Quantitative easing:
printing money to throw at the bankers
The Bank of England, among others globally, is practising what it calls "quantitative easing" to assist the capitalist economy out of its recent collapse.
LESLIE MASTERS explains why the Bank of England is printing money to deliberately stoke inflation.
"Quantitative easing" is one of those euphemisms that the ideologists of the bourgeoisie like to invent to hide their real intentions, such as "downsizing".
What the Bank of England is hiding is the fact that it is trying to cause inflation - the bete noire of official capitalist thinking, and something the Bank usually professes to be fighting.
At the time of writing, the Bank of England's "quantitative easing" programme has involved printing £200 billion in bank notes to buy assets from banks and other companies.
Printing large quantities of dollar bills by the Americans is what blew the Bretton Woods agreement out of the water, and led to the rampant inflation of the 1960s and '70s. Regardless of where or how the Sterling notes are spent, they will represent a vast increase in circulating medium over and above the amount required actually to circulate the goods and services available.
Since there will be, in effect, more money chasing the same goods and services, the prices of those goods and services will be forced upwards.
How ordinary citizens are drowning in debt
While the Government bails out Britain's debt-ridden banks with billions, millions of ordinary citizens are deep in debt and struggling to cope. "Drowning in Debt" is the latest report from the Citizens Advice Bureaux service in Scotland.
JANE McKINNON looks at the report's key findings.
Citizens Advice Scotland's report, "Drowning in Debt" was published in June 2009 and is based on a survey of debt clients from a representative sample of bureaux across Scotland.
Although it deals only with Scotland, it is certain the report's findings will be mirrored acrosss the whole of Britain. Below are some extracts in comparison to its last survey in 2003.
Lone Parents
The average total debt for lone parents since 2003 has increased by a quarter from £11,469 to £14,963.
Lone parent debt clients face significant "debt stress". For every £1 of monthly income, lone parents owed on average £19 of debt compared to £14 in 2003.
Just under 50% of all debt clients have gone without essentials to manage their debt compared to 33% in 2003.
It is the norm for low income lone parents to go without to provide for their children.
Relationship breakdown, as a reason for debt, was mentioned by just under a third of those surveyed.
Charlie: a 21st century worker
Charlie was unemployed for 10 months. He is a victim of the recession which has, and still is, having a particularly brutal effect on the building trade.
JANE McKINNON reports on conditions at the Hewlett Packard computer assembly plant in Bishopton.
Charlie signed on at the dole every fortnight whilst applying for jobs, without any success. His £128.60 a fortnight Jobseekers Allowance didn't go far and Charlie had to drastically curtail nights out with his mates and ditch the idea of a holiday with his girlfriend.
Becoming despondent and feeling he was never going to be employed again, Charlie answered an advert for a job with one of the contractors who operate for Hewlett Packard at their massive computer assembly campus in a rural setting in the Bishopton-Erskine area, 13 miles from Glasgow.
Charlie was pleased to get the job but his wages and conditions leave much to be desired. He works three 12 hour shifts a week and does an additional one shift a month to bring his weekly hours to 39.
He is paid £5.99p an hour and his annual salary is £12,139. His employment is for a six months period on a Temporary/Fixed Term Contract which carries with it a three months' probationary performance review.
As a temporary worker Charlie misses out on some of the benefits afforded to the company's permanent staff and his annual holiday entitlement is only 15 days per annum.
UK elections are seriously out of favour
Britain's General Election battle lines have been drawn. In the words of Willie Bain MP, Labour's successful candidate in the Glasgow North East by-election, "It is Game On" between Labour and the Tories.
JAMES THOMSON looks at the Labour and Conservative parties' electoral prospects in the run up to this year's General Election.
For the first time in many months, Labour has cut the Conservatives' lead in the opinion polls following its comfortable victory in the Glasgow North East Westminster Parliamentary by-election on 12 November.
