Weak Economic Recovery is Because of the Mal-Distribution of Income and Wealth

The US unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent in April as the economy created a modest 115,000 jobs, official figures showed Friday, the eve of President Barack Obama’s maiden reelection rally.

Despite the meager job creation, the Labor Department data showed unemployment at the lowest level in over three years.

But the report will do little to sweeten popular sentiment about the health of the recovery, which has been beset by pitfalls.

The number of unemployed fell by 200,000 to 12.5 million.

The drop in unemployment was in part due to workers dropping out of the jobs market.

Participation fell to 63.6 percent.

Confidence has become a shaky plank of the US recovery from the 2008-09 recession, hit by earthquakes, fiscal crises, revolutions and infuriatingly mixed data.

Economists had expected unemployment to be stuck at 8.2 percent, with the economy creating 162,000 jobs during the month.

The report will be more keenly parsed over by the White House than usual.

On Saturday Obama will visit Ohio and Virginia to begin to make his case for re-election.

Half of all voters say the economy is the single biggest issue in this November’s election.

Since Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate has arched from 7.8 percent at inauguration to 10 percent as the impact of the financial crisis spread, and back down to 8.1 percent today.

Obama’s fate could turn on whether he can convince voters that his policies avoided another Great Depression and that his rival would return to policies that failed in the past.

Obama will not mention, nor will any Republican, especially Wall Street Mitt Romney, that the economy sucks because the demand for goods and services are not there. And this is cause by the mal-distribution of income that the government has engineered during the last 32 years through free trade treaties, deregulation and other things.

That’s why the economy is so terrible.

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Why Are Teacher Cut Backs Coming? Blame Free Trade Agreements

The Oregonian writer Steve Duin wrote a nice piece about teacher cutbacks at Franklin High School coming in the next few months. He only told the effects, and I asked him to write about what has caused these cutbacks. Below is a link to his well written column, and below that is my response.

At Portland's Franklin High School, the Bell Tolls for…Them

Dear Steve Duin,
I appreciate your nice, but short-sighted, story titled, “At Franklin, the bell tolls for…them.” You quote teacher Portia Hall as saying, “’I’ve been teaching for fifteen years, and I’ve never had a year when we didn’t cut. Even when times were good.’”

Why don’t you tell the whole story about school funding and teacher cut backs? Why don’t you write about how free trade treaties have shipped jobs and much of the tax base overseas? Why don’t you write about how those treaties make it more profitable for American businesses to create jobs in other nations rather than here? Why don’t you write about how the difference between the old higher wages in the US and the new lower wages over there go into the pockets of Wall Street fat cats and other rich people via higher corporate profits, enhanced dividends and rising share prices? The people that lose those jobs wind up searching for work. That’s not a very good trade. This leads to a good question.

What are the federal government and the American economy for? Is it to redistribute more income to the already rich at the expense of working people? That’s been happening for the last thirty years.

These agreements are the primary reason why the rich are getting richer. They’re why the one percent received 93 percent of total US income growth from 2009 to 2010.

Why is the tax base crumbling? Why are teachers being laid off three years after the official end of the recession? Why can’t the economy create over 12 million jobs with rising real wages nowadays, like it did when Jimmy Carter was president and the economy and the population were only about 60 percent the size of what they are now? Why have only 4 million jobs with declining real wages and salaries been created in the twelve years since George W. Bush took office? Why is the economy so weak?

Free trade “income redistribution” agreements are the greatest reasons the one percent receive nearly 25 percent of the total US income nowadays compared with about 8 percent under Carter. The result has been devastating to the 99 percent in lost jobs, declining real income, demand too weak to create jobs in the US at previous levels, evaporating tax bases, teachers voting to strike in Gresham-Barlow and the Parkrose districts. These agreements are also the primary reasons why Portia Hall has never seen “a year we didn’t cut.”

Just open your eyes and look at those free trade treaties and ask yourself what the upcoming Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement is going to do to 99 percent of Americans. If it’s implemented, the agreement is going to redistribute even more income to the one percent from the 99 percent, leading to more jobs shipped overseas, jobs created in other nations rather than here, shrinking tax bases, cutbacks in education, police, firefighters and all kinds of government positions and programs that the 99 percent rely upon. Are these the results we want from our federal government and our economy? I don’t think so, but that’s what we’ve got.

