WikiLeaks: Royal Bank of Scotland Shocka!

Now remember before I continue that there are people arguing that we should not know the information in the WikiLeaks cables.

Ok, so Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) collapsed during the finaincal crisis and had to be bailed out using our money. Just prior to the collapse chief executive Fred Goodwin gets £700,000 per year pension award from RBS. Then a month later RBS announced that its 2008 loss totalled £24.1bn, the largest annual loss in UK corporate history.

So who was to blame for this? Turns out - nobody! Like rain or loosing a sock, itturns out it was just one of those things..

The Financial Services Authority is poised to announce it has closed its investigation into Royal Bank of Scotland and will take no further action against any of its former directors – including chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin – despite the £45bn bailout of the Edinburgh-based bank.

The City regulator appointed accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a detailed analysis of the events that took place in the run-up to the near-collapse of the bank in October 2008. They are understood to have concluded that while management made poor judgments, there are no grounds to take enforcement action against the individuals involved.

Then comes WikiLeaks and in private conversations it was revealed that perhaps somebody was to blame after all..

The cables sent from the US embassy in London, report that [RBS Chairman Philip] Hampton told a visiting delegation of politicians that one of the biggest mistakes made by the bank was its takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro just as the credit crunch began in the autumn of 2007. This acquisition left the bank with a wafer-thin capital cushion and ultimately led to the £45bn taxpayer bailout of the bank in October 2008.

But again, there are some who argue we should not know this information...

The Rightward Drift of Politics

It has been claimed that there is a right-ward drift in US politics. I don't know enough about it to say either way, but the Republican gains in the recent US election are depressing. Not that the White House under democratic rule was doing much to be happy about. As ever the US elections have implications for us globally and again I'm depressed that political parties there to represent the working people are either so hamstrung or so two-faced due to the corporate funding they get, that there seems little hope for mainstream politics. Here's a couple of examples of what I mean:

In the US:

The Democrats aren't preparing to stand up for anything, either. They're already talking about backing down on the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military. I didn't vote for the Democrats so that they could turn tail at every Republican whim: they're supposed to work for the policies Democrats claim to stand for.

In the UK:

Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.

This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.

Thanks Labour, 'cos it's worth spending billions of crappy weapons systems of little use to us to keep the Daily Mail and crew of your back... Thanks Democrats, your inability to fight for things you believe in and push to compromise with people only willing to compromise to the right has now given us a man running for House Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus, who thinks we don't need to worry about climate change because God says it's all ok.

And behind all this pumping out piles and piles of shit is the rightward media...
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The Cuts and the Financial Crisis - What the fuck happened?

So the Tories (sort of) have got into power the the mantra of the coalition government is cuts, cuts, cuts. What is hard about all this is that there are so many factors at play and so many issues that are woven into the issue that it is hard to unpick what is what.

Its also why we're all looking for easy stories that explain it and easy fixes that will solve the our woes. Problem is, that I suspect there are none. The whole thing is a monstrous fuckup that is getting more fucketyuped day by day.

I'm been trying to make sense of it all myself - and in trying to make it touches on other political beliefs that I hold - which also need to be re-examined, that the whole thing becomes a mess in my head. In short, I'm getting nowhere trying to understand the whole and what we should do about it. So this article is an attempt to make sense of it.

So I'm going to start with some of the basics...

What the fuck happened?

Here is my understanding of it: Back in 2006 everything seemed business as usual with the leviathan global economy. However what most of us did not know then was that a series of complex financial products that were being brought and sold for many years, where in fact highly unstable investments. Investments that many mainstream banks had put lots of cash into. Once conditions in the global economy ceased to favour these risky investments (mainly due to a loss of liquidity) then they started to explode in the faces of whoever held them at that point. This in turn triggered a series of other conditions that in turn triggered other mini-crises and so on and so forth until it became a huge financial crisis. Faced with a meltdown of the underlying baking system, most governments responded with bailouts . Pouring billions into the mainstream banks fearful that if they did not the wave of triggering crisis would go on and on.

