Corporate corruption, pensions and New Labour
I have previous referred to the chapter in Michael Moore's book Stupid White Men in which he deals with the ripping off of company assets by their management. He focuses on Enron which was the real biggie. The management of this company stole hundreds of millions of dollars to finance a lavish lifestyle. This included spending the shareholders' money on charitable and political donations to build their reputation in the areas they operated in.
Enron even gave money to New Labour by hiring stalls at the Labour Party conference. The Labour Party Conference has now become the traditional place that big business pass money back to New Labour for favours rendered. New Labour ministers prostrate themselves at corporate beanos throughout the event. The actual conference floor has become an American-style conference jamboree. Even the so called policy forums are being ignored with the appointment by Blair of Alan Milburn as Postmaster General to look after the manifesto.
This year there was a flicker of resistance, with the conference voting to take the railways back into public ownership. Alistair Darling along with Gordon Brown opposed this on the grounds that the private sector were "investing" £70 million a week into the railways. Of course the exact opposite of this is happening. The taxpayer and the passengers are shelling out billions of pounds a year to enable the rail companies to make fat profits out of their monopolies. It was no coincidence that the rail companies had taken big stalls at the conference. So when the New Labour leadership said they will ignore the conference decision they were serving their corporate masters.
Blunkett did not mention corporate crime or Enron in his conference speech. He announced that £90 million was to be spent expanding the Special Branch to combat terrorism. This is on top of doubling the size of the secret service. This is the muscle of Blair's new war on terrorism, the dangers of which have increased several fold since Blunkett's government opened up new terrorist bases in Iraq. Blunkett's reticence over corporate crime might be explained by him trying to sweep under the carpet what the real effect of his anti-terrorism campaign is having. His unequal (ie one way - people can be sent to the US without the full protection of the UK courts but not from the US to the UK) extradition treaty with the US was brought in to fight terrorism. However it is being used to extradite three British businessmen who allegedly made millions of pounds out of fraudulent deals with Enron. The alleged crimes were committed on UK soil. Extraditing such high-profile people to Texas before the US Presidential election will help take some of the pressure over Enron's links off Bush. After all it was those wily Europeans who destroyed Enron....
There is no defence of British citizens against the Bush administration by New Labour. Lord Goldsmith, UK Attorney General, was supposed to have come to an agreement with the US authorities over the British citizens in Guantanamo Bay. They are still there after two years in solitary confinement unable to see their lawyers or relatives. Now the American military intend to try them by US Officers without any defence and with a presumption of guilt. Hearsay evidence will also be allowed to be used against them.
No wonder those in Liverpool who are campaigning to save Kenneth Bigley from being murdered by thugs in Baghdad have no confidence in New Labour's ability to act. The thugs demand that the two women prisoners held by the US military authorities be released was refused despite an Iraqi Government Minister announcing it might be possible. Unlike the French and Italian Governments the UK possesses no independence of action over its foreign policy. Those inside New Labour who argue any different should ask why the Government has opposed the Court ruling that the inhabitants of Diego Garcia can return.
The ripping of company assets by managers - ie stealing from the shareholders - is one of the major factors behind the so called pensions crisis. This works in three main ways.
The first is a straightforward betrayal of the workers in a company by closing and or restricting their pension fund. This enables the managers to increase the profit of the company and increase their bonuses. In essence their bonuses have come from the anticipated pensions of the longest-serving and most loyal members of staff who are usually low paid.
The second just involves stopping paying any money into the pension funds and in some cases (ie Robert Maxwell) "borrowing" money to fund deals that would increase their bonuses in the short term.
The third case just involves stealing the shareholders' money. Shareholdings which are to a large extent made up of pension funds run by trustees who are not accountable to their prospective pensioners and therefore are simply interested in the charges they can pass on. This in effect means that it is almost impossible to save for a pension by "investing" your money. There are almost no attempts to stop these corporate robbers who steal more money in a week than all the bank robberies in England in decade. The destruction of pensioners' hopes and ability to live above the government decided poverty line causes far more deaths than armed robberies.
If you think that I am exaggerating examine what New Labour peer Lord Black did to the Daily Telegraph through his holding company. He allegedly stole £350 millions. This was 95% of the profits. Profits which were due to the actual owners of the company, many them through pension funds being either pensioners or future pensioners. In other words the pensioners would get back 5% of the returns they should have got less the management fees of the funds. This amounts to practically zero.
