of our affairs, we have been tricked by a malignant Wizard of Oz.11
In a 2002 article titled "Who Controls the Federal Reserve System?", Victor Thorn wrote:
In essence, money has become nothing more than illusion -- an electronic figure or amount on a computer screen. . . . As time goes on, we have an increasing tendency toward being sucked into this Wizard of Oz vortex of unreality [by] magician-priests that use the illusion of money as their control device.12
James Galbraith wrote in The New American Prospect:
We are left . . . with the thought that the Federal Reserve Board does not know what it is doing. This is the "Wizard of Oz" theory, in which we pull away the curtains only to find an old man with a wrinkled face, playing with lights and loudspeakers.13
The analogies to The Wizard of Oz work for a reason. According to later commentators, the tale was actually written as a monetary allegory, at a time when the "money question" was a key issue in American politics. In the 1890s, politicians were still hotly debating who should create the nation's money and what it should consist of. Should it be created by the government, with full accountability to the people? Or should it be created by private banks behind closed doors, for the banks' own private ends?
William Jennings Bryan, the Populist candidate for President in 1896 and again in 1900, mounted the last serious challenge to the right of private bankers to create the national money supply. According to the commentators, Bryan was represented in Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by the Cowardly Lion. The Lion finally proved he was the King of Beasts by decapitating a giant spider that was terrorizing everyone in the forest. The giant spider Bryan challenged at the turn of the twentieth century was the Morgan/Rockefeller banking cartel, which was bent on usurping the power to create the nation's money from the people and their representative government.
Before World War I, two opposing systems of political economy competed for dominance in the United States. One operated out of Wall Street, the New York financial district that came to be the symbol of American finance. Its most important address was 23 Wall Street, known as the "House of Morgan." J. P. Morgan was an agent of powerful British banking interests. The Wizards of Wall Street and the Old World bankers pulling their strings sought to establish a national currency that was based on the "gold standard," one created privately by the financial elite who controlled the gold. The other system dated back to Benjamin Franklin and operated out of Philadelphia, the country's first capital, where the Constitutional Convention was held and Franklin's "Society for Political Inquiries" planned the industrialization and public works that would free the new republic from economic slavery to England.14 The Philadelphia faction favored a bank on the model established in provincial Pennsylvania, where a state loan office issued and lent money, collected the interest, and returned it to the provincial government to be used in place of taxes. President Abraham Lincoln returned to the colonial system of government-issued money during the Civil War; but he was assassinated, and the bankers reclaimed control of the money machine. The silent coup of the Wall Street faction culminated with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, something they achieved by misleading Bryan and other wary Congressmen into thinking the Federal Reserve was actually federal.
Today the debate over who should create the national money supply is rarely heard, mainly because few people even realize it is an issue. Politicians and economists, along with everybody else, simply assume that money is created by the government, and that the "inflation" everybody complains about is caused by an out-of-control government running the dollar printing presses. The puppeteers working the money machine were more visible in the 1890s than they are today, largely because they had not yet succeeded in buying up the media and cornering public opinion.
Economics is a dry and forbidding subject that has been made intentionally complex by banking interests intent on concealing what is really going on. It is a subject that sorely needs lightening up, with imagery, metaphors, characters and a plot; so before we get into the ponderous details of the modern system of money-based-on-debt, we'll take an excursion back to a simpler time, when the money issues were more obvious and were still a burning topic of discussion. The plot line for The Wizard of Oz has been traced to the first-ever march on Washington, led by an obscure Ohio businessman who sought to persuade Congress to return to Lincoln's system of government-issued money in 1894. Besides sparking a century of protest marches and the country's most famous fairytale, this little-known visionary and the band of unemployed men he led may actually have had the solution to the whole money problem, then and now . . . .
posted by Barry Fockler at 4:24 PM
0 comments
Saturday, June 24, 2006
New Worker British News
New Worker British News - 23/6/2006
Forest Gate protest
THOUSANDS of people gathered in East London last Sunday to protest at the police treatment of two Muslim brothers - Abul Koyair and Mohammed Abdul Kayar - and their family after the notorious anti-terror squad raid on their home, in which Kayar was shot in the shoulder.
