Linky Love for the weekend

• The Refugee Council have new research on asylum seekers: In-depth interviews with asylum seekers and refugees revealed that:
  • Over two thirds did not choose to come to the UK.
  • Most only discovered they were going to the UK after leaving their country of origin.
  • The primary objective for all those interviewed was reaching a place of safety.
  • Around three quarters had no knowledge of welfare benefits and support before coming to the UK – most had no expectation they would be given financial support.
  • 90% were working in their country of origin and very few were aware they would not be allowed to work when they arrived in the UK.
• Giles Wilkes has written on conspicuous consumption in China: The price of ‘fine’ items – like Hirst artwork, say – is driven by demand, not supply or quality.  If there are rich people, who have a deep need to demonstrate that they are men of wealth and taste, then the price of the items that are conventionally linked to such qualities are bound to rise – hence the existence of How to Spend It magazine.
• Lenny gets justifiably fucking furious with the Heritage Foundation: You want to hear about chutzpah? You want to hear about sheer gravity-defying audacity? Well, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, prepare to catch your lower jaw. Forget Limbaugh’s racist anxieties. Forget about Pat Robertson drooling about Haiti’s ‘pact with the devil’. He’s a senile old bigot, and his sick provocations are familiar by now. This is the Heritage Foundation on the Haiti earthquake, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 people…
• Matthew Yglesias on the Senate hearings on our financial crisis: The entire younger generation is going to suffer because of the massive debt-overhang. But Dimon and the Morgan crowd are still getting filthy rich in part thanks to government emergency measures designed to mitigate the crisis. And this is not because Morgan had tons of foresight. They didn’t even consider a scenario in which housing prices might fall. It’s an idiotic mistake. The exact same mistake that everyone else made. But they made it to a somewhat lesser extent than their leading competitors. So rather than suffering, they’re benefitting. It’s the miracle of capitalism!
• Skeptical Science ask where the warming went this winter, and tell us:
• Paul Cotterill reveals the Lancashire Tories’ secret privatisation plans: I’m well used to Tory incompetence and arrogance, but even I’ve been pretty shocked by the news that the Tory administration at Lancashire County Council, with the connivance of their Tory colleagues at West Lancashire Borough Council and other Tory boroughs across the County, have been secretly preparing a massive privatisation of services.
• Dave Semple lauches a call to arms for the Union Movement: The strikes, the mass occupations of Parliament Square, the sporadic disruption of the national business must continue until Parliament votes to repeal these laws, and the other laws which represent a gross overreach as regards the diminishing rights of the individual. And make no mistake, the issues are totally connected; the organised labour movement – even in its atrophied state – remains the only consistent means whereby to control our political caste, even if that control remains moderated by the confines of capitalism.
• Narco News – one of the best news sources for the Americas – describes the devastation of Haiti’s earthquake: Two buildings over, Joseph Matherenne cried as he directed the faint light of his cell phone’s screen over the bloody corpse of his 23-year-old brother. His body is draped over the rubble of the office where he worked as a video technician. Unlike most of the bodies in the street, there was no blanket to cover his face.
• The Graun bring us up to date on Haiti’s history of imperial subjugation: The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

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