So I ask you again, Why don’t you write about the causes, as well as the effects? Why don’t you tell the whole story?

Warmest Regards,

John Hively

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How badly has wealth and income been redistributed by the US government over the last thirty years

How unequal is the redistribution of income and wealth in US? The Guardian of the United Kingdom has posted the story and animated the key data – see what it says. But before you begin, let it be stated unequivocally; income and wealth distribution is primarily brought about by the golden rule of politics. He or she who has the gold makes the rules. Also bear in mind that the current economic weakness in the US and in much of the industrialized world has been brought about by this redistribution. The 99 percent have less money to spend since our corrupt government has redistribution much of their income to the 1 percent.

click here for the complete story

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U.S. set for fourth year in a row of $1 trillion-plus deficit According to the Congressional Budget Office

The United States isn’t heading for a economic disaster, not yet anyway since were still in one, but it is heading toward another trillion dollar deficit. You’d think the folks in Washington would figure out that redistributing income and wealth from productive working people to the unproductive parasites of the affluent class reduces the demand for goods and services in roughly the proportion as the redistribution. Unfortunately, the rich folks hijacked our government long ago, so don’t expect jobs to increase at a serious enough pace to enhance federal tax receipts enough to significantly reduce the deficit.

Click here for more on the deficit

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Globalization is the Ultimate Income Redistribution Scam

By now it’s obvious globalization has just been a way to redistribute income from those who work for a living to the rich. The corporations of the rich send jobs from higher wage nations to the lowest wage countries, and the difference between the old wages and the new is pocketed by the rich. It’s that simple. That’s the major reason, although not the only one, why the rich have gotten wealthier and the rest of us are tightening our belts. The rich have stolen our jobs and hijacked our governments.

Both Republicans and Democrats pretty much believe that making the rich wealthier by redistributing income and wealth to them from working people is the only purpose for any economy, especially the US economy.

It’s weird how people view globalization as something important to prosperity for all when all of the evidence says exactly what I said above. A story below is about how globalization is threatened by income disparity. So I republished the story below. In parenthesis and italics are my interpretation of what they really mean.

—————————————————————————————

(Reuters) – A backlash against rising inequality – evident from the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring – risks derailing the advance of globalization and represents a threat to economies worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum.

(People are becoming aware that rising income inequality is brought about by globalization and people are getting mad. This represents a threat to our income redistribution scam.)

Severe income disparity and precarious government finances rank as the biggest economic threats facing the world, according to the group’s 2012 Global Risks report released on Wednesday.

(Declining government finances are brought about because of the redistribution of income from working people to the rich through globalization. Working people have less money to spend which results in less demand for goods and services, which leads to fewer jobs and less collectable taxes that working people pay. Because of the weakened tax base, police and teachers are laid off. Ergo, globalization has weakened the world’s economies and angry people have begun to realize this.)

The 60-page analysis of 50 risks over the next decade precedes the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in two weeks’ time in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, and paints a bleak picture of an increasingly uncertain world. Over the past four decades, Davos, which brings together politicians, central bankers and business leaders, has become a byword for globalization. Now confidence about the steady gains from the onward march of the global marketplace is faltering.

(The “steady gains” of the rich gotten via stealing income from working people is at risk. This income redistribution scam is about to come under fire by a lot of angry people who are coming to realize what a scam globalization is.)

Rising youth unemployment, a retirement crisis among pensioners dependent on debt-burdened states and a yawning wealth gap have sown the “seeds of dystopia,” according to the report, based on a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders

(Damn it! Working people are becoming aware of how globalization has ripped them off, wiped out their savings, destroyed their industrial base, exported their jobs, weakened or stolen their pensions, and curbed their taxable income. Pretty soon the shit’s going to hit the fan and our globalization scheme may come to an end unless governments we control, like the US government, act in repressive ways to maintain it.)

For the first time in generations, people no longer believe their children will grow up to have a better standard of living.

(Thank you globalization for ruining the futures of the children of the lesser people, those 99 percent rabble rousing peons. We of the one percent got ours, and we’re still getting ours, even if it was theirs, but it isn’t anymore.)