Mudassar Ahmed, one of the march organisers, attacked the "lies and misinformation" put out by the police after the arrest and the failure of intelligence that led to the raid.
It turns out that the informant upon whose information the raid was based, was a young man with an IQ of just 69, who had been a boyhood friend of the brothers.
The two brothers were released after a week of interrogation with no charges against them and not a scrap of incriminating evidence found, despite a very thorough police search of their home.
much to answer for
Ahmed said: "The police are doing their job but they should be doing it properly. The intelligence agencies have much to answer for."
The brothers and their family were also angered when police released information that £38,000 in cash had been found at their home.
The family, who are strict Muslims, say this money is from a family business but their religious beliefs forbid usury - meaning that they cannot use banks.
Last Sunday's demonstration in Forest Gate was also supported by the family and friends of Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian who was shot by anti-terror squads at Stockwell Tube station last July. This was another tragic failure of police intelligence.
Meanwhile Lord Carlile of Berriew last week, in his annual review of counter-terror laws, claimed that Britain's ports and borders are too poorly policed to deter terrorists.
Civil service cuts over decades have led to a situation where Customs staff are "thinly spread" and the Coast Guard service has also been drastically cut.
*****************
Top architect exposed as BNP activist
ONE OF the three candidates for the presidency of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) is an active member of the neo-Nazi British National Party, according to an investigation by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.
Peter Phillips, an architect and property owner in Redhill, Surrey, managed to obtain the 60 nominating signatures from fellow chartered architects needed to stand in the election, for which ballot papers were sent out this week.
The winner, to be announced on 26th July, will serve as president of the respected institute for two years from September 2007.
Phillips, who is known for his strong views on race and on women in positions of authority, is campaigning on an anti-political correctness platform against Sunand Prasad, the first Asian to stand for the position, and Valerie Owen.
Last week Riba told Searchlight that it was not aware that Phillips was an active member of the BNP who had stood for the party in local elections. He had not declared his support for the extremist party in the election leaflet which is sent to every Riba member with the ballot papers.
At a presidential hustings meeting Phillips admitted he had been a BNP member for five years and had stood in elections. He told the progressive Archinect website that he would put more details on his own website shortly..
Phillips's photo appeared in the BNP monthly newspaper, The Voice of Freedom, in March 2004 when he was campaigning in Eltham for Julian Leppert, the BNP's candidate for mayor of London. He has also been seen out canvassing in other parts of London, including Ruislip and Barking and
Dagenham.
He stood for the BNP in the May 2003 elections to Reigate and Banstead Council, Surrey, for Merstham ward, coming third out of four candidates with 299 votes.
Searchlight understands that his offer to be a BNP candidate in subsequent elections was blocked by a then senior BNP officer.
When the Riba learned of his BNP membership, it distanced itself from Phillips in a statement that said: "The Riba values the contribution to architecture and society by people of diverse origins and backgrounds, and is firmly committed to equality of opportunity.
"The views that the candidates express in their election campaigns will not necessarily represent the position of the Riba as an institute, nor the views of its wider membership."
The current Riba president, Jack Pringle, said: "It's good that he has come clean and there's no question of him being disqualified from running. But it's important the electorate understand the context in which his views are held."
a shock
Pringle also said: "On council Peter Phillips has always represented rightwing views, and in particular unpleasant views on the abilities of women. Nevertheless this is a shock.
"The thing I am really disturbed about is that it has not been open. Now our members understand the full context of his views, but do so literally as the ballot papers go out. His views are totally countercultural to the profession, and absolutely anti-pathetical to what the vast majority of our
profession are interested in."
Former Riba president George Fergusson commented: "Absolute outrage has been expressed by everyone on council I have communicated with. No doubt that is a united feeling among the profession.
"I know him [Phillips] only too well and I have despised his views for a long time. No doubt he would not have received the 60 nominations necessary if those who nominated him knew of his political affiliations. I have therefore written to him and asked him to withdraw his candidacy.
"Wherever he goes, this man reveals misogynist and racist views. It is shocking that someone like him is in our midst. The worry is that he is trying to infiltrate a power base within one of the most important professions in the country.
