In the pre-globalization era, western labour enjoyed near-monopoly access to western capital

In the pre-globalization era, western labour enjoyed near-monopoly access to western capital. That is to say, western capital was immobile, and had to treat with western labour because it had nowhere else to go. We are now beginning to have, for the first time in human history, a truly global economy, where almost anything can be produced anywhere in the world, and then sold anywhere. (Lloyd,B & Thurow,L).With globalization, when the dismantling of barriers to world trade gave western capital access to vast amounts of low- cost labor in countries that were previously closed off.
Cheap labour, plus the opportunity to exploit new global markets, has brought a profit bonanza to western companies. But it has not been reflected in higher wages for employees at home because companies are no longer in thrall to employees at home. Instead, the gains have been split between capitalists, who have enjoyed higher returns; executives, whose emoluments go up with profits; and poor workers in the developing world, who have gained from the growth in jobs and rising wages that would once have gone to the west.
This is not quite how globalization was supposed to work out.
Although the demand for labour has indeed fallen significantly in both he USA and EU in recent decades; there is the shift from natural resource-based industries into those dominated by brain power. But if we are now moving to a world dominated by the knowledge industries, the key assets become the brainpower of individuals and you cannot own individual human beings that will change what we mean by capitalism. What will capitalism mean when you cannot own the key
asset? Is there a model in investment banks, law firms, consultancy companies? They are capitalist business firms but they do not operate in the same way as ICI, orGeneral Motors.( H. Battu , C.R. Belfield , P.J. Sloane)
According to the principle of comparative advantage, rich countries with their skilled workforces would specialize in turning out advanced products while the poor countries with their unskilled labor would specialize in low-technology goods. Yes, there could be job losses in the rich countries among unskilled factory workers, but western workers overall would gain from the opening of new markets for their products and from cheaper imports.
On the other hand. the countries will move towards higher end products. For example in 50 s Japan use to manufacture clothing and garments for American market. As the Japanese economy developed it started churning out silicon chips and the made forage into automobiles and electronics. Today Japan is the second largest market in the world and it outsource most of its clothing and garments requirements from China, Japanese owned factories in Taiwan and Korea are producing chips for Japanese electronics. Today some of the biggest names in electronics in American markets are Japanese. What started as a Akio Morita revolutionary Walkman today blossomed into Play Station 3, next generation gaming console.(Kendra) As globalization stepped in more and more
countries opened their door to free economy this change led to the emergence of new players like
China, India, Philippines, Russia and South Africa .Among these China emerged as the leader in
manufacturing section while India is excelling in information technology. India today is considered one of the most employer-friendly countries for outsourcing because in India educational system churns out almost 3 million College graduates every year and they earn approximately one-tenth to one-fifth the salaries of their Western European or American counterparts (Kendra)

In addition, the idea that only low-skilled factory workers have anything to fear from globalization has turned out to be a myth. The former Soviet bloc already has many highly educated workers (the Soviets, remember, beat the Americans into space) and the less developed countries are pouring investment into higher education. \"Indonesia, Brazil, China, India - names the country - have more than doubled university student enrolments in the 1980s and 1990s,\" Freeman says. China is investing particularly heavily in science and engineering and \"by 2010 it will graduate more PhDs in science and engineering than the US\". (4)
Tom Peters puts it in one of his presentation (Tom Peters 2004) when I was young, my mum use to tell me finish your food, people in India and China are dying of hunger. Today I tell my daughter finish your homework, people in India and China are looking for your job .