However this is where the complexities start to mount. Many cited the lack of regulation of the financial markets as the problem. Other claimed too much regulation was the problem. Some claim that without the bailouts, it would be much worse. Others claim that the bailout are perpetuating a rotten system and we should have let the banks fail. I have no idea as to the correct answer. Try to get your head around all the variables that you would need to understand to get a clear answer and the scale of the problem of understanding becomes apparent; regulation, speculation, the shadow banking systems, trade deficits, exchange rates, commodity prices, GDP, interest rates and more - and for each country that was a player in the drama - the US, China, UK, Germany, Greece, Japan and so on... That's just the stuff we know about - what was the impact of the costs of all the wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Colombia, Palestine etc...) ongoing in this? Where is the role of peaking oil supplies in all this? Climate change? Shifts in global power? Technological change? Ecological damage? Human population growth?

Its a quantum mechanics of an equation to try and understand it. Put simply, us humans tend to only be able to follow a few threads of a story. We seek to find a simplified way to understand it all then relegate those bits we can't have the space brain-space for as minor variables in the whole. This is not because the evidence suggests that this is what we should do but because we don't like to think that we are wilfully ignoring something important, so we just find a way to rationalise ignoring it. "The real issue in all this is..." "What most people don't get is..." "The important factors in this crisis are..."

Just because something has not featured in our analysis of events, does not mean it was not significant. Indeed, each of us (me included) carries a set of cognitive filters in our own head (called Selection Bias) that means we tend to pick things as important not based on the evidence set before us, but because of pre-existing prejudices, political views and emotions.

So the bankers are unlikely to fully consider a Marxist view of what happened and why. But an anarchist is unlikely to consider the evidence that if the state had not bailed the banks out, it would be much, much worse now than it is. Capitalists are going to wave the free market around as a solution to all the problems and anarchists will point to mutual aid as the only way out. Given the number of variables and variable-variables, how could any of us know? Who'd be willing to risk finding out?

Here's how I understand it... The UK government debt is about £1000 billion and the state borrows about £160 billion per year. Officially we spent about £850 billion bailing banks and the like out. Unofficially this figure may be higher; possibly over £1000 billion. It is more complex than this - we now own big chunks of banks and we have had some of the money paid back...

Either way, the figures seem to suggest that if we had not have to bail the banks out, we'd not be in the mess we are. So why don't we hear much (if anything) about the financial sector doing anything to help us out of the mess they so clearly contributed towards?

Making the Working Class Support the Ruling Class II

Part 2 in and ongoing series: Making the Working Class Support the Ruling Class... This is a great article about how right-wing propagandists have taken the populist ideas of the rich and powerful and turned them upside down...

Regular middle class folks, he tells us, have been inveigled into leading unsustainable lifestyles. Instead of going to church and home-schooling their children as they once did, they hunker down in their over-leveraged houses and watch porn on the giant screen TVs that they bought on credit. America has lost its way; we are headed over a cliff.

And who is to blame for this sad state of affairs? Not the bankers who supplied our citizenry with mortgages and credit cards and addicted them to debt; not the merchants who sold them the TVs; the advertisers who seduced them away from the pay-as-you-go thrift that was their birthright. Business and businessmen are still the font of everything good. No, the villains are the Statist bureaucrats in Washington who despise everything commonsensical and homely and just. Unregulated commerce is still the ultimate expression of freedom; political Progressivism is the cancer that enslaves and kills.

Indeed - the enemy is not those that led you to this point, but the 'others' - those the rich point you to as the enemy. It's a world turned upside down.

