Monthly Archives: August 2011
Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), issued the following statement after both Republicans and Democrats last Thursday announced their selections to serve on the ‘supercommittee’ that is charged with finding $1.5 trillion in budget cuts. She said: ‘Which Members (of Congress) serve on the new...
ON Thursday the Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, made an emergency statement to parliament on the international economic crisis that is engulfing British capitalism to the point of collapse and, in particular, the Bank of England revising down its growth forecast for 2011. With trillions of dollars being wiped off share...
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) says fire crews are ‘sickened’ by the silence of politicians over fire service cuts. Politicians have been queuing up to question police cuts, but none have yet challenged the same cuts to the fire service, the FBU added in a statement. The union has been inundated...
CITY regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has stepped up scrutiny of UK banks’ exposures to foreign government debt after fears of a European sovereign debt meltdown gripped European stock markets. An FSA spokeswoman said: ‘We have been holding discussions with the banks and their auditors in relation to their...
PUBLIC services staff in Southampton have rejected a revised pay proposal by the Tory city council and voted to continue their programme of rolling strikes. Unison and Unite members voted by four to one to continue with industrial action, while negotiating for a better deal. The long-running dispute has seen hundreds...
FATAH leader Marwan Barghouthi, jailed in Israel during the Second Intifada, has warned Washington that vetoing a Palestinian state at the United Nations would spark huge regional protests. Barghouthi convicted of organising attacks against Israelis during the second intifada, gave an interview to MENA through his lawyer from...
THE beginning of PM Cameron’s speech to the recalled House of Commons was an attempt to divorce the youth uprising that is taking place from the objective situation that workers endure in this country. In this way the issue was reduced to ‘greed’, ‘theft’, ‘sheer criminality’ and other qualities for...
Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday announced a whole series of police state measures for use against young people and workers. He told a recalled House of Commons: ‘Following the meetings of COBRA which I chaired on Tuesday, and Wednesday and again this morning, we have taken decisive action to help...
THE Young Socialists yesterday called a mass lobby of the TUC Annual Congress for Monday September 12, beginning at 8.00am. The conference is being held at the TUC’s headquarters in Great Russell Street near Tottenham Court Road, central London. Young Socialists National Secretary Joshua Ogunleye told News Line: ‘This is going...
‘SINCE we last met, the mood in markets has taken a sharp turn for the worse,’ Bank of England Governor Mervyn King admitted yesterday, as he opened his presentation of the BoE’s latest quarterly inflation report. In his message of doom for British capitalism, King announced that the BoE has...
THE bloody massacre of 85 Libyan men, women and children by NATO in the town of Zlitan exposes once and for all that when the UK, US and France cried out ‘We must go into Libya to protect innocent civilians’, they were lying, and intended to do exactly the...
PALESTINIANS are considering engaging in a fight to change Palestine’s status to that of a ‘non-member state’ as a step forward towards the realisation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Permanent Palestinian observer to the United Nations Riyad Mansour said last Tuesday that the option of changing...
A VAST force of police was mobilised for last night’s action against the masses of youth who have been showing just how much they hate the capitalist order of society, with its unattainable commodities. The police were equipped with armoured Landrovers, of the type used during the anti-republican operations in...
A new study dispels the myth that immigrant workers are taking good-paying jobs away from American-born workers, says the AFL-CIO union federation. According to ‘The Low Wages of Black Immigrants,’ released last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), black workers, whether they were born in the United States or...
Parliament is being recalled again tomorrow, to debate the youth uprising that is sweeping Britain. After he had chaired a Cabinet Office meeting of the emergency ‘Cobra’ committee, which comprises leading politicians, army, police and other sections of the capitalist state, Cameron spoke to the press in Downing Street. Warning of...
Fatah has accused ousted party security chief Muhammad Dahlan of ‘having a hand’ in poisoning the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Arafat died in a Paris hospital in November 2004. The exact cause of his death remains a mystery, but popular belief among Palestinians holds that he was poisoned. Fatah’s...
A new report by the Incomes Data Services and the High Pay Commission has thrown the spotlight on the issue of pensions, and the nauseating hypocrisy of the government and the Labour Party on this question. Workers have been exposed to a constant barrage of lying propaganda pumped out by a...
FOLOWING last Friday’s booting of the USA off its top-tier AAA credit rating, there were big falls in the world’s money markets yesterday. The technology-rich Nasdaq Index fell more than 3 per cent, United States Steel Corp fell 6.2 per cent to $31.18, Citigroup Inc dropped 5 per cent...
THE people of Tottenham were yesterday considering the implications of the explosive uprising that took place on Saturday night. The reverend Nims Obunge said: ‘I was here for five hours before this incident kicked off; I was here with the families, I was here with the communities. ‘Now something did happen...