So globalization is not just about a few blue-collar factory workers in the west losing their jobs and everyone else being better off. Because of plummeting telecom charges, all kinds of middle-class, white-collar jobs once thought of as non-tradable – not just in telemarketing and call centers but in accountancy, medical diagnostics and information technology - have started moving to the developing world. (4)
Today Young peoples sitting in their offices in India and Beijing are answering average Western s insurance queries, planning their taxes, helping them fixing their computers, providing information regarding their credit card accounts and helping them in planning their debts. The surge doesn t last there it hasnow started threatening the white collar jobs which was once considered western birth right. So what will be the future for Europe and American jobs market, will it be as doomed as the candidates in the presidential race made to believe us or we have to dig deeper to find the real truth. (Kendra)
The median wage for men in the United States in 2006 was $16.66 an hour; jobs paying less than two-thirds of the median wage for men paid $11.11 or less per hour. Some 44 million workers in the USA about one of every three hold low-wage jobs paying less than $11.11. That is bad news, and worse than most people realize. Clouding the picture further, most low-wage jobs don\'t offer employment benefits like paid sick days, health insurance, or retirement accounts. They also tend to have inflexible or unpredictable scheduling requirements, and provide little opportunity for career advancement
While low-wage workers haven\'t seen much of a raise since 1979, the economy and worker productivity have grown substantially. For several decades before 1980, productivity growth and wages rose together in other words, U.S. workers were productive and shared in the gains from their productivity. In the last few decades, workers have continued to be increasingly productive, but they have seen little payoff in wages for their hard work. Between 1973 and 2006, productivity increased by 83 percent, while the median wage increased by only 13 percent. (6)
We have many more entry-level jobs than we have entry-level workers that is, workers who are new to the labor market and too few jobs that provide a middle-class standard of living. It turns out that in the U.S. labor market today it\'s not possible for everyone to be middle class, no matter how hard they work. Plus, it is getting harder to climb that ladder.
The only way to restore the middle class is to improve the labor market with a mix of new ideas and strategies for improving low-wage work. Our economy and our nation will be stronger for us all when we do.
According to sociologist such as Dennis Gilbert of Cornell University the middle class is divided into only two groups: the upper middle and lower middle class .As mentioned above the upper middle class, according to Gilbert as well as Thompson & Hickey constitutes roughly 15% of the population. The lower middle class is the second most populous according to both models the most populous class constituting roughly one third of the population, the same percentage as the working class. (3)
The lower middle class.. these are the people in technical and lower-level management positions who work for those in the middle class as lower managers, craftspeople and the like. They enjoy a reasonably comfortable standard of living although it is constantly threatened by taxes and inflation. Generally, they have a high school educational and perhaps some college or apprenticeship education. Brain K.William, Stay C. Sawyer and Carl M.Wahlstrom, Marriages, Familities & Intimate Relationships,2006 (Adapted from Dennis Gilbert 1997; and Joseph Khal 1993). (1)
Everyday, middle class families carry higher risks that a job loss or a medical problem will push them over the edge. Although plenty of families make it, a growing number who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare. The security of middle-class life has disappeared.
The new reality is millions of families whose grip on the good life can be shaken loose in an instant.
So, as we see, the situation can be changed to some extend, but not much , this means that Tomkin s state that in any case a middle-class worker is a looser is completely realistic and true due to the facts of today s life. And there are an overall tone of the text, we are all losers and no one wants to admit this.
If the middle-class is loser, there may also be a winner like capitalists , who have enjoyed higher returns; executives, whose emoluments go up with profits. Graef S. Crystal (1991) reveals that In the last 20 years the pay of American workers has gone nowhere, while American CEOs have increased their own pay more than 400 per cent The CEOs are indeed the big winners with benefit packages often reaching $100 million or more; plus, the satisfaction of having an even bigger market
share.(Butts,D,1997)There are a number of companies in the USA where the workforce have found that their wages have been reduced across the board by 20-30 per cent. At the same time, overall the
real wages of CEOs went up 30 per cent last year, while the real wages of the workforce went down.