Axis of Evil: JP Morgan and Exxon

Credit Default Swaps are one of those clever little financial tools that the finance posse came up with to continue buy and selling things that don't exist. There were a major factor in the recent financial collapse that has cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs and homes. What's more they have a murky history: thye were invented by JP Morgan to help Exxon deal with the fall out of a major oil spill:

The Boca Raton meeting first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. J. P. Morgan was reluctant to turn down Exxon, which was an old client, but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. The so-called Basel rules, named for the town in Switzerland where they were formulated, required that the banks hold eight per cent of their capital in reserve against the risk of outstanding loans. That limited the amount of lending bankers could do, the amount of risk they could take on, and therefore the amount of profit they could make. But, if the risk of the loans could be sold, it logically followed that the loans were now risk-free; and, if that were the case, what would have been the reserve cash could now be freely loaned out. No need to suck up useful capital.

In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. So, if Exxon defaulted, the E.B.R.D. would be on the hook for it—and, in return for taking on the risk, would receive a fee from J. P. Morgan. Exxon would get its credit line, and J. P. Morgan would get to honor its client relationship but also to keep its credit lines intact for sexier activities. The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap."

You could not make it up...

Turning Rebellion into Money

One of my favourite Conflict records is a double LP of live stuff called 'Turning Rebellion Into Money' and on the back of the sleeve it takes the idea full circle declaring 'Turning Money Into Rebellion.' The first part of that is what sprung to mind reading about the cash rake-in of Sarah Palin;

Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.

Woah - there's a lot of profit in pointing out how communist America has becomes. This right-wing rebellion is a whole eco-system of cashing making that anyone who's been to a festival would recognise...

A young woman named Bethany Owens was sitting at a small table, pulling bills from a leather satchel. The 20-year-old daughter of black conservative entrepreneurs William and Selena Owens, Bethany had spent the morning at her parents’ booth selling books and CDs, like her mother’s title The Power Within a Conservative Woman ($9.95) and her dad’s motivational CD Answers Beyond the Rhetoric ($19.95). Bethany began stacking up bills, doling them out like a Vegas dealer. “One hundred, two hundred, three, four, five hundred,” she counted. “Ugh! I gotta start over.”

“Five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred. Okay, that’s $3,300,” she said, piling bills into neat rows.

“Are there corn dogs here, somebody?” yelled Melanie Morgan, a blonde conservative talk-radio host sitting nearby. Just then, Russo informed her that he’d heard Palin had agreed to speak alongside Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh at Morgan’s upcoming charity event for the troops, which would mean more care packages. “Oh my God! This is fabulous. Sal, brilliant. I could cry I’m so happy,” she said. “That’s gonna be so many hundreds of thousands of dollars more.”

Except, there is no hypocrisy here people - yes I suspect some in the tea party movement might wince at the profiteering from what is supposed to be a principled fight for America's soul rather than a big money-fest, but this is what they preach - profit is good, greed is good, the individual making cash above all is good.

Simples.

However, this does kind of throw a spanner in the works of the idea that people like Palin are the same folk are the rank-and-file. Palin won't have problems with healthcare with $12 million in the bank. Ever.

US based Exxon Mobil - 2009 reported $45.2 billion profit - taxes paid? $0.

That's right denial funding oil giant Exxon Mobil used complex tax schemes of avoid paying any US income tax on it's $45.2 billion profit:

Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS. ... Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas

But Exxon ends up looking like a tax angel next to the makers of everything from media, to guns to car, General Electric;

Most egregious...is General Electric, which generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.

Wow. Nice.
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I'm speechless. Greedy bastards.

Save Bristol's Libraries!

Save Bristol's libraries from the Bristol IWW - good on 'em for this campaign as Libraries are important social spaces for sharing and learning!! We need more not less put into them.

The Bristol Branch of the IWW trade union is calling for strong and decisive action from other unions to stop brutal cuts wrecking Bristol's library service as the IWW today launch their own campaign against the cuts.

Bristol's library service, run by Bristol City Council, is looking to cut £225,000 from the libraries budget this year, largely by axing nine staff across the service. This is despite the libraries budget being underspent by £181,000 last year.