And we know what he spent the pensioner's money on. He bought and sold luxury apartments, ran large private jets, spent tens of thousands of pounds on his wife's birthday party. His wife was paid one million dollars a year as a special advisor to the holding company ... and on top of this she was paid for writing an extreme right-wing column for the Daily Telegraph. But she was not even content with this - she claimed for all her writing tools including pencils! No wonder one of her cousins in the AGS has taken to calling her "a right-wing fascist bitch".
But Lord Black has not just spent the pensioners' money on his family's lavish lifestyle. He has donated their money to a Canadian hospital so it can name a wing after him. He realised like the managers of Enron that you need to develop a good public image. Of course he gave the impression the money was donated by him and not from his pensioner shareholders. And who gave him his peerage? None other than Tony Blair. Not a single member of the New Labour Government has publicly commentated on the Lord Black robberies. And as far as one can discover there has been no attempt made in Britain to recover the money.
The extent to which Lord Black as a manager ripped off the shareholders is not unique. Every shareholder of Leeds United including Leeds City Council lost all their money due to the gross mismanagement of the company. And the shareholders have been refused sight of the investigation into its affairs. Leeds's Tory-Green-Liberal Democrat Council and its loyal New Labour opposition refuse to fight for its taxpayers money. British Energy, which is Britain's largest electricity producer, plans to transfer its assets into another company so eliminating its share holders.
Another smaller example concerns a company called the Accident Group. In May last year most of the 2,500 staff were dismissed by text messages. The reason given was that a bank withheld funds from the company. However the founder of the company Mark Langford set up in 2001 a trust fund of £8 million. This was set with "a view to providing discretionary benefits to current, future and former employees, their spouses, widows and dependants". However only the directors of the company were told of the fund or have benefited from it.
The founder of the Accident group is, according to the Daily Telegraph, "in self-imposed exile in Marbella." The £8 million fund is held in the Employee Benefits Trust. This is based in Jersey and owned by a British Virgin Island company called Leverington. This company received 75% of the Accident Group's £11.8 million dividends over the last two years. The remaining 25% went to Mr Langford and his wife. This would considerably lower Mr Langford's tax liability. Alec McFadden of the North West region Trade Union Council has been leading the fight to try to get some of the money for the workers who lost their jobs.
Under New Labour the gap between the rich and poor and has grown considerably. This gap is at its largest for pensioners.
Youth and Labour
On the UK Labour Party web site there are some photogenic pictures of "young" people who support New Labour. An alarming number of them named Stephen Twigg as their favourite MP. I couldn't find any who named a left-wing MP. Some predictably sucked up by naming Blair (none for Brown). Some of the people were not so young and turned out to be MPs in their mid-thirties. It is all so reminiscent of the old Russian Young Communist League.
Delving further into the website it seems that if your class background fits you can go to New Labour's internal Policy Forums without having to live the area you represent. For instance Henri Murison (representing North Yorkshire) is at Cambridge University and Bridget Phillipson representing the North East is at Oxford University.
Death in Iraq
The number of US troops dead in Iraq is now well over 1000. On top of this there have been several thousand casualties. The causality rate per death is far higher than in Vietnam due to improvements in battlefield hospitals. However the returned US causalities have now filled all the hospitals in the Washington DC region. The numbers have grown so large that reservists called up for the invasion have not been allowed to return.
The Bush administration is preparing to reintroduce conscription to make up the numbers after the presidential elections. The Americans now have troops in over 100 countries. Their focus being to protect US oil interests throughout the globe. However in the process they come under more and more attacks. It has become very expensive. Bush has no intention of taxing the oil barons and companies which have donated so heavily to his campaigns but he is also finding it very difficult to raise taxes on Middle Americans. His solution has been to borrow money on an enormous scale. China and Japan have lent billions of dollars to help finance Bush's military adventures.
Most people who are dying in Iraq are its citizens, and many of these have been killed by the US-UK occupation forces. Since early April, when the health ministry in Baghdad began keeping figures, some 3,200 civilians (not including Iraqi police or insurgents) have been killed - some in terrorist attacks, some by the US-led coalition. On average, insurgents now are attacking US forces 87 times a day. More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped, 30 of whom have murdered. The oil pipelines are also under daily attack.
This is a huge insurrection. Clearly large numbers of ordinary Iraqis are prepared to take on the superior firepower of the UK and US troops to drive them out of their country. At the Labour Party conference the leadership organised a stitch-up around the figleaf of the Iraqi Government. They ignore the fact that the so-called Government was chosen by the US, is protected by the US, dare not go outside the US Army-protected compounds and has no democratic mandate to operate in Iraq.