If I were a head of the company and had a responsibility for negotiating on my company s behalf with the employees over salary rises I would do definitely make negotiations with the employees through their managers or supervisors. . It seems to me, it is better to use team-reward system. Workers do not always work autonomously. Many tasks require group work, with skills diffused through teams and across the workplace; and organisational cultures (e.g. those associated with high-performance management) may depend on the average workforce skill level. Furthermore, firms may deliberately cultivate a team dynamic , with information-sharing, co-training, monitoring, and support so as to exploit these spillovers. Idson (1995), As organizations are moving into team-based management systems, the implementation of team reward systems is on the rise. A team reward system is a system in which a group members pay is at least partly contingent on the
performance of their group or team. Team rewards should create increased cohesiveness and cooperation as well as reinforce individual performance when they are used. Organizations using team reward systems begin to look at team reward systems as ways to motivate employees to make larger, more significant contributions to the organization. (5)
If implemented and used correctly, team reward systems have the potential to be an extremely helpful tool for organizations who are using a team-based system of management. There are many variables that must be analyzed and considered as the transition to team reward systems occurs. Team reward systems have great potential to grow and foster cohesiveness and cooperation within a team as well as enable the employees within an organization to find intrinsic motivation and self-fulfillment within the workplace.
There are many possible reasons to support the implementation of team reward systems. The most fundamental reason is that the organization structure is team-based management. Also, team reward systems promote team productivity and increase cooperation among team members. Some organizations use team reward systems because they give employees an opportunity to see more directly the rewards for their hard work. Others continue to use more long term reward systems in addition to team rewards, such as gain sharing or profit-sharing.
There are certain guidelines to consider when using team reward systems. First, the team leader and/or management should be able to communicate well with other group members in order to explain the process of team reward systems and be as fair and consistent as possible as group members adjust to the change. It is also important for team leaders to consider the size of the reward, frequency of payout, and allocation procedures that the organization will be using.
As a head of the company I have to identify issues and the objectives that will drive the negotiation, need to learn more about the employees objectives and the road map that the employee\'s negotiator will likely follow in attaining those objectives.
One of the most difficult tasks during a negotiation is to confine the discussion to what is important while avoiding irrelevant subjects. One of the best ways to promote productive and efficient discussion is to establish an agenda for both sides to follow.

As a conclusion we can say that a way out for western middle class poverty definitely exists. A lot depends, of course, from the political, economical and social factors. But if to take an ideal situation, when all those factors do not influence the situation, a lot depends on the politics of the management stuff of this or that company. Capitalists are people who know how to make money. The only things to be in need are chip working staff, good equipment. This is really true; nowadays it is much more beneficial for a capitalist to organize a part of the business in such countries as Russia, India, Chine, etc. This is clear for everyone, and do not need any additional confirmation, that for one and the same work US workers get definite sum of money, and Russian workers will get twice or trice less, and they will be happy of this. The living level is the main difference. Reach people sometimes do not take into account that they also should raise the living level of their native workers, I mean, the workers of the country they live in. So, the situation with the western workers leaves much to be desired. The people who can make the situation better, do not want to do anything, this contradicts with their becoming richer and richer. The main problem for a head of the company is how to raise salaries and wages for the workers and not to lose with money. From my point of view the best solution is negotiations and team reward system. This will change the situation for the better and also will give the workers to feel as one community, one body. They will be interested in work and as a reward, their salaries will grow.

Like other professions, the field of accountancy has come to recognize that the younger generation of employees are more concerned about balancing their private and professional lives than older workers. Accordingly, accounting organizations headed by the AICPA and accounting firms across the US are teaming up with businesses to develop programs designed to help both employers and employees address lifestyle issues that face dual professional families. Changing workforce demographics is shaping the future of the accounting profession. Statistics show that the number of people and dual-career families entering the labour pool is increasing. What many people don’t realise, however, is that an accounting and finance degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to become a professional accountant. (Of course the reverse also holds: career opportunities for accounting and finance graduates are not restricted to the accounting profession!). These pages were written to provide some basic background information on the accounting profession, together with the transition from university student to professionally qualified accountant.
The image of accountants as dull, middle-aged men dressed in grey suits is fast disappearing. The accounting profession is associated with high salaries and a bewildering array of career opportunities including traditional auditing and assurance work, management consulting, corporate finance, IT consulting, tax planning, human resources (HR) and insolvency. In addition, the leaders of many top companies are qualified accountants.
