VESTAS WORKERS BESIEGED BY RIOT POLICE
(Updated Press Release)

Workers staging a sit-in at the soon-to-close Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight are being starved out by police.

The police, many inside the factory and dressed in riot gear, have denied food to the workers who took over the factory offices last night, to protest the closure of their factory. The police, operating with highly questionable legal authority, have surrounded the offices, preventing supporters from joining the sit-in, and preventing food from being brought to the protestors.

All-too-plausible explanation from Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JH13Ag02.html) of Georgia's attack on South Ossetia (2,000 civilians killed and refugees made of another 30,000; a helping hand from US airlifts of 2,000 'essential' Georgian troops back from Iraq) in terms of the push to extend NATO into the Caucasus, which, as it says in the title, would 'end the post-Cold War era', permanently activating the military faultline along Russia's southwestern border and the course of the major Central Asian gas and oil pipelines.

An endless series of Experts have recycled their opinions in Credit Crisis Anniversary-Festschriften over the last few weeks, but this one from the Moscow Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (www.igso.ru) actually has a historical perspective stretching beyond the calendar year. Good account of consumer credit gigantism as short-term supplement to 30 years of falling real wages in the 'old' industrial world, and of high commodity prices as effect rather than cause of inflation (i.e. more money 'created' than commodities produced).