"On the positive side, we do have two excellent candidates for the role, Sunand Prasad, who is a brilliant architect and whose standing is a real gift to the profession, and Valerie Owen, a very intelligent, principled candidate."
*******************
GMB drops out of three-way union merger
THE GMB annual conference in Blackpool last week voted to withdraw from the process of merging with two other giant unions - the TGWU and Amicus.
TGWU general secretary Tony Woodley and Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson issued a joint statement in response to the GMB decision."Obviously we are disappointed at this decision, which we regard as a missed opportunity for the GMB.
However, we fully respect the GMB's democratic decision and will continue to work closely with our sister union for the benefit of all our members," they said.
"The TGWU and Amicus will now proceed with our planned creation of a new union to meet the great challenges facing working people in the 21st century - a democratic and campaigning union which will fight back for employees in the workplace, will take trade unionism out to the millions of unorganised workers, will stand up for equality for all and advance its members interests politically. Such a new union will, we believe, rapidly become attractive to other unions in this country and will also build ever-stronger links with trade unions around the world as we confront the opportunities of the globalised economy."
******************
Unison and international solidarity
by New Worker Correspondent
DAVE Prentis, general secretary of the public sector union Unison, last week addressed a rally organised jointly by Make Poverty History and Unison while at the union's annual delegate conference in Bournemouth.
Joining him on the platform were trade unionists from Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. This was the first time they had had the opportunity to meet because of the wall that Israel has built surrounding the West bank.
At the end of the rally Prentis said that Unison had achieved a great deal in solidarity with international trade unions and would continue to do so.
At another rally on the next day, Labour MP John McDonnell, who heads the Labour Representation Committee, spoke on solidarity with Venezuela.
New Communist Party industrial organiser Mike Fletcher had a brief discussion with John. He said the best way to show solidarity was to defeat Blair within the labour movement.
Following the solidarity meeting, the North-East Mental Health Branch of Unison affiliated to solidarity organisations with Cuba, Venezuela and Columbia - and called on the rest of the labour movement also to affiliate.
****************
TGWU challenges Jeremy Clarkson to be a bus driver for a week
JEREMY Clarkson, the outspoken TV presenter, motoring writer and newspaper columnist, has been challenged to spend a week as a bus driver by the Transport and General Workers' Union.
The gauntlet has been thrown down by the union following Clarkson using his newspaper column to say any bus driver who fails to let the car go first is an "inconsiderate jumped-up little Hitler bastard" who should be "shot in the middle of his face".
"Bus drivers have a sense of humour but these comments are not just not funny they are deeply offensive," said Graham Stevenson, TGWU national organiser for transport.
"Many of our members and their families have taken offence. Jeremy Clarkson should apologise but he should do more in our view and spend a week as a bus driver."
Stevenson has laid the challenge down on behalf of the 100,000 plus bus drivers who are members of the TGWU. He said Clarkson's views showed deep contempt for the nation's bus drivers so it was only right for him to see what the job entailed.
"Jeremy should try a week as a bus driver in a busy city in the UK on bus driver's pay and hours, living in the average bus driver's accommodation," he said. "We are prepared to organise it if he is prepared to do it."
******************
Rural curate's egg from Agricultural Wages Board
THE TRANSPORT and General Workers' Union last week described the outcome of pay talks between the TGWU and the Agricultural Wages Board as a "curate's egg".The union said that intensive talks have led to a big step forward in pay for skilled farm workers. The 6.9 per cent increase is a just reward for them and would be a good platform for attracting new people as well as offering significant promotion opportunities.
"The TGWU said it was important for this year's pay talks to recognise skills and, indeed, they have," said the union's chief negotiator Chris Kaufman, TGWU national secretary for agriculture. "It's important to note that the employers agreed with this view."
The lead workers craft grade would go up from £5.91 to £6.31 an hour, an increase of 6.9 per cent.
Thirty thousand workers now have the opportunity to be promoted to this new grade three in due course.
The union also highlighted the 5.9 per cent increase in pay for the lowest pay grades, now to be renamed the Initial Grade, and the reduction from 52 to 30 weeks before they move through training to grade two.