“It needs immediate political attention, otherwise the political rhetoric that responds to this social unease will involve nationalism, protectionism and rolling back the globalization process,” said Lee Howell, the WEF managing director responsible for the report.

(“Working people are going to demand that we stop redistributing income and wealth from them to the rich!” Howell meant. “We must stop that! We must continue to wipe out the middle class via globalization!”)

The unsustainable level of government debt in many countries had already been highlighted as a top threat in the previous two WEF risk reports but the chronic nature of fiscal deficits means the issue remains centre stage.

(The US Federal Reserve can print trillions of dollars and give it out to Goldman Sacs, which can then hand out bazillions to the rich, and that’s perfectly fine, but government programs for working people have to be ended because of government debt. We can simply print money for us because we control the governments, but the lesser people can’t have anything because of government debt.)

“We’re seeing governments kicking the can down the road and not trying to get their hands on it,” Howell said.

(“Government doesn’t want to answer to the people and put an end to globalization,” Howell meant. “It’s a hot topic. People are going to get angry when they see how globalization has screwed the future of working people.”)

Since last January, the euro zone’s debt crisis has spread and deepened – toppling governments in Greece and Italy – while the United States has lost its triple-A credit rating, after failing to stabilize its debt position.

(Globalization has been an inequality scam that has sucked away the hopes and dreams of the masses and led to a situation in which the world is much more economically and politically unstable. But globalization is good for us rich fat cats and must be continued no matter how bad things get, or how unstable they become, because of this scam.)

There will be a greater focus than ever in Davos this year on the failures of the modern market economy, including discussion on the uncertain future of capitalism, a subject that would have got short shrift in the years before the financial crisis.

(We’ve got to figure out a way to ensure that working people believe that globalization is good for them and their children until we bleed as much income and wealth as possible from them and redistribute it to the rich.)

HACK ATTACK

In an increasingly interconnected world, the WEF report also highlights the risks posed by cyberattacks against individuals, corporations and nations.

“The Arab Spring demonstrated the power of interconnected communications services to drive personal freedom, yet the same technology facilitated riots in London,” said Steve Wilson, chief risk officer for general insurance at Zurich Financial Services.

(Technology gives too much information and power to working people to coordinate their protests against us rich folks. I don’t know what we can do about that. Any suggestions?)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s defense strategy this month showed cyber warfare to be a growing focus for governments, while companies got a wake-up call last April when hackers stole Sony Play Station online data for millions of users.

“It’s completely mind-boggling how complex the world is becoming and it is hard to understand the risks that come from that,” Wilson said.

Other threats identified in the 2012 report include the risk that financial and other regulatory systems designed to safeguard the modern world may no longer be up to the job, as well as rising greenhouse gas emissions and looming water shortages.

(Other threats identified in the 2012 report include the risk that financial and other regulatory systems designed to redistribute income and wealth from working people to the wealthy will no longer be up to the job with an aroused and angry working class organizing to oppose it. Oh, yes, green house gases and water shortages will also be a problem, for them, but not for us.)

Governments and corporations must also stay abreast of a host of “X” factors – emerging concerns with still unknown consequences – such as the risk of a volcanic winter or a major accident involving new technology, such as genetically modified organisms or nanotechnology.

Full report at: here

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; editing by Janet McBride)

Click here for more on this story

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Obama Announces A New, Leaner, US Corporate Welfare Program for the Rich via the Military

The US has the most bloated, corruption inspired military in the world. It’s a massive welfare and income redistribution program for rich people. Every missile built represents profit for the one percent. Likewise, every soldier killed represents profit for the one percent. When that soldier dies, or is maimed and unable to kill effectively anymore, the military needs to purchase a lot more stuff, like uniforms and equipment, for the dead soldier’s replacement. That means profits and huge profiteering for the one percent, and a loss for the 99 percent in taxes and blood. In other words, the US, with a military bigger in size than the next seven biggest military’s in the world, is a massive income redistribution scam. The 99 percent pay taxes to support it, and the one percent reaps all of the benefits via those taxes and the blood of the 99 percent who are killed and maimed for profit and profiteering. You could cut the US military in half and it would still be the biggest in the world. By some accounts, the US military is currently bigger than the rest of the worlds armed forces combined. How’s that for a rich person’s welfare and income redistribution program?