This victory has buoyed Labour leaders because, as they know, unpopular Governments rarely win by-elections so near to their end of term.
There is one problem though which is that although the polls suggest the Labour Party might close the gap on the Tories, the same polls claim Gordon Brown is still regarded as Labour's biggest liability. The third failed plot to remove Brown - on January 6 - by Blairites, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt is evidence that voters and many in the Labour Party itself believe Brown is Labour's greatest impediment to success.
Nevertheless, it seems certain that Brown will lead Labour into the General Election. If he chooses to give himself all the time he can to try and claw back the Tories' lead, that should mean a May or June election.
Alternatively it could be March. The Chancellor's Pre-Budget report in December singularly failed to give any detail on Labour's widely expected public spending cuts and tax rises. That detail will most likely be forthcoming in the Budget at the end of March/beginning of April. Obviously a spending cuts/higher taxes Budget would be bad for Labour. A March election, before the real Budget is announced, might be Labour's best prospect.
THE SOCIALIST CORRESPONDENT CONFERENCE
Saturday 6 March 2010 10am - 5.30pm
University of London Union Malet St London
The Socialist Correspondent conference takes place at a time of global capitalist recession, climate change, war and threats of other wars.
Discussion will include the capitalist economic crisis and imperialism's strategy of re-stabilisation.
Examples of resistance to imperialism's aims including that of Venezuela and other South American countries will be looked at.
Politics in Britain including the upcoming General Election, Tory austerity plans, state of the trade unions and the future of the Labour Party will also form part of the discussion.
Click here to download a Conference Registration Form in pdf format.
Israel: anything the US will not support?
As the Israeli Defence Force continues to bomb Gaza, Palestinians have been given very little reason to expect any change in US policy towards Israel.
TOM BERNEY reports on the depressing signs from America.
In an interview on ABC TV, former Vice Presidential candidate and current ideological doyen of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin was asked for her views on the Middle East.
No comments at all on America's illegal wars - her reply was just, "Israel should be allowed to build more settlements". Her interviewer asked, "Even if they are on Palestinian territory?" Palin looked blank for a moment, as clearly the idea of Palestinians having territory or rights had never crossed her mind. She responded "Israel has to build homes for their people". Satisfied with that, the interviewer moved on to another topic.
Such is the level of discussion in the United States on the continuation of the slow motion genocide of Palestine that shames the world.Sadly it is not just Palin and her supporters. Barack Obama was elected with great expectations. Despite his airy rhetoric in Egypt in June 2009 about a new beginning, "the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable" and on settlements that, "there can be no progress towards peace without a halt to such construction", building and expansion of settlements has continued.
Just three weeks after Hillary Clinton had praised Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu "for showing unprecedented restraint in settlement growth" nine hundred new houses were approved for Jewish occupation in Israeli occupied East Jerusalem. There is nothing new in that. The Israelis have consistently used the ploy of promising to freeze settlements while in fact continuing to expand them.
Romania: life after the counter-revolution
Romanian university professors and media folk I met showed as little enthusiasm for capitalism as for former president Ceaucescu. .
PHIL CHAMBERS spent three days in Iasi in Romania. He reports on life there after two decades of capitalism.
With a gesture that reminded me of the famous Monty Python 'Life of Brian' sketch, 'What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?', one pointed admiringly to his shelves of good-quality, affordable art books published in the socialist period.
The daughter of a doctor told me that for most people the health system is worse under capitalism. Gypsies look like one potential scapegoat for the negative impact of not-so-free market economics, including the opportunity for young people to work for low wages abroad.
Church attendance is up. The last time I saw this many nuns and priests was in the Vatican (it's a living). The surprisingly large number of stray dogs look well-fed (better-fed than the beggars, at any rate) and some even use zebra crossings.
Since imperialism wants Romania and other smaller former socialist countries as a convenient source of cheap labour, its EU membership is a mixed blessing. Public sector workers are feeling the pinch and fighting back: the day before I arrived there was a widespread strike. After 20 years the 1989 'revolution' feels much more like the counter-revolution it really was.