"We see the need to be an attractive industry against the background of an ageing workforce," continued Kaufman. "This agreement goes some way to achieving that desirable end.
The union added that the extra day's holiday for all grades was a welcome development. The 2.9 per cent pay rise for all other grades would be acceptable given that extra benefit.
But union leaders remain concerned by the removal of the overtime rate for Sunday working for new employees. Kaufman said this would affect migrant workers and so create a two-tier workforce. He confirmed the TGWU would be seeking legal advice on the issue."
******************
Water waste
THAMES Water is facing censure after failing to meet targets for reducing leakages for the third year in a row.
The company has imposed a hose-pipe ban and has requested a drought order while it is losing 894 million litres a day through leakages. The regulator Ofwat described this as "unacceptable".
Thames Water has also been criticised in recent years for selling off a number of reservoirs to the west of London for housing development - reducing the region's capacity to store water.
Thames Water last week announced a 31 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to £346.5 million for last year.
******************
More psychologists needed
PROVIDING better treatment for people suffering from depression, anxiety and a range of other mental illnesses would save the economy millions of pounds in benefits paid to sufferers according to a report issued last week by a group of academics at the London School of Economics.
The Depression Report, chaired by Professor Richard Layard, pointed out that most patients benefit more from talking therapies but are more likely to be prescribed drugs, which often do not work and have a range of unpleasant side effects.
Waiting lists for talking therapy are very long and by the time patients get this treatment, their condition is harder to treat.
Professor Layard said: "We know that one in six people suffers from depression and chronic anxiety and that this affects one in three of all families.
"And yet in most parts of Britain, you have to wait at least nine months for a course of cognitive behaviour therapy, despite the fact that it is shown to be just as effective as medication." The cost of such a course is £750.
Currently one million people are on incapacity benefit because of mental illness - more than the number unemployed.
The report has the backing of the Royal College of General Practitioners and leading mental health charities like Mind.
Meanwhile another report from the British Medical Association's board of science says that the number of children suffering from certain types of mental health disorders has doubled in the last 30 years.
The doctors warned that around one in 10 children will experience a clinically recognised mental health disorder between the ages of one and 15..
New Communist Party of Britain
http://www.newworker.org
Write to:
P.O.Box 73
London SW11 2PQ
Telephone 0207 223 4050 or 0207 223 4052
Forest Gate protest
THOUSANDS of people gathered in East London last Sunday to protest at the police treatment of two Muslim brothers - Abul Koyair and Mohammed Abdul Kayar - and their family after the notorious anti-terror squad raid on their home, in which Kayar was shot in the shoulder.
Mudassar Ahmed, one of the march organisers, attacked the "lies and misinformation" put out by the police after the arrest and the failure of intelligence that led to the raid.
It turns out that the informant upon whose information the raid was based, was a young man with an IQ of just 69, who had been a boyhood friend of the brothers.
The two brothers were released after a week of interrogation with no charges against them and not a scrap of incriminating evidence found, despite a very thorough police search of their home.
much to answer for
Ahmed said: "The police are doing their job but they should be doing it properly. The intelligence agencies have much to answer for."
The brothers and their family were also angered when police released information that £38,000 in cash had been found at their home.
The family, who are strict Muslims, say this money is from a family business but their religious beliefs forbid usury - meaning that they cannot use banks.
Last Sunday's demonstration in Forest Gate was also supported by the family and friends of Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian who was shot by anti-terror squads at Stockwell Tube station last July. This was another tragic failure of police intelligence.
Meanwhile Lord Carlile of Berriew last week, in his annual review of counter-terror laws, claimed that Britain's ports and borders are too poorly policed to deter terrorists.
Civil service cuts over decades have led to a situation where Customs staff are "thinly spread" and the Coast Guard service has also been drastically cut.
*****************
Top architect exposed as BNP activist
ONE OF the three candidates for the presidency of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) is an active member of the neo-Nazi British National Party, according to an investigation by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.
Peter Phillips, an architect and property owner in Redhill, Surrey, managed to obtain the 60 nominating signatures from fellow chartered architects needed to stand in the election, for which ballot papers were sent out this week.