Click here for the story and video

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Hey Rich Dummies! The Middle Class Grows the Economy While the Affluent Weaken It

The demand for goods and services creates jobs and nothing else matters, more or less. That’s why the middle and lower classes, or as we like to say, the 99 percent, are the jobs creators. The rich are the job destroyers. That’s why thirty years of trickle down economics has gotten us into another Republican Great Depression. That’s also why redistributing income from the 99 percent to the 1 percent destroys jobs. That’s right. This process, like the recent South Korea outsourcing jobs and redistributing income to the rich treaty,” destroy jobs. Destroying jobs on behalf of the 1 percent means destroying prosperity for the 99 percent.

Click here for more on the subject

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The Best Master’s (Graduate) Degrees With Which to Get a Job

By John Hively

Here are the ten best master’s degrees to have if you want to get a job, at least according to Forbes magazine. However, there are things Forbes never mentioned, most likely because they didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of their corporate advertisers or the magazine’s libertarian CEO, Steve Forbes.

Take computer science, for example. Forbes most likely doesn’t want you to know that a ton of those jobs have and are being outsourced to India and Pakistan. Computers connect the world and make it easier to outsource jobs to the lowest bidder worldwide. So the market in the USA for computer science majors is getting more and more competitive because of those free trade treaties that Forbes loves to endorse.

When a corporation ships jobs overseas, the difference between the old compensation here and the new compensation there increases profits, and ultimately goes into the bulging wallets of CEO’s and mostly rich shareholders via higher dividends and share prices. In other words, free trade is a redistribution of income scam and computer programmers are among the best educated American citizens that lose out because of those income redistribution treaties.

Anyway, here’s the list of jobs and a few of my comments.

1. (tie) Computer Science (Caveat—See nursing below)
Mid-career median pay: $109,000
Projected employment increase: 27%
Common jobs: Software developer, software architect, software engineer

1. (tie) Physician Assistant Studies (Caveat—See nursing below)
Mid-career median pay: $101,000
Projected employment increase: 39%
Common jobs: Physician assistant

3. (tie) Civil Engineering (Another job that can be and is outsourced)
Mid-career median pay: $96,400
Projected employment increase: 24%
Common jobs: Civil engineer, project manager

3. (tie) Economics (Caveat—See nursing below)
Mid-career median pay: $116,000
Projected employment increase: 19%
Common jobs: Economist, market research analyst, data analyst

3. (tie) Mathematics (Caveat—See nursing below)
Mid-career median pay: $87,100
Projected employment increase: 22%
Common jobs: Actuary, software developer, data analyst

6. Environmental Science (Caveat—See nursing below)
Mid-career median pay: $84,300
Projected employment increase: 28%
Common jobs: Environmental scientist, environmental health scientist, project manager

7. (tie) Nursing (Caveat–Nurses can’t be outsourced. However, for several years your government under the Bush administration negotiated through the World Trade Organization (WTO) to import almost every classification of employee, including doctors and nurses, at the same compensation as they earned in their home countries for a period of up to three years. That means a nurse earning $10 a day in the Philippines could’ve been imported into the USA to work as a nurse for $10 per day. The same was true of every job listed in this article along with hundreds of others. A computer programmer in Pakistan earning $5,000 a year could’ve been imported into the USA and then paid that same amount as he or she earned there. The government, in other words, was negotiating to reduce the compensation of doctors, nurses, computer programmers and thousands of others in the USA. More specifically, on behalf of the richest of Americans, your government was negotiating to redistribute your income, livelihoods and futures to the richest of Americans. This is something that never happened, mainly because South American nations broke off negotiations over agricultural subsidies. Just remember, however. Your government tried to make it so, and it will likely try again. Fight back. Join the Occupy movement)

Mid-career median pay: $85,500
Projected employment increase: 22%
Common jobs: Nursing manager, advanced registered nurse practitioner, pediatrics nurse practitioner

7. (tie) Physics (Caveat—See nursing above)
Mid-career median pay: $115,000
Projected employment increase: 16%
Common jobs: Senior systems engineer, physicist, software engineer

9. Occupational Therapy (Caveat—See nursing above)
Mid-career median pay: $78,000
Projected employment increase: 29%
Common jobs: Occupational therapist, hand therapist, rehabilitation services director

10. Political Science (I don’t know why Forbes selected this as 10th best. I know several paralegals and they’re all unemployed in their field)
Mid-career median pay: $87,100
Projected employment increase: 19%
Common jobs: Paralegal/legal assistant, government affairs director

Forbes alleges they got their pay and employment increase numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I can understand the growth of nurses and physician assistants because of the aging of the baby boomers, but given the continued weakness of the economy, it’s difficult to envision the growth of the other fields, especially when so many of them can be exported.