The brutality of German fascism did not begin with the holocaust
By LEO KUNTZ. Translated by Pat Turnbull from the German journal RotFuchs.
When history is written in the Federal Republic of Germany, it is the usual practice to refer to the persecution and murder of more than six million European Jews by the fascists using the word 'holocaust'. (The Jewish victims themselves call it the Shoa.)
This expression, imported from the USA, conceals the full extent of the crimes perpetrated in the name of the German people and without any mass resistance from them. On the subject of resistance: according to the interpretation of today's Federal Republic, this was conducted almost solely by the 'men of 20th July 1944'.
To give a true historical picture, we must guard against two falsifications of the actual events. The defenders of the Nazi past deny the extermination of millions of Jews by the Hitler fascists, or even attempt to justify it. The British Bishop Williamson, rehabilitated inside the church by the Pope, has excelled himself recently in this respect. This monstrous lie is rejected by all democrats far into the bourgeois camp. Particularly stubborn proponents are even confronted with the law.
There is, however, another tendency in the official media representation and writing of history in the Federal Republic of Germany: the attempt to narrow down the brutalities of German fascism to the persecution and extermination of the Jews.
Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp
By PAT TURNBULL.
1945: Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from the town of Nordhausen bury the corpses of prisoners found at the Mittelbrau Dora concentration camp
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
As Leo Kuntz says (see page 29), his father Albert was killed by the SS in Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp.
This camp had a particular character. On 17-18 August 1943, 433 RAF bombers raided Peenemuende, where the German V weapons, the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket, were being manufactured. Because of extensive damage, production was suspended, and a search was begun for underground caves to be used as a factory.
The place selected was near Nordhausen, in the Harz mountains, where a subterranean complex of caves, tunnels and galleries had already been built long before the war for the secret storage of war materials, poison gas and sulphuric acid. This underground site was adapted and production of the V weapons started there.
Overall responsibility for the project was held by the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Scientific and technical organisation was in the hands of Wernher von Braun and his team. The code name of the project was Dora and the underground factory and adjoining concentration camp was known as Mittelbau Dora.
Cooperation is a powerful survival trait
Deeply embedded in European folklore and literature is a fear of the wolf as a species, more so probably than any other animal.
A. B. CAIRNS argues that humans survived because they cooperated with one another.
Wolves are social animals, they hunt in packs and this makes them successful predators and our folklore records that. How could puny humans survive on the plains of Africa which they shared with stronger and faster predators?
Only by cooperating with one another. Cooperation within a species is a very powerful survival trait.
Evolution by natural selection must have favoured that trait within the human species. People who cooperated were more likely to survive and reproduce.
We are all the product of successful ancestors. As Richard Dawkins points out; "Not one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once".(1) Evolution tells us that we must have a pre-disposition to cooperate, it is essential for the continuation of our species.
I suspect that very few of the billions of humans alive today could survive without the complex social infrastructures within which they live. Without that infrastructure not just we as individuals would perish but also everything which defines us as human.
Could we have built such structures if cooperation were not part of our natures? It could be argued that some kind of socialism is a biological imperative.
READER'S LETTER to The Socialist Correspondent
LESLEY MASTERS
I agree with much of what Comrade Cairns says in his letter ('Darwin and Complexity from Simplicity') in issue No. 6, particularly in relation to the supreme importance of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. However, I think his argument is incomplete, and leaves room for a creator-God after all.
Darwin's theory only applies to the evolution of living organisms. It does not - and cannot - explain how the earliest living organisms on Earth actually arose from non-living matter. Thus, while we no longer need accept the Biblical fairy tales of a human race created directly by God, there is still a gap to be filled here, much further back in the development of life on Earth. Christians (and practitioners of other religions) who accept evolution as a reality, fill this gap with a creator-God.