The winner, to be announced on 26th July, will serve as president of the respected institute for two years from September 2007.
Phillips, who is known for his strong views on race and on women in positions of authority, is campaigning on an anti-political correctness platform against Sunand Prasad, the first Asian to stand for the position, and Valerie Owen.
Last week Riba told Searchlight that it was not aware that Phillips was an active member of the BNP who had stood for the party in local elections. He had not declared his support for the extremist party in the election leaflet which is sent to every Riba member with the ballot papers.
At a presidential hustings meeting Phillips admitted he had been a BNP member for five years and had stood in elections. He told the progressive Archinect website that he would put more details on his own website shortly..
Phillips's photo appeared in the BNP monthly newspaper, The Voice of Freedom, in March 2004 when he was campaigning in Eltham for Julian Leppert, the BNP's candidate for mayor of London. He has also been seen out canvassing in other parts of London, including Ruislip and Barking and
Dagenham.
He stood for the BNP in the May 2003 elections to Reigate and Banstead Council, Surrey, for Merstham ward, coming third out of four candidates with 299 votes.
Searchlight understands that his offer to be a BNP candidate in subsequent elections was blocked by a then senior BNP officer.
When the Riba learned of his BNP membership, it distanced itself from Phillips in a statement that said: "The Riba values the contribution to architecture and society by people of diverse origins and backgrounds, and is firmly committed to equality of opportunity.
"The views that the candidates express in their election campaigns will not necessarily represent the position of the Riba as an institute, nor the views of its wider membership."
The current Riba president, Jack Pringle, said: "It's good that he has come clean and there's no question of him being disqualified from running. But it's important the electorate understand the context in which his views are held."
a shock
Pringle also said: "On council Peter Phillips has always represented rightwing views, and in particular unpleasant views on the abilities of women. Nevertheless this is a shock.
"The thing I am really disturbed about is that it has not been open. Now our members understand the full context of his views, but do so literally as the ballot papers go out. His views are totally countercultural to the profession, and absolutely anti-pathetical to what the vast majority of our
profession are interested in."
Former Riba president George Fergusson commented: "Absolute outrage has been expressed by everyone on council I have communicated with. No doubt that is a united feeling among the profession.
"I know him [Phillips] only too well and I have despised his views for a long time. No doubt he would not have received the 60 nominations necessary if those who nominated him knew of his political affiliations. I have therefore written to him and asked him to withdraw his candidacy.
"Wherever he goes, this man reveals misogynist and racist views. It is shocking that someone like him is in our midst. The worry is that he is trying to infiltrate a power base within one of the most important professions in the country.
"On the positive side, we do have two excellent candidates for the role, Sunand Prasad, who is a brilliant architect and whose standing is a real gift to the profession, and Valerie Owen, a very intelligent, principled candidate."
*******************
GMB drops out of three-way union merger
THE GMB annual conference in Blackpool last week voted to withdraw from the process of merging with two other giant unions - the TGWU and Amicus.
TGWU general secretary Tony Woodley and Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson issued a joint statement in response to the GMB decision."Obviously we are disappointed at this decision, which we regard as a missed opportunity for the GMB.
However, we fully respect the GMB's democratic decision and will continue to work closely with our sister union for the benefit of all our members," they said.
"The TGWU and Amicus will now proceed with our planned creation of a new union to meet the great challenges facing working people in the 21st century - a democratic and campaigning union which will fight back for employees in the workplace, will take trade unionism out to the millions of unorganised workers, will stand up for equality for all and advance its members interests politically. Such a new union will, we believe, rapidly become attractive to other unions in this country and will also build ever-stronger links with trade unions around the world as we confront the opportunities of the globalised economy."
******************
Unison and international solidarity
by New Worker Correspondent
DAVE Prentis, general secretary of the public sector union Unison, last week addressed a rally organised jointly by Make Poverty History and Unison while at the union's annual delegate conference in Bournemouth.
Joining him on the platform were trade unionists from Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. This was the first time they had had the opportunity to meet because of the wall that Israel has built surrounding the West bank.