Do you ever think where the accounter may work? There is a world of possibility for an accounter. They work in business, sports, the arts, government, education, the non-profit sector - the choice is really great! Accounting opens doors in every kind of business coast to coast. You could work for a large, international accounting firm or a small, local accounting firm, a corporation or small business, a government agency or non-profit organization, or a college or university. Accounting is also an excellent foundation for starting your own practice or company.
If you work for an accounting firm, as an accounter you may deal with clients in a wide range of industries. For example, you could be assigned to a client in the music industry, examining the company’s financial records, providing tax advice or developing a computer system to track the sale of CDs.
If you work directly for a company, you could be involved in everything from advising on how to increase profits to analysing future financing needs. If you work in government you might find yourself testifying on the impact of pending tax legislation. You can even use your accounting expertise to instruct students or conduct research.
Accounting requires a diverse array of skills, aptitudes, and technologies. You should have strong problem-solving abilities, excellent oral and written communication skills, and technical know-how. One day you may be preparing a financial report on the computer; the next you may be presenting your findings on video.
As for the skills an accounter must have it is at least a bachelor’s degree in accounting, or a bachelor’s degree in another subject with a master’s degree in accounting. In addition to accounting and business courses, one should take classes in communications, the humanities, the sciences, economics, and computer applications. So it seems really promising. Another fortune in this profession is that an accounter doesn’t work with the words, language and that long process of persuading people. It is nearly impossible to overstate the benefits of being able to write well. It is even more important to be able to write well than to speak well, at least until you reach very senior levels of an organization or are interacting regularly with the public directly as a representative of a company. Written communication has a central role in the success of an organization and the ability to express yourself only adequately is simply not, well, adequate. And if you cannot communicate well in writing you’re going to have a very tough time making a successful career from your first job. Even if this handicap doesn’t inhibit you in an entry-level position, you will run into a wall on your first promotion. The importance of effective writing in the workplace cannot be over-emphasized. Clear communication not only frees the employee to perform their tasks efficiently, it bolsters self-confidence and enhances the creative process in the entire staff. People know they are starting on solid ground and have confidence that their efforts will not be wasted or unappreciated. Clear communication shows respect for entire staff and enables excellence in business. My future career doesn’t require writing at all. I will write often of course, but this will be numbers, not letters and words, so this is a technical writing. An accounter usually calculates, so the documents I will write are just forms for filling. So the only language I will require, analyzing data/information/statistics is numbers mixed with formal English phrases. For sure I will persuade a lot of people with the most knockdown argument – numbers. My speech will be full of numbers, as that of any successful accounter, who is concise and respectful person in glasses and in the expensive suit in front of the computer in comfortable office.

Works used:
1. Blumstein Philip, Carssow W., Groves Kathryn, The Honoring of Accounts. NY: Sociologist, 2001.
2. Rest F., Choosing the profession. Cambridge University Press. 1999.

In narrowing representations of American culture through visual art to a manageable topic for a conversation there is a focus on art that records and represents individuals and groups of people or movements within our culture that to the majority of Americans are invisible and marginalized. While it seems oxymoronic to think of visual art as a representation of something invisible, a whole range of American art includes marginalized, disenfranchised, and often invisible people, groups, and events in our culture.
On the “invisibility” chart, if invisibility can be measured by degrees, sharecroppers are the least visible of the individuals, groups, and events that I have chosen to feature in my unit. No one speaks more poignantly of the invisibility of a subculture of society than James Agee speaks of sharecroppers in his documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
And some there be which have no memorial: who perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. (Agee, 13)
Agee and photographer Walker Evans lived with two sharecropping families, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, in Alabama in the summer of l936 and crafted a photographic and written record of sharecroppers’ daily lives. Their publication, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, including Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs and Agee’s riveting descriptions of the families with whom they lived, is a memorial to this aggregate of humanity that struggled and toiled from dawn to sunset, and sometimes past, to eek subsistence from the earth. Evans’s photos are witness enough to the grueling toil, the poverty, and the resignation in the eyes and body language of every subject he photographed. With Agee’s richly descriptive text piled on, it is almost more than a person can bear. Agee writes:
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs: the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it, and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly be able to bear to live. (Agee, 14)
If these marginalized, disenfranchised people are remembered anywhere, it is in the pages of this documentary that was such a condemnation of humanity, that allowed people to live this way, that Esquire Magazine, who commissioned the collaboration, declined to publish the results.