Most of these cuts will be made at the city's flagship Central Library where staff say users may have to wait two hours or more to obtain books and information from a slimmed down and understaffed reference library.

The council is also proposing to spend over £0.5m providing 'self-service' facilities at libraries and will then only provide one supervisor for every two branch libraries in the city.

IWW spokesman Frank Hutchison says,"Bristol City Council have promised there would be no cuts to frontline services. They lied.

"Libraries are among our most important and much-loved public services but here in Bristol the service is being systematically destroyed to save money.

"Meanwhile, despite the huge public outcry and concern, the traditional trade unions are sitting on their hands and failing to act.

"If they won't, we will. These unions are not only letting down their members but the wider community too.

"We will therefore be holding a public meeting in the near future to bring together library staff, concerned service users, other workers worried about the threat of cuts to public services in the city and the wider public."

The IWW says it will be fully committed to any campaign that's launched as a result of this meeting and will look to resource and fund that campaign as best it can.

"Doing nothing - or worse, doing a backroom deal to sell our library service down the river - is not an option," said Mr Hutchison.

Troops Charity in Costs Scam

Charity is important. It's a basic form of mutual aid and cooperation. Giving to help others/a cause with no gain is recognised as a valuable human trait, and with good reason. But when you give to an organisation that is a charity, you want to know that it is doing what it claims and not spending the money on other stuff. Now some costs going on administration, running costs, further fund-raising is inevitable; it would be impossible to expect 100% of the money to go to the cause. So what is a good percentage that goes to the front line of the cause? Some say that 75% of donations going to the front-line is a good figure, and if this drops below about 65% then the charities in question, "...are simply not living up to their missions." Another source says 60% is the minimum but agrees that 75% or more going to the cause is an efficient charity.

So square that with the 'Freedom Alliance' which is managing to give between 20% and 4% (just just fucking 4%!!!) of donations to the cause;

In fact, less than 20%–and in two recent years, less than 7% and 4%, respectively–of the money raised by Freedom Alliance went to these causes, while millions of dollars went to expenses, including consultants and apparently to ferry the [US Right-wing Celebrity, Sean] Hannity posse of family and friends in high style. And, despite Hannity’s statements to the contrary on his nationally syndicated radio show, few of the children of fallen soldiers got more than $1,000-$2,000, with apparently none getting more than $6,000, while Freedom Alliance appears to have spent tens of thousands of dollars for private planes. Moreover, despite written assurances to donors that all money raised would go directly to scholarships for kids of the fallen heroes and not to expenses, has begun charging expenses of nearly $500,000 to give out just over $800,000 in scholarships.

Sean Hanity is a right-wing dick-nut and it seems has an ego much bigger than the charity he supports. Check this;

Of course, as the [Fox news informant] tells it, there’d be a lot more money every concert to go to the cause if Hannity didn’t demand–and get–use of a Gulfstream 5 plane to fly him and his family/entourage to the concerts; a “fleet” (that’s the word the guy used) of either Cadillac or Lincoln SUVs for him and his family/entourage; and several suites at really expensive hotels for him and his family/entourage. The promoter apparently values Hannity’s star demands at well over $200,000 per event. The source says he heard that Oliver North pulled Hannity aside at one of the concerts and told him that this had to stop.

Fuck me - when you are being pulled up regarding your personal ethics by Oliver North - a guy who smuggled drugs to fund hit squads - you know you're down the moral black-hole.

Updates on this story here and here.

$6 Billion Later, Afghan Police Force is a Mess

Not unlike the billions lost in Iraq, the same malaise cause by a mixture of Imperial hubris, lack of transparency and the privatising of war: another nation building cock-up. This time round after sinking a staggering $6 billion (and that is just since 2002) into the Afghan police they have fuck all to show for the money and effort:

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. ... The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.

Wow - extortion, assault, and rape; and we're not even on to the war crimes of the Taliban. What comes across in this article is that the local sort-of trust US forces, they sort-of trust (at least they know where they stand with..) the Taliban but the Afghan Cops are the worst of the lot. Here is another shocking bit of the story:

More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.