Defence secretary Hoon's predictably made the crassest speech to the Labour Party conference where he urged the delegates not to back the "troops out" call, saying: "Whatever your views, we must now work to defeat terrorism [...] Now is the time to unite to help the Iraqi people rebuild their country, their economy, their way of life."
Almost none of the money the Americans have promised for re-building Iraq after its massive bombing campaign has been spent. However the people of Iraq seemed to be doing their best to chuck the British and American troops out so they can start rebuilding the country themselves.
Mike Turner predicted for Newsweek's web pages that:
- Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or:
- The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam.
Mike Turner is a Retired Air Force Colonel and a former military planner who served on the US Central Command planning staff for operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Before retiring in 1997, he spent four years as a strategic policy planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff specialising in Middle East/Africa affairs. He is a 1973 graduate of the US Air Force Academy and a former fighter pilot and air-rescue helicopter pilot. The graphs shown at http://www.lies.com/blog/archives/001316.html can be criticised on the grounds that the Vietnam War did not really begin to heat up until the middle 1960s; however the general comparison is striking.
Stopping Americans voting
Among Bush strategists it has been felt that Americans living abroad might have fallen under influences that might make them vote against Bush. In order to help the administration out the Pentagon has begun restricting international access to the official web site (www.fvap.gov) intended to help overseas absentee voters cast ballots. According to overseas-voter advocates who have been monitoring the situation, internet service providers in at least 25 countries - including Yahoo Broadband in Japan, Wanadoo in France, BT Yahoo Broadband in Britain and Telefónica in Spain - have been denied access to the site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, apparently to protect it from hackers. However the Pentagon was unable to provide examples of internet service providers being banned from any other US government web sites.
[Tip: If you can't access the site, try using Google's cached link after a search for "FVAP". Alternatively, click here. Ed.]
Meanwhile in Ohio the question is "Was your voter registration form thick enough?" Ohio's republican secretary of state has issued an order (three days before the registration deadline) to throw out all voter registration forms printed on paper less than 80lb. Coincidence that Democratic Party leaning areas have seen a 250% rise in voter registration, with tens of thousands of new voters in a race expected to be closer then Florida 2000? Of course it was the Ohio State Government that sent out 40lb forms to those requesting them.
Last Saturday nearly 500 people went to Fylingdales, North Yorkshire, to protest against the US military's Star Wars project which is due to go live within the next few weeks. There were speeches, drumming, food and a march across the moor up to the radar.
The attendance of Thom Yorke from Radiohead helped to raise the profile of the demonstration. Star Wars is the US Government's long running project to get its weapons into space. There has been widespread worldwide opposition to the project which breaks weapons proliferation treaties and threatens to spark a space arms race, as countries such as China and Russian seek to match the US's capabilities.
It is part of the US's quest for "full spectrum dominance" and would allow the US to fire missiles at earth from space. The radar at Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire moors will play a vital part of the system, and by allowing US to use and upgrade it, the British Government is giving full support to a project which poses a serious threat to worldwide peace and security.
More on triangulation
I have touched upon this political strategy developed by Bill Clinton's advisors (and completely forgotten by Kerry's). Basically it means that you drive your strategy towards those elements that you know to be popular (discovered through focus groups). Part of this involves pandering to the most backward elements in the electorate in order to prevent your opponents developing support to your right.
In New Labour this rightwing job was done by Jack Straw and is now being done with relish by Blunkett. He loves being called a rotweiller or a Genghis Khan. Blunkett's job is to be more right-wing on law and order than the Tories. He has succeeded. He is now so far to the right that not only does he consort with the enemy in his personal relations, he socialises with them. At the Labour Party conference he went to two private parties with journalists from the Daily Mail and the Sun.
However another part of the triangulation strategy is attack your opponents and their motives. This involves steering any discussion away from policies. So New Labour has been running its Hartlepool election campaign by personally attacking its opponents usually by saying they are not local i.e. dangerous foreigners. This might work if everyone had forgotten Mandelson. Another example is that they have registered a number of websites containing Michael Howard's name. Until this was exposed they had been planning to use the sites to run their heavily spun version of the Tory leader's life. Given the closeness of policies between Blair and Howard, just like Bush and Kerry, the only way to proceed is personal abuse. No wonder the electorate are increasingly staying at home.
Leeds West Indian Carnival
As can be seen from the photographs a great time was had by all, and it was truly spectacular.
Chapel Allerton Arts Festival
The Alliance for Green Socialism stall did great business at the Chapel Allerton Arts Festival. The Festival is going from strength to strength and provided a chance to meet many old friends.
-- Half-Celestial Khan