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Economic Lies of the Republican: Tax Cuts for the Rich Don’t Create Jobs, They Destroy Jobs and Redistribute Income From Working People to the Rich: Here’s How

By John Hively

Republicans have long championed the idea that tax cuts for the rich create jobs. We know that’s a lie. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy created negative private sector job growth for the last ten years. They also helped to send us spiraling into the current slow motion 2nd Great Depression. Let it be stated unequivocally that there is not a shred of evidence that tax cuts for the rich has ever created a single job, but there is plenty of evidence they destroy jobs and redistribute income.

We’ll start this series with how the affluent use tax cuts to steal money out of the pockets of working people.

Say you’re a billionaire and you have a yearly income of a hundred million dollars. Perhaps you take home ninety million dollars after all the deductions you have. You’re only paying fifteen percent federal tax on your capital gains, which is how you derive your income, but those deductions add another five million to your checking account. What happens if the capital gains tax rate is slashed to ten percent? That means you take home ninety-five million dollars.

You might invest that extra five million with a hedge fund, which is a non-regulated investment company. The managers there might invest that money in the futures market for oil. Does that create any jobs? Hell no. But it does bid up the price of a barrel of oil. Say oil is trading at $100 a barrel before the tax cut. After the cut, there are lots of billionaires and millionaires investing in the futures markets with the cash from their new tax break, which bid up the price of lots of commodities; but let’s stick with black gold for simplicity. All these rich people bid up the price of oil to say $150 a barrel.

That means the price of gasoline is going to jump, maybe a dollar or two a gallon, more or less. That extra dollar or two you pay at the pump goes directly to the rich folks that bid up the price of oil. That means money goes from your pocket to the wallets of the rich because of their tax cut. In this way, tax cuts for the rich redistribute income from working people to the affluent.

Of course, it’s worse than this if you’re a working stiff because the wealthy are pushing up the price of goods all through the economy via their investments in the futures markets for farm produce, chickens, beef, steel, whatever. You name it. You’re paying more of your income to the rich for a ton of stuff.

That means you have less cash to spend at your local restaurant, or maybe to buy that iPod, television, Toyota Prius, or any number of things. And whatever company makes the items that citizen’s purchase is forced to reduce labor costs because the demand is less thanks to the redistribution magic of those tax cuts. So companies cut the wages and benefits of their employees, and or reduce their work force through lay-offs, or they offshore jobs. That local restaurant of yours might be forced to lay-off people, reduce employee hours, or even close, thereby eliminating more jobs.

So those tax cuts for rich fat cats are killing jobs, not creating them. And when they destroy jobs via their investments in the futures markets, they also weaken the tax base for schools, local government, libraries, police, roads and so many other things that make our lives better. That also means government employees see their jobs eliminated, their hours sliced, or their hourly compensation held static or pushed down. Those that keep their jobs wind up working more and earning less.

You can’t forget tuition at state colleges and universities are going to spike, so our kids are going to pay more for school because of the tax cuts, which are also smothering their future employment prospects as jobs are eliminated. When it comes to fleecing your pockets, our federal government helps the affluent a lot.

Sure, there might be a few patriotic warriors of the people in congress left, brave men and women of high moral standing like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon; but about 98 to 100 percent of the Republicans in Washington and somewhere between 66 and 80 percent of the Democrats are collaborators of the affluent; people like Ron Wyden, Wall Street’s Democratic senator from Oregon and Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer, another collaborator of Wall Street from Oregon. Those kind of people help change the rules in favor of the rich.

Take inflation for example. Using current methods, the government says inflation was 1.5 percent for all of 2010. Yet, according to Harper’s Magazine, inflation would have been over 10 percent last year if the government measured inflation the way it did thirty years ago. But it doesn’t. The government has changed the way it measures inflation twenty times since 1980. There might be a sinister reason for this.

