News From Nowhere is the monthly 2 page newsletter of the WSPUS. Please download, print and distribute it in your town, work, school or union.

This month’s NfN: About the “Housing Bubble” …

The Liberal Democratic Party, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, lost the majority it had held in the upper house (along with its coalition partner the New Komei Party), so that now it is controlled by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Many within the LDP have called for Abe to resign, which is customary after such a major defeat, but as of mid-August he is still holding on to power. Whatever Abe’s destiny, however, the election result seems to herald the beginning of the end of what has essentially been a system of one-party rule since the LDP was formed in 1955.

There is no shortage of reasons for the defeat suffered by the LDP. First and foremost, there was the scandal involving the pension system. It was revealed in May that some 50 million pension records had been lost. This means that people who regularly paid into the system are at risk of being shortchanged on their pension benefits. With a huge percentage of Japan’s population at or nearing retirement age, it is easy to understand why this scandal has alienated so many people from the LDP.

We have been going for over a hundred years and over that period have come across all sorts of theories as to the cause of and solution to the problems facing society and wage and salary workers in particular. One set are those who say that the answer lies in some reform of the monetary system and who are known, perhaps ungenerously, as “currency cranks”. They go back a long ago way, and were even found amongst the Chartists in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s.

They argue that banks are the problem: that they can create credit (money, purchasing power) by a mere stroke of the pen, which enables them to exploit the rest of society through charging interest on this. With our knowledge of how capitalism works — how surplus value, the source of all rent, interest and profit, is created by workers at the point of production — we have always argued that this is not the case. Banks are just intermediary financial institutions, borrowing money from some to lend to others. They have no special powers to create purchasing power out of nothing. They merely redistribute it. Only the government can create extra token money.

News From Nowhere is the monthly 2 page newsletter of the WSPUS. Please download, print and distribute it in your town, work, school or union.

This month’s NfN: We choose “The Ballot Over The Bullet”

Imagine is the magazine of our Canadian Companion Party - the SPC. In this issue they celebrate “100 Years For Socialism”

News From Nowhere is the monthly 2 page newsletter of the WSPUS. Please download, print and distribute it in your town, work, school or union.

This month’s NfN: “What do you mean, Freedom Isn’t Free?”

Three stories of the ongoing tribulations of the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana

1.

In previous blogs we have highlighted the roles of China and The United States in the politics and economics of Africa and in case we are criticised for not mentioning the other nations exploiting the continent , we have decided to highlight the French on this occasion

French businesses have longstanding operations in Africa. The continent accounts for 5 percent of France’s exports. Though France has diversified its sources of raw materials, Africa remains an important supplier of oil and metals. There are 240,000 French nationals living in Africa.

Zambia is to pay $15.5 million (£7.7 million) to a British Virgin Isles-registered firm to settle a case at London’s High Court. The two sides had agreed the sum after allowing for interest and payments already made - significantly lower than Donegal had wanted, but still a substantial profit for the firm.
Donegal International - described by critics as a “vulture fund” - had taken the country to court seeking payment of a debt, and late payment penalties.
The firm had been seeking $55 million in total - after buying a debt of $3.2 million that Zambia originally owed to Romania. The original debt arose from a $15m loan made by Romania in 1979, mainly for Zambia to buy farming equipment. However, Zambia’s economy ran into trouble and the country fell behind with payments.
The outstanding debt was bought by Donegal in 1999 at a deeply discounted price and it later sued to recoup the full amount plus penalties.

“Vulture fund” companies buy up the debt of poor countries at cheap prices, and then demand payments much higher than the original amount of the debt, often taking poor countries to court when they cannot afford to repay . Vulture fund is a term that’s used for bond speculators who take the bonds, the cheap debt of the third world, that may sell ten cents on the dollar, because no one expects to ever collect on these debts, they buy up the debts really cheap, and then they use political muscle, bribery or lawsuits to try to squeeze til the pips squeak , as they say .
Anti-poverty campaigners say such companies are unethical; and divert resources away from badly needed spending on health and education in very poor countries. Some international finance officials have also voiced fears that recent official debt relief for the poorest countries might encourage more legal claims as countries that no longer have to repay the World Bank, for example, may be more able to pay private creditors who go to court.

Nigeria’s Niger Delta crisis goes back to 1920 and the treaties that the forefathers of the people of the region signed with the imperial masters in Bonny. The Niger Delta spreads out over several states in Nigeria and even before Nigeria’s independence in October 1960, there had been serious tensions surrounding the arrangements for the government of the region.

Warri in Delta state is the second most important oil town in Nigeria after Port Harcourt, the capital of River state. Delta state produces approximately 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil. It is the richest state in the Nigerian federation. Its capital is Asaba near Onitsha, the biggest commercial market in Africa.

Since the end of the Second World War, when the US forced the Italian government to discharge its Communist Party cabinet members as a prerequisite for aid, to its support for the coup attempt in Venezuela in 2003, the US has been regularly subverting elections around the globe for the benefit of its own corporate elite.

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Workers in Colombia are amongst the poorest in the world yet live in an area rich in natural resources. Colombia’s complex and on-going war between the government’s armed forces, drug producers and traffickers, leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries, with blurred distinctions between each side, continues. Trade unionists, students, activists, journalists and those accused of collaborating with any side in the conflict are potential victims, not just combatants. This is not only a civil conflict, for following the globalisation of capital we see the globalisation of the means of defending capital: war.

In the late 1980s the Andean Group of governments further liberalized investment regulations to ease the repatriation of profits from foreign investments and to allow a greater foreign involvement in the national economy. This led to the Andean Pact free trade agreement in 1992. The most recent figures show that free-trade capitalism has done little to benefit workers in Colombia. World Bank figures show that the national poverty rate declined from 65 percent in 1988 to 64 percent in 1999. According to the FAO, the number of undernourished people in the population decreased from 6.1 million in 1990-92 to 5.7 million in 2000-02. If this is the World Bank’s current motto of ‘A World Free of Poverty’ in action, then Colombians will be waiting several decades before they even have enough food to eat in a country with the some of the richest natural resources on the planet.

It seems that Dr. Jack Kevorkian needs a little of his own medicine, so to speak. The Michigan state parole board rejected a request to pardon the doctor or commute his sentence, even though he is in grave medical condition. He is currently serving a 10-25 year sentence for his roll in the assisted suicide of Lou Gehrig’s disease sufferer, and is not eligible for parole until 2007. Despite the protests of his lawyer, and prison doctors, he will not be considered for early release until then.

Dr. Kevorkian is currently suffering from high blood pressure, arthritis, cataracts, osteoporosis and Hepatitis C.

Wednesday 16 November was a quiet day in France. Only 163 cars were burnt by urban rioters in the whole of France and the state of emergency was lifted in some places and re-imposed in others. The urban unrest of the last two weeks is fading away, leaving some dead - the guy attacked for trying to defend his area from arsonists; some injured - the disabled woman set on fire in a bus by thugs, the 18- month-old baby who received a rock on the head and a whole lot of mindless vandalism: cars burnt, schools burnt, buses burnt, kindergartens burnt, shops smashed and so on.

The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy- sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France’s answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs “riff-raff”, thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.