At the end of the rally Prentis said that Unison had achieved a great deal in solidarity with international trade unions and would continue to do so.
At another rally on the next day, Labour MP John McDonnell, who heads the Labour Representation Committee, spoke on solidarity with Venezuela.
New Communist Party industrial organiser Mike Fletcher had a brief discussion with John. He said the best way to show solidarity was to defeat Blair within the labour movement.
Following the solidarity meeting, the North-East Mental Health Branch of Unison affiliated to solidarity organisations with Cuba, Venezuela and Columbia - and called on the rest of the labour movement also to affiliate.
****************
TGWU challenges Jeremy Clarkson to be a bus driver for a week
JEREMY Clarkson, the outspoken TV presenter, motoring writer and newspaper columnist, has been challenged to spend a week as a bus driver by the Transport and General Workers' Union.
The gauntlet has been thrown down by the union following Clarkson using his newspaper column to say any bus driver who fails to let the car go first is an "inconsiderate jumped-up little Hitler bastard" who should be "shot in the middle of his face".
"Bus drivers have a sense of humour but these comments are not just not funny they are deeply offensive," said Graham Stevenson, TGWU national organiser for transport.
"Many of our members and their families have taken offence. Jeremy Clarkson should apologise but he should do more in our view and spend a week as a bus driver."
Stevenson has laid the challenge down on behalf of the 100,000 plus bus drivers who are members of the TGWU. He said Clarkson's views showed deep contempt for the nation's bus drivers so it was only right for him to see what the job entailed.
"Jeremy should try a week as a bus driver in a busy city in the UK on bus driver's pay and hours, living in the average bus driver's accommodation," he said. "We are prepared to organise it if he is prepared to do it."
******************
Rural curate's egg from Agricultural Wages Board
THE TRANSPORT and General Workers' Union last week described the outcome of pay talks between the TGWU and the Agricultural Wages Board as a "curate's egg".The union said that intensive talks have led to a big step forward in pay for skilled farm workers. The 6.9 per cent increase is a just reward for them and would be a good platform for attracting new people as well as offering significant promotion opportunities.
"The TGWU said it was important for this year's pay talks to recognise skills and, indeed, they have," said the union's chief negotiator Chris Kaufman, TGWU national secretary for agriculture. "It's important to note that the employers agreed with this view."
The lead workers craft grade would go up from £5.91 to £6.31 an hour, an increase of 6.9 per cent.
Thirty thousand workers now have the opportunity to be promoted to this new grade three in due course.
The union also highlighted the 5.9 per cent increase in pay for the lowest pay grades, now to be renamed the Initial Grade, and the reduction from 52 to 30 weeks before they move through training to grade two.
"We see the need to be an attractive industry against the background of an ageing workforce," continued Kaufman. "This agreement goes some way to achieving that desirable end.
The union added that the extra day's holiday for all grades was a welcome development. The 2.9 per cent pay rise for all other grades would be acceptable given that extra benefit.
But union leaders remain concerned by the removal of the overtime rate for Sunday working for new employees. Kaufman said this would affect migrant workers and so create a two-tier workforce. He confirmed the TGWU would be seeking legal advice on the issue."
******************
Water waste
THAMES Water is facing censure after failing to meet targets for reducing leakages for the third year in a row.
The company has imposed a hose-pipe ban and has requested a drought order while it is losing 894 million litres a day through leakages. The regulator Ofwat described this as "unacceptable".
Thames Water has also been criticised in recent years for selling off a number of reservoirs to the west of London for housing development - reducing the region's capacity to store water.
Thames Water last week announced a 31 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to £346.5 million for last year.
******************
More psychologists needed
PROVIDING better treatment for people suffering from depression, anxiety and a range of other mental illnesses would save the economy millions of pounds in benefits paid to sufferers according to a report issued last week by a group of academics at the London School of Economics.
The Depression Report, chaired by Professor Richard Layard, pointed out that most patients benefit more from talking therapies but are more likely to be prescribed drugs, which often do not work and have a range of unpleasant side effects.
Waiting lists for talking therapy are very long and by the time patients get this treatment, their condition is harder to treat.
