Economics

UK commuters face an 8 to13% increase in rail fares, well above the rate of inflation, whilst Stagecoach, one of the private rail companies, announces a return of £340m in profits to shareholders – including an £88m payment to two chief executives. Meanwhile the inevitable austerity driven “double dip recession” looms across major economies but the banks refuse to lend.

The Venezuelan Minister for Energy and Oil, Rafael Ramírez, said bringing home the gold is a measure that will strengthen the economy and sovereignty. He also defended the government project to nationalise gold mining in the country. The Venezuelan executive announced on Wednesday that it will recover the gold deposited in countries such as the UK, the USA and Canada.

The greed of people as they accumulate wealth and resort to Riba (transactions involving usury and interest) are the causes of the current global credit crisis, according to an eminent and erudite Muslim and one of the leaders of the Muslim community in India.

Whilst the blame game about the UK riots rages in the national and international Media and the State uses the opportunity to get more draconian, punitive and discriminatory, we must keep an eye on the structural changes that the neoliberal agenda is introducing, even as we speak about those changes being the root of the problem.

Expensive studies prepared by prestigious organisations come now to say that the “physical” trading in human beings is the third most profitable “illicit” business after drug and arms trafficking.

Bryan Farrell, a New York based writer and contributor to wagingnonviolence.org gives his view on the English riots and what MLK might make of it all, “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.”

Credit Rating Agencies are at it again. If the hole in the real economy, the one in which real people live, created by the virtual economy, where the speculators live, aka “rescuing the Banks during the subprime crisis”, were not big enough, Standard and Poor, has “downgraded” the US Credit Rating sending the world economy into a deeper hole. So who are they?

The World Trade Organization member countries are moving towards the Eighth Ministerial Conference in Doha next December, again with no concrete results, even on issues relating to least-developed Countries (LDCs), recognized by the member countries’ ambassadors in the informal meeting of last July 26.

It is necessary to reflect on the possible ways out of the entire crisis in which our society is submerging. The excessive power of financial capital, the widespread debt and enormous concentration of wealth is something which the nation state, captured and blackmailed by that power, is unable to confront.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to take a firm stand vis-a-vis Greece bleeding financial crisis, she was surly aware that black economy accounts as high as one-third of Greek GNP, that tax invasion amounts to 20 billion dollars a year, and that corruption is rooted everywhere, at all levels, particularly among political parties.