So Bush and Bliar/Brown poured money into and presided over a regime that was failing to train the police that were the bed-rock of the counter insurgency? What a fucking joke. They have left a massive shit-pile for their predecessors to clean-up; it it can be done at all? I can't believe we let these people run not just one war, but multiple wars from Iraq to Somalia.

I wouldn't let them run a fairground ride.

The War on the Poor

I was listening to some tunezzz today and I came across this quote by the lead singer of the great band Fugazi:

"I want to talk to you about the war, I want to talk to you about the war, not the war in the middle east. The war in the middle city, the inner city, the war against the poor... Washington DC over 700 people were killed last year. This is a war worth fighting."

The war in the middle east was not the current Iraq war or proxy wars in Gaza or Iran. This was spoken in 1990 and the war was the first gulf war under the first Bu$h. But as time passes, sadly little changes: the more unequal society is, the more the poor suffer, the more all suffer. (Out of interest there is a book on this 'The Spirit Level' who's authors are up for a prize in Bristol, there are some other good books in the list, but this is best IMHO.)

Here's the video too:

Right-Wing Conference Falls Apart Over Profit

I'm a little surprised at this, a right-wing conference in the US is falling apart because the ordinary grass-roots people planning to attend feel it is overpriced and being run at a profit..

Tea Party loyalists began to balk at the expensive price of tickets and the fact that the venture is for-profit, saying that it smelled 'scammy.'

I am not surprised to find that the conservative grass roots are pissed at this, even though the organisers are just doing what comes naturally - transfering money from the poor to the rich - because it is very human to want to feel that the ideals for which you struggle are about more than self-interest. I was going to take the piss a bit, but I'd rather those pissed-off at the right stopped and thought a bit about why those they have put so much trust in would treat them in that way?

[Neo-con theorist] Kristol agrees with this view. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

What one of the intellectual 'heavyweights' of the US conservative movement is clear that some people are more equal than others. Is that what the US stands for? Liberty and Freedom for the few (the rich)? Answers on a postcard...

Anti-Capitalism: Where we were right...

This is an interesting article that puts the blame for the current financial crisis on several main areas;

1. Smashing the unions so they would not get in the way of the greed-grab. Which is a point well made by Dave Douglass about the Miners Strike of 1984-5 saying that the union had to be broke to bring in Neoliberalism - worth listening to him! (part 1 and 2)
2. Pushing deregulation everywhere - and using the shackles of debt left over from the failed regemes of the cold war as a means to push it. Sadly, that's why Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History failed - debt = control.
3. Allowing money to cross boarders without impunity. (But people can't unless it is as a semi-legal work force you can use to drive down wave costs)
4. Smashing indigenous peoples to keep the supply of raw goods (oil, timbers) in thier lands coming into the market. See Jensen! "From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation."
5. Offering cheap almost unregulated debt to keep consumers buying.

The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative, and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the "nanny state" should be dismantled for the benefit of all. ... The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital, and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed ... The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class.

It is interesting that all of these were a big feature of the anti-capitalist critique of the late 90s and early 2000s. It was predicted then that it all all start to fall apart - and it did. This is similar to another article in the Guardian:

The movement, which was essentially demanding democratic control over the global economy, wreathed summit after summit of the G8, the WTO and the World Bank with protest and teargas. It was wild, infuriating, diverse and sometimes incoherent, as only a network that encompasses indigenous peoples, radical environmentalists, workers and kids in hoodies could be. The movement was like the child in the crowd as the emperor of global neoliberalism wheeled by, pointing out that his cloaks were woven from financial fictions and economic voodoo. They must now be credited for their prescience. (my emphasis!)