Professor Layard said: "We know that one in six people suffers from depression and chronic anxiety and that this affects one in three of all families.
"And yet in most parts of Britain, you have to wait at least nine months for a course of cognitive behaviour therapy, despite the fact that it is shown to be just as effective as medication." The cost of such a course is £750.
Currently one million people are on incapacity benefit because of mental illness - more than the number unemployed.
The report has the backing of the Royal College of General Practitioners and leading mental health charities like Mind.
Meanwhile another report from the British Medical Association's board of science says that the number of children suffering from certain types of mental health disorders has doubled in the last 30 years.
The doctors warned that around one in 10 children will experience a clinically recognised mental health disorder between the ages of one and 15..
New Communist Party of Britain
http://www.newworker.org
Write to:
P.O.Box 73
London SW11 2PQ
Telephone 0207 223 4050 or 0207 223 4052
posted by Barry Fockler at 10:56 PM
0 comments
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Shooting of British Cameraman by Israeli Soldier Cold-Blooded Murder, Inquest Told
Published on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
by Vikram Dodd
A military expert yesterday told an inquest that the death of a British journalist who was shot dead by an Israeli soldier was "calculated, cold-blooded murder".
James Miller, 34, was killed by a single shot in May 2003 in Gaza while making a documentary about the suffering of Palestinian children. No soldier has been disciplined or charged and in court the cameraman's family have accused Israel of a coverup, claiming there is evidence that his killer is Lieutenant Heib of the Israeli defence force.
The jury yesterday was told by Chris Cobb-Smith, who investigated Mr Miller's death, that the fatal shot was "deliberate" and not an accident. Mr Miller died as he and colleagues were trying to leave a Palestinian house at night, holding a white flag with a torch shone on it, clad in body armour and helmets with the letters "TV" written on it in fluorescent tape.
Mr Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer and UN weapons inspector, said Mr Miller and his colleagues would have been visible to the Israeli soldiers, who had night vision goggles. The sky was cloudless, the moon was shining and electric lights were shining from nearby houses. "My conclusion is this was calculated and cold-blooded murder, without a shadow of a doubt," Mr Cobb-Smith told the jury at St Pancras coroner's court in London.
The jury were again showed video of the shooting captured by another cameraman.
As Mr Miller and two colleagues approached an Israeli armoured personnel carrier shouting "Hello, we're British journalists," a shot rings out. Thirteen seconds later a second shot strikes Mr Miller, then a third bullet hits the house they have just left, with other shots spaced at five to 12-second intervals.
Mr Cobb-Smith said: "These shots were not fired by a soldier who was frightened, not fired by a soldier facing incoming fire; these were slow, deliberate, calculated and aimed shots."
The jury were played extracts from a 2003 BBC programme covering Mr Miller's death, in which his colleague, Dan Edge, told how the soldiers knew the group were journalists and had been talking to them earlier. Mr Edge said: "We know they knew we were there. They shouted to us two or three times in the evening."
The Israeli armoured personnel carrier was around 100 metres away and Mr Edge said: "I suddenly heard someone shouting 'How you doing', in Arabic, do you like pop music, do you like Fairuz, a Lebanese singer." Also in the documentary extracts played to the jury, reporter Saira Shah who was standing next to Mr Miller, suggested the soldiers may have been high: "They sounded like they were high, in very good spirits, whooping it up, maybe high on something." In her formal statement read to the inquest, Ms Shah said that after Mr Miller was pronounced dead, an Israeli officer who questioned her tried to suggest that a Palestinian gunman was responsible: "I was distressed at this process. I did not believe that they were objective in their questioning."
Annie McGuinness, a consultant in accident and emergency medicine, said Mr Miller stood little chance of survival once the bullet had hit him at the root of his neck at the front, severely damaging three main arteries. Ms McGuinness, from University College hospital, London, said the father of two young children would have lost one fifth of the blood in his body within a minute.
