Private Eye looks back at the birth of PFI and makes a not-so-surprising discovery.

A reader alerts the Eye to a 1940s history of Benito Mussolini, uncovered by a US think tank, and makes an unkind comparison with Gordon Brown's current favourite policy.  
   
More strapped for cash than Brown ever was, "Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget.  He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings.  He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yeraly instalment plan.  No money was paid out by the government.  And hence nothing showed up in the budget.
    Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond.  But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the country's books.  However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly instalments which ran from ten to fifty years.
    In time, as the number of such contracts increased, the number and amount of the yearly payments grew.  By 1932 he had obligated the state for 75 billion lire of such contracts.  The yearly payments ran to billions.  What he did by these means was to conceal from the people the fact that he was plunging the nation ever deeper into debt."
   The author, American John T. Flynn, added in a footnote: "For a full and interesting discussion of this wierd chapter in fiscal policy see 'Twelve years of fascist finance', by Dr Gaetano Salvemini, 1935".  So yes: the private finance initiative, cornerstone of 'eleven years of Brownite finance', was in fact one of Il Duce's barmier ideas.

Further detailed coverage from Libcom (http://libcom.org) of the  class struggle that continues to rage in Bangladesh, focusing here on how the global 'food crisis' works concretely in this case. The effect of farming techniques imposed during Asia's 'Green Revolution' is addressed, although this needs to be put related to the world trade 'diplomacy' which since WW2 has made 'developing' countries dependent on food imports (see M. Hudson, Super Imperialism), and to the present commodity price bubble inflated by investment attempting to hedge its way out of exposure to perilous financial 'products'.

In-depth to say the least (it's 55 pages if you print it out) interview with marxist writer/activist and recent Mute collabor Loren Goldner by the South Korean SaNoShin group, covering the 20th century history of class struggle and present developments/future prospects.
From Goldner's Break Their Haughty Power website (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/)

'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and Western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called ‘shopping towns’ were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia

THREE TALKS BY LOREN GOLDNER
London, Jan 19th, 21st and 22nd, 2008

New York-based Marxist Loren Goldner is giving a series of talks in London this month, hosted by Mute magazine [http://metamute.org]

A Peter Linebaugh piece on the Magna Carta auction appeared on Counterpunch a few days ago (http://www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh12152007.html).  A columnist in yesterday's FT  promptly answered the historian's question, "Yet can liberty be bought or sold?"...