THE uprising that took place in Tottenham on Saturday night came 48 hours after the police shooting of a local man, Mark Duggan, and five hours after a family-led community protest march that took place from Broadwater Farm to the police station to demand the truth of what...
IRAN’S Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi has announced that 40bn dollars will be invested in the country’s joint oil and gas fields. Explaining his plans for this joint development the oil minister said: ‘Considering the extensive area of the joint fields, their development needs heavy investment; therefore, the task...
The link between Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes is now ‘abundantly clear’, says UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness. ‘Many displacements are taking place where settlements are expanding and with it we are seeing an upturn in vicious attacks by Jewish settlers,’...
Panic gripped investors in the world’s stock markets yesterday as bank shares were hit hard. Share prices on the London stock market slumped by a further 2.5 per cent, wiping another £50bn off shares. The 83 per cent state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland Group announced it is cutting 2,000...
EVEN sections of the bourgeois media, and the bourgeoisie that it represents, were yesterday able to describe the appearance of the current world economic crisis, evaluating it as either ‘just getting into its stride’ or ‘this crisis is only just beginning’. This summation of the situation comes after...
The TUC Congress next month is meeting at an historic juncture of worldwide economic and political crisis. Millions of workers are having their wages frozen or cut, jobs are being destroyed on a vast scale, and all public services are being cut and privatised, with the government hell bent on...
The debt crisis is now eating at the heart of the Eurozone, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned yesterday. He urged all 27 EU countries to urgently rethink their rescue systems, after earlier warning that the eurozone is in ‘system failure’. Barroso said ‘Developments in the sovereign bond markets of...
TEN leading human rights organisations, along with victims of torture and their lawyers, have withdrawn from the British government’s Detainee Inquiry because they believe that its purpose is to hide the truth, not to get to it. In a letter to the Inquiry, the groups – including Reprieve and Amnesty...
THE National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare says the following about Obama’s debt deal that savages the poor and leaves the rich well alone. ‘For too long, middle-class Americans and their families have been held hostage while anti-tax crusaders threaten American default unless vital programmes, like Social Security...
Italian finance minister Giulio Tremonti was yesterday in talks with Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the Eurogroup of finance ministers from the 17 eurozone countries, as yields on Italian bonds reached levels near that of Greece. In early trading, the interest to be paid on Italian 10-year bonds rose 0.19...
JUST one day before Democrats and Republicans were set to forge a trillion dollar debt deal that would impose savage cuts on the American working class, US workers took decisive strike action to defend their living standards. Licensed deck and engineering officers and stewards represented by American Maritime Officers (AMO)...
TAIWANESE electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple, plans to have a million robots, by the next three years, in operation in its Chinese plants, replacing very large numbers of Chinese workers. Foxconn is the world’s biggest contract electronics maker, and also works for Sony, Nokia, Dell and Hewlett...
ISRAELI forces shot dead two Palestinians during an arrest raid near Ramallah in the central West Bank early Monday, onlookers and medical officials said. Witnesses said that soldiers stormed Qalandiyah refugee camp at dawn and as they ransacked homes, confrontations erupted between the army and local residents. The soldiers began...
LORD McFall, who has been examining private sector pension schemes, has concluded in his Workplace Retirement Income Commission review, that workers on private pensions will have a ‘bleak old age’. His review spells out that he is talking about up to nine million people living in poverty for the last...
ORDERS have been issued by Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapaksa and by his sibling Basil Rajapaksa to colonial governor Maj-Gen Chandrasri for immediate and full-swing replacement of Tamil civil service in the north. The act may superficially look as a revenge for the defeat in the civic elections, but...
The National Union of Journalists held their second 24-hour strike yesterday against compulsory redundancies at the BBC. The action received massive support from its 3,000 members. Up and down the country, journalists walked out to defend jobs and the quality of BBC programming, including in Belfast, Glasgow, Hull, Brighton,...
LIBYAN state Al-Jamahiriyah TV opened its first regular news broadcast (0830 gmt) on Saturday 30 July with a report showing damage caused to the state TV building in Tripoli by overnight NATO air strikes. The report made no mention of any casualties. NATO had said earlier that it had conducted...
THE latest NATO war crime, the bombing of the Libyan TV station, killing three technicians, was a repeat of a similar war crime, also carried out by NATO in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. Saturday’s murderous attack was said, by a NATO official, to be part of the NATO...
Labour has accused the government of cutting NHS spending in England in poorer areas and moving funds towards richer parts of the country, citing changes to the funding for primary care trusts. For years, areas which have higher incidences of poor health have been given a higher per-capita funding...