That said, there were also things that we were wrong about (and I use 'we' in the board sense of some in the anti-capitalist movement - it is a broad church!) I am writing somthing longer on this I hope to publish soon on my blog...
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How Much is Global Warming Denial Worth? $1120 Million Per Day

We're all familiar by now with the vast sums the coal and oil industry has spend on obfuscating the issue of global warming. So for example, the From the American Petroleum Institute dis-information campaign would consider it a victory when, amongst other things, they had got...

Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy.

So why would the oil industry want to stack the negotiarions - following the money - what is it worth them them. Well in a recent article in the Economist magazine (about peak oil) there was this:

The IEA reckons that co-ordinated action to restrict the increase in global temperatures to 2ºC will restrict global demand for oil to 89m b/d in 2030, compared with 105m b/d if no action is taken.

So there is a difference of 16million b/d (that is Barrels Per Day) so given the cost of a barrel is currently around $70, so you can see that it represents $1120 million dollars per day in difference. So event mitigating the supply a bit - by obfuscating the science and promoting uncertainty is worth $millions per day.

That's why denial has been so well funded.
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Bosses Cost Bulk of Pension Schemes

I am surprised I've not seen this news plastered around more. In a nutshell, a new study shows that the bosses of the big FSTE companies cost the pensions schemes far, far more than the ordinary workers. The greedy bastards.

FTSE 100 companies are contributing an average of 70% of executives’ pay to fund the final salary scheme of the top bosses, according to a report by Lane Clark & Peacock.

Higher earners’ pensions are far more expensive than those of ordinary employees. Benefits for employees in final salary schemes cost far less as a proportion of pay than those of senior executives.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that 80% of companies with 500 employees or more, which have defined benefit pension schemes, require employer contributions of between 15% and 20%. This contrasts with the 70% of salary paid for top executives.

Cleveland’s Worker-Owned Boom

An interesting article that in some ways follows on the the work-occupations in Argentina...

This June, the doors will open at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a state-of-the-art, nearly $6 million facility in Cleveland, Ohio.

What’s so special about this laundry? In a word, ownership. The business will be 100 percent owned by its 50 employees, virtually all of whom live in the surrounding community. Life is tough in this neighborhood, where the poverty rate exceeded 30 percent and thousands of homes lay stripped and abandoned even before the current recession began. ...

Iraq War: Right Wing War Blogger's Get it Wrong

Back in 2003, the website Right Wing News asked some leading war-cheerleaders for their opinions of the coalition dead in the upcoming war. This is what they said:

John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less"
Charles Johnson:"Very few"
Henry Hanks: "Less than 200"
Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred"
Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand"
Scott Ott: "Dozens"
Glenn Reynolds: "Fewer than 100"
Tim Blair: "Below 50"
Ken Layne: "a few hundred"
Steven Den Beste: "50-150"

Well they were all totally wrong as currently it stands at around 4600.

Right Wing News didn't bother to ask them about civilian casualties, I guess like the US military, they didn't do body counts. Well for the record the number is around 100,000 to 1,000,000.

They also didn't ask about the financial cost of the war. Prior to the war the Bush people has estimates from $0 (Paul Wolfowitz, "really finance its own reconstruction") to $50 billion (Rumsfeld) to $200 billion (Larry Lindsey - Bush sacked him for this view).

At time of writing; $685,000,000,000 (which might rise to as much as $3 trillion).

Wolfowitz went on to run the World Bank for a bit.
Bliar went on to launch the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to promote peace.

You couldn't make it up...

Overseas Development: $2 Trillion in 50 Years - Banks: $18 Trillion in 1 Year

Says it all really:

"Since the inception of aid (overseas development assistance) almost 50 years ago, donor countries have given some $2 trillion in aid. And yet over the past year, $18 trillion has been found globally to bail out banks and other financial institutions. The amount of total aid over the past 49 years represents just eleven percent of the money found for financial institutions in one year.

The UN Millennium Campaign is urgently calling on rich countries gathering at this week's high-level summit on the economic crisis to make no further excuses that they lack resources and to urgently deliver on their aid commitments."

more at: http://www.endpoverty2015.org