Each family, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, tended a vegetable garden, but their daily labor, while Agee and Evans lived with them, was picking cotton for the men who owned the land. One of the photographs that I will make into a slide is of Fred Ricketts poised, in his raggedy clothes, before a cotton field; slung over his shoulder is the long slender bag that he will drag up and down the rows behind him as he fills it with one hundred pounds of cotton. Another photo that I will make into a slide is of eight-year-old Pearl Gudger, dragging the long, slender bag and leaning into the row, bent to pluck the cotton from the open burrs whose gores are stiff with sharp points that will prick even the deftest fingertips.
Students can find, on the Internet, a wealth of photographs of sharecroppers laboring in the fields, leaning into the cotton plants, and dragging the bags along behind them. What cannot be conveyed in photographs is the sun beating down, intolerably on the heads and backs of the pickers. An excerpt that is an effective complement to these two photos is Agee’s description of the physical torture of it:
Meanwhile, too, you are working in a land of sunlight and heat, which are special to just such country at just that time of year: sunlight that stands and stacks itself upon you with the serene weight of deep sea water, and heat that makes the jointed and muscled and fine-structured body glow like one indiscriminate oil; and this brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you more and more heavily in hour after hour so that it can seem you are a diving bell whose strained seams must at any moment burst, and the eyes are marked in stinging sweat, and the head, if your health is a little unstable, is gently roaring, like a private blow torch, . . . (Cawelti, 67)
Agee describes, in his chapter, “Money,” the rigidly structured economic arrangements that the sharecroppers have with their landlords, that leave no opening for escape.
Gudger has no home, no land, no mule; none of the more important farming implements. He must get all these of his landlord. Boles, [his landlord], for his share of the corn and cotton, also advances him rations money during four months of the year, March through June, and his fertilizer.
Gudger pays him back with his labor and with the labor of his family. At the end of the season he pays him back further: with half his corn; with half his cotton; with half his cottonseed. Out of his own half of these crops he also pays him back the rations money, plus interest, and his share of the fertilizer, plus interest, and such other debts, plus interest, as he may have incurred. What is left, once doctors’ bills and other debts have been deducted, is his year’s earnings.

Works cited:
1. Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
2. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991.
3. Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1990.
4. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. 1976. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
5. Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

“In prohibiting in absolute terms torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Article 3 of the ECHR enshrines one of the fundamental values of democratic societies. This provision admits no exceptions to this fundamental value, irrespective of the circumstances and the victim’s behavior, and no derogation from it is permissible. In its first judgment under this provision, the Court held that in assessing the severity of the punishment or treatment endured by a person, regard should be had to the victim’s personal characteristics, such as their age, sex and state of health.
The case of E and Others v. UK (2002) concerned children who had suffered serious ill treatment (sexual and/or physical abuse) over a considerable period of time at the hands of their mother’s partner, despite being referred to and monitored by social services. The Court held that there had been a violation of Articles 3 and 13 (the right to an effective remedy). This judgment, as well as other subsequent judgments illustrate that the positive obligation to protect children under Article 3 extends beyond imposing criminal sanctions for such ill-treatment and requires States to take reasonable steps to prevent ill treatment of which the authorities had or ought to have knowledge.” (1)
Under the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights has observed that:
“Article 3 enshrines one of the most fundamental values of democratic societies. Even in the most difficult circumstances, such as the fight against terrorism and organised crime, the Convention prohibits in absolute terms torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Unlike most of the substantive clauses of the Convention and of Protocols Nos. 1 and 4, Article 3 makes no provision for exceptions and no derogation from it is permissible under Article 15(2), even in the event of a public emergency threatening the life of the nation.” (2)
The entire nature of the prohibition on inhuman treatment and its applicability in all circumstances is obvious also from international humanitarian law (IHL), which clearly gives to understand that torture, corporal punishment and other measures which lead to physical suffering are prohibited even in times of armed conflict. The specific reference to the prohibition of corporal punishment in conflict is remarcable.