The inquest resumes tomorrow. The Israeli government has declined to take part, coroner Dr Andrew Reid has told the jury. In a statement, the Israeli embassy in London said: "After a very thorough investigation using laboratories in Israel and abroad and after reviewing all the available evidence, it was not possible to reach a reliable conclusion that could provide a basis for proceedings under criminal law."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
by Vikram Dodd
A military expert yesterday told an inquest that the death of a British journalist who was shot dead by an Israeli soldier was "calculated, cold-blooded murder".
James Miller, 34, was killed by a single shot in May 2003 in Gaza while making a documentary about the suffering of Palestinian children. No soldier has been disciplined or charged and in court the cameraman's family have accused Israel of a coverup, claiming there is evidence that his killer is Lieutenant Heib of the Israeli defence force.
The jury yesterday was told by Chris Cobb-Smith, who investigated Mr Miller's death, that the fatal shot was "deliberate" and not an accident. Mr Miller died as he and colleagues were trying to leave a Palestinian house at night, holding a white flag with a torch shone on it, clad in body armour and helmets with the letters "TV" written on it in fluorescent tape.
Mr Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer and UN weapons inspector, said Mr Miller and his colleagues would have been visible to the Israeli soldiers, who had night vision goggles. The sky was cloudless, the moon was shining and electric lights were shining from nearby houses. "My conclusion is this was calculated and cold-blooded murder, without a shadow of a doubt," Mr Cobb-Smith told the jury at St Pancras coroner's court in London.
The jury were again showed video of the shooting captured by another cameraman.
As Mr Miller and two colleagues approached an Israeli armoured personnel carrier shouting "Hello, we're British journalists," a shot rings out. Thirteen seconds later a second shot strikes Mr Miller, then a third bullet hits the house they have just left, with other shots spaced at five to 12-second intervals.
Mr Cobb-Smith said: "These shots were not fired by a soldier who was frightened, not fired by a soldier facing incoming fire; these were slow, deliberate, calculated and aimed shots."
The jury were played extracts from a 2003 BBC programme covering Mr Miller's death, in which his colleague, Dan Edge, told how the soldiers knew the group were journalists and had been talking to them earlier. Mr Edge said: "We know they knew we were there. They shouted to us two or three times in the evening."
The Israeli armoured personnel carrier was around 100 metres away and Mr Edge said: "I suddenly heard someone shouting 'How you doing', in Arabic, do you like pop music, do you like Fairuz, a Lebanese singer." Also in the documentary extracts played to the jury, reporter Saira Shah who was standing next to Mr Miller, suggested the soldiers may have been high: "They sounded like they were high, in very good spirits, whooping it up, maybe high on something." In her formal statement read to the inquest, Ms Shah said that after Mr Miller was pronounced dead, an Israeli officer who questioned her tried to suggest that a Palestinian gunman was responsible: "I was distressed at this process. I did not believe that they were objective in their questioning."
Annie McGuinness, a consultant in accident and emergency medicine, said Mr Miller stood little chance of survival once the bullet had hit him at the root of his neck at the front, severely damaging three main arteries. Ms McGuinness, from University College hospital, London, said the father of two young children would have lost one fifth of the blood in his body within a minute.
The inquest resumes tomorrow. The Israeli government has declined to take part, coroner Dr Andrew Reid has told the jury. In a statement, the Israeli embassy in London said: "After a very thorough investigation using laboratories in Israel and abroad and after reviewing all the available evidence, it was not possible to reach a reliable conclusion that could provide a basis for proceedings under criminal law."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
posted by Barry Fockler at 2:12 AM
0 comments
About Me
- Name: Barry Fockler
(ABOVE)- And, about this site... FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://tinyurl.com/6j7ty. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Links
Previous Posts
- BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
- McCain Would Privatize Social Security
- BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
- Exclusive: Chief Fired by Palin Speaks Out
- BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
- Chávez announces socialist development project
- BE SURE TO READ -NEWS AND BLOGS-
- The Web of Debt
- New Worker British News
- Shooting of British Cameraman by Israeli Soldier C...
Archives
- March 2005
- April 2005
- May 2005
- June 2005
- July 2005
- August 2005
- September 2005
- October 2005
- November 2005
- December 2005
- January 2006
- February 2006
- March 2006
- April 2006
- June 2006
- August 2008
- September 2008