Speculation in the futures markets drive prices up, which adds to the inflation rate. And this means that inflation can be used to help gauge how much of your income is being shoveled into the pockets of the wealthy thanks to those tax cuts. Government, you see, is a keen collaborator of the one percent as they financially pillage the middle class. Most of our politicians don’t want us to know what’s really going on. That’s why the government doesn’t include the price of food and energy in the way it determines the yearly amount of inflation, at least not anymore. There’s another way the rich benefit by bidding up the prices of commodities in the futures markets, but I’ll save that for part two of this series. The links below are for other similar articles.

Four Obstacles for Upward Mobility for Young People

Bill Moyers Explains How the Rich Have Waged War Against Democracy and Shared Prosperity

the Government is using deceptive statistics to fool us; they\'re cooking the books

Seven economic lies of the republicans

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Thousands of College Students March In London Against Cuts In University Funding Brought About by Offsourcing Jobs for the Rich

Note from John Hively–England’s economic problems are similar to the United States. Jobs have been shipped overseas and the difference between the old wages in England and the new wages elsewhere is pocketed by the rich in the form of dividends and higher stock prices. Think about this. The rich person receives the income from the jobs that has been shipped, year after year, for as long as that job remains overseas. Income is redistributed this way from working people to the rich, but the lose of jobs also means a reduction of the tax base, which forces a number of things, one of which is the increase in university tuition.

Below is the story of the march by by Agence France-Presse of Rawstory.com.

Thousands of students marched through London against cuts in university funding as a massive police operation prevented a repeat of the violence at similar protests a year ago.

Organizers said 10,000 people joined the march on Wednesday through the heart of the financial district in protest against the government’s tripling of higher education fees.

About 4,000 police were deployed, Scotland Yard said, adding that it did not dispute the number of protesters given by the organizers despite earlier giving a lower figure.

Police made 24 arrests, mainly for public order offenses but the rally remained largely peaceful despite a few sticks and bottles being lobbed at lines of riot police.

The only real moment of tension came when officers forcibly cleared a group of demonstrators who briefly pitched tents in London’s historic Trafalgar Square, leaving one protester with a bloody head injury.

Police had warned ahead of the rally that they had authorized the use of rubber bullets in case of “extreme circumstances”, but besides deploying riot and mounted police they did not take any major steps.

“It went extremely well. We’re very happy with the turnout, which is good given the amount of intimidation there was before,” Michael Chessum, of the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, told AFP.

“We wanted to send out a clear statement to the government that this is a sustainable movement, it isn’t over, and I think that is what we have done pretty successfully today.”

The heavy police presence was in response to the violence that marred a series of four student protests last year against the tuition fees hike, which the government says is needed as part of austerity measures.

At the first rally on November 10, 2010, protesters smashed up the Conservative Party offices, while a month later they attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla.

Riot police in fluorescent jackets lined the route of Wednesday’s protest from the University of London to the City of London financial district, blocking off all side roads, while police helicopters buzzed overhead.

They handed out booklets to protesters advising them what to do if there is disorder, for example to stand aside and let officers work, demonstrators said.

They also stopped the demonstrators joining a protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral, where anti-capitalism activists inspired by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement have been camping out since mid-October.

A group of protesters had earlier broken off from the main rally to set up around 25 tents in historic Trafalgar Square at the foot of Nelson’s Column, which commemorates one of Britain’s greatest naval victories.

Police later moved in, hauling protesters out of the green and blue tents which officers then folded up.

“This is what democracy looks like,” screamed one protester with a trickle of blood running down his forehead, as police led him away in handcuffs.

Another protester, Glyn Jukes, told AFP the demonstrators were allied to the “Occupy London Stock Exchange” movement in St Paul’s.

“We’ve chosen this very public place at the centre of London to serve as a beacon for the general strike on the 30th to help communicate with people,” Jukes said.

Trade unions are planning a major walkout over pension reforms on November 30, which the student movement says it will join.

Fears of violence had also been raised after London was rocked by riots and looting for four nights in August, which the government blamed on criminality, but which many analysts linked to high levels of deprivation in some areas.

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