Several consequences flow from the absolute nature of the prohibition which may be worth emphasising in the context of the present case.
First, the absolute nature of the prohibition means that severe, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is inadmissible no matter what are the circumstances of the particular case, including specifically the victim’s behaviour. Even the most deviating behaviour on the part of individuals cannot justify, or affect the understanding of what constitutes, such treatment or punishment. “As the European Court notes:
“[...] Article 3 prohibits in absolute terms torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and […] its guarantees apply irrespective of the reprehensible nature of the conduct of the person in question […].”” (3)
Second, there can be no justification for inhuman or degrading punishment on the basis of the protection of other human rights, or for reasons of public order or prevention or repression of crime. Specifically, as held by the European Court in Tyrer in relation to the judicial corporal punishment of a juvenile by birching, the fact that a particular punishment may be believed to a have a deterrent effect is irrelevant. The Court observed
“[…] a punishment does not lose its degrading character just because it is believed to be, or actually is, an effective deterrent or aid to crime control. Above all, as the Court must emphasise, it is never permissible to have recourse to punishments which are contrary to Article 3, whatever their deterrent effect may be.”(1)
Third, according to general principles of international law, condition of the internal law do not affect the characterisation of measures as severe or degrading, and cannot justify the imposition of such measures. The fact that a certain kind of treatment or punishment is definitely permitted or provided for by domestic legislation is extraneous so far as that treatment or punishment violates the prohibition under international law of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
We can say for sure that human rights are not at all dangerous for democracy. “To argue that they constitute such a danger would be grossly to distort the purpose and effect of an instrument which came into being largely to protect democracy against the perceived totalitarian threat of the cold war years and which is founded upon the twin principles of democracy and the rule of law.” (5)
There are in addition Convention rights which are absolute in nature and in respect of which no humiliation is possible under Article 15 of the Convention. Therefore, Article 3 prohibiting torture, and inhuman or degrading treatment enshrines one of the most fundamental values of democratic society. “While the Strasbourg Court is well aware of the immense difficulties faced by States in
protecting their communities from terrorist violence, even in these circumstances the Convention prohibits torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, irrespective of the victim's conduct. The prohibition provided for in Article 3 against ill-treatment applies equally in expulsion cases. Where substantial grounds have been shown for believing that an individual would face a real risk of being subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3 if removed to a particular receiving State, the responsibility of the Contracting (holding) State to safeguard him or her against such treatment may be engaged in the event of expulsion.” (1)
In the case of Soering v UK [1989] 11 EHRR 439 where the UK wished to extradite a man to the US the European Court of Human Rights found that it would be contrary to the spirit and intent of the Convention to knowingly give up a person to another state where “substantial grounds have been shown for believing that the person concerned, if extradited, faces a real risk of being subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the requesting country”.(6)

Sources:
1. Tyrer v. United Kingdom (Appl. No. 5856/72), Judgment of 25 February 1978, Series A, No. 26, para. 31. See also the Human Rights Committee, in its Concluding observations on Israel, UN Doc. CCPR/C/79/Add 93 (1998), para. 19, condemning guidelines authorising ‘moderate physical pressure’ to obtain information considered crucial to the protection of life.
2. http://hei.unige.ch/~clapham/hrdoc/docs/echrsoeringcase.txt
3. www.icj.dk/documents/Speech2006Lawandterrorism.doc
4. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldjudgmt/jd040617/ullah-1.htm
5. http://www.workers-party.org/wpstory.asp?sn=770
6. http://www.lawindexpro.co.uk/demo/cs051212.php

Land Law

‘On 13 October 2003 the Land Registration Act 2002 and Land Registration Rules 2003 came into force. They have completely replaced the law for land registration. Together, the new Act and Rules govern the role and practice of Land Registry.
The Land it provides a framework for the development of electronic conveyancing Registration Act 2002 achieves the following:
it makes the register a more complete picture of a title to land - showing more fully the rights and interests affecting it;
it simplifies and modernises land registration law and is the first major overhaul of the land registration system for 75 years;
Major changes to the law and practice affect all those involved with registered land. In particular:
shorter leases must now be registered;
voluntary registration is available for new types of interest in land;
changes affect the protection of third party interests; the law of adverse possession (squatters rights) has been reformed.’(1)
Overriding interests
Overriding interests were created by the Land Registration Act 1925 (LRA 1925). They are interests that are not protected on the land register but which nevertheless bind any person who acquires an interest in registered land, either on first registration or where there has been a registrable disposition of a registered estate that has been completed by registration. The LRA 1925 was repealed by the Land Registration Act 2002 (LRA 2002) which now refers to overriding interests as: “Unregistered interests which override first registration”, which are dealt with under Schedule 1 to the LRA 2002, and “Unregistered interests which override a registered disposition”, which are dealt with under Schedule 3 to the LRA 2002.(2)
The class interests that have overriding status under the LRA 2002 are more restricted than under the LRA 1925, but include short leases, certain rights of people in actual occupation and unregistered legal easements.
In Registered Conveyancing, when a person buys a legal Estate In Land which has Registered Title, he/she will not be bound by any third-party interests in that land, unless they are noted on the register, or are deemed to be overriding. Others were made overriding to relieve the administrative burden on the LandRegistry, which is a less creditable reason in these days of computerization. Some interests are overriding because it would be unreasonable to expect their owners to register them, particularly where they are obvious.
Under the Land Registration Act (1925) the list of accepted overriding interests was defined in s.70(1). This provision has now been repealed, and replaced with Schedules 1 and 3 of the Land Registration Act2002. Schedule 1 applies to interests that are overriding when the land is registered for the first time, while schedule 3 applies when the land is subsequently sold. Overriding interests in Sch. 3 are narrower in scope than those in Sch. 1, and both are narrower in scope than the 1925 legislation.
Broadly speaking, the following sorts of interest are overriding, both under the 1925 legislation and the LRA 2002.
Legal (and perhaps equitable) Easements and profits
Short leases (although the definition of `short' has changed)
Customary and public rights, including rights of way, rights of sheepwalk, rights of drainage, etc.
These were, and are, overriding because it is not clear who should have the obligation of registration.
Franchises (rights to hold fairs, collect tolls, etc)
LocalLandCharges (e.g., tree preservation orders)
Rights acquired by AdversePossession (squatter's rights)
Obligations to repair sea-walls, embankments, and churches
Manorial rights (see manor) (as they are hard to register)
Rights to mine or extract minerals (as they are generally obvious)
In addition, the rights of person in ActualOccupation are automatically overriding, even if they would not otherwise be.
The following interests are, in general, not overriding, under either the 1925 or 2002 legislation.
Beneficial interests under a trust -- these interests should be protected by a restriction on the register. The interest of a Tenant For Life is not overriding even if that person is in occupation.
The burden of a Restrictive Covenant, as it is reasonable to expect the owner of the benefit to register it.
Mortgages, whether legal or equitable, as a competent mortgagor will take steps to protect it by, e.g., a Legal Charge.
Any interest that is obvious from an inspection of the register itself. Thus interests that are registered lose any overriding status they might otherwise have.
The overriding status of public rights, customary rights, manorial rights, minining and mineral rights, franchises, sea-wall and embankment repair liabilities, and local land charges is largely unchanged in the new Act. The table below compares the overriding interests that have been changed by the 2002 Act with their status in prior to that Act.
There are some changes that are more subtle that a cursory reading of the 2002 Act might suggest. First, the wording of Sch.1(2) and Sch.3(2): `so far as relating to land of which he is in actual occupation' is intended to remove the effect of FerrishurstVWallcite1998, which allowed actual occupation to be enforceable against the title, rather than against the land occupied. Second, although a legal easement is still overriding on a reading of Sch.1 or Sch.3, in fact a legal easement does not become `legal' until it is registered. When it is registered, it loses its overriding status. This means that an easement that is expressly granted is not overriding; the person to whom it was granted should have registered it.
There has been some discussion about the effect of the HumanRightsAct1998 on overriding interests. It is clearly a worry, and may be a contravention of Article 9 of the European Convention On Human Rights if a person who buys property finds it saddled with obligations of which he did not, perhaps even could not, know. So far problems have only arisen with liabilities to repair a church chancel; one can see a court being sympathetic to a person who buys a house for, say, £100,000, and then finds himself lumbered with a bill for another £100,000 to repair the church roof. However, for the time being such interests remain overriding.
Overriding interests are a major risk for any purchase of a registered title. Such interests do not appear in the register. One of the recognized aims of the Land Registration Act 2002 is to reduce the number of overriding interests which are binding upon the buyer or a registered title. In fact, the Land Registration Act 2002 reaches this purpose only to a limited degree.
The Act 2002 complicates further matters by containing two lists of overriding interests, which differ slightly. Schedule 1 lists ‘unregistered interests which override first registration’, while schedule 3 lists ‘unregistered interests which override registered dispositions’.
Among the remaining four important overriding interests the only one, Local Land Charges remained unchanged. The other three categories are Easements and Profits, Short-term Legal Leases and Property rights of a Person in Actual Occupation. These all have been reduced in their scope but will continue to be of fundamental importance.
Minor interest
Under the Land Registration Act 1925 (LRA 1925) all third party rights in registered land, other than registered charges and overriding interests , took effect in equity as minor interests and would be overridden by a registered disposition made for valuable consideration unless protected by an entry in the register. The LRA 1925 was repealed by the Land Registration Act 2002 (LRA 2002), which came into force on 13 October 2003, and does not use the term “minor interest”. An interest affecting an estate or charge is simply defined as “an adverse right affecting the title to the estate or charge” (section 132(3) (b), LRA 2002). Similarly, a third party right protected by a notice under the LRA 2002 is simply referred to as an interest affecting a registered estate or charge that is the subject of a notice in the register.
Minor interests are all proprietary interests in registered land which are not:
1) capable of substantive registration
2) mortages by registerd charge
3) overriding interests
Rights which are normally included in minor rights are as follows:
1) estate contacts, unpaid vendor’s liens, restrictive covenants and matrimonial home rights, that is rights of occupation under the Matrimonial Homes Acts
2) overreachable interests arising under a strict settlement, new-style trust of land or trust for sale.
One should keep in mind, though, that with the exception of matrimonial home rights and interests under a strict settlement, all minor interests are capable of being promoted to ‘overriding’ by operation of Schedule 3, para. 2 of the 2002 act, if the owner of the interests is in actual occupation.
This is even true of overreachable equitable interests arising under a trust for sale or new-style trust of land.However , if an owner of an overreachable interest is in actual occupation of the land, his rights can still be overreached provided the purchase price is payed by the purchaser to the correct trustees.
The new law on protection of minor interests is remarkably straightforward. The 2002 Act destroys cautions as a means of protecting minor interests. All minor interests must be protected by the entry of a notice, except that interests which arise under a trust of land will be protected by the entry of restriction.
1 www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2002/20020009.htm
2 http://www.landreg.gov.uk/legislation/
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Registration_Act_2002
4 http://www.spr-consilio.com/artland1.html
5 www.rics.org/.../
6 http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=17458&searchresults=1
7 http://www.answers.com/topic/land-registration-act-2002
8 http://www.kevinboone.com/lawglos_OverridingInterest.html
9 www.netlawman.co.uk/acts/land-registration-act-2002.php
10 http://www.lemon-co.co.uk/address-correct.htm
11 www.hfw.com/l3/new/newl3c047b.html
12 www.sghlaw.com/commercialproperty/articles/LandRegistrationAct2002.pdf
13 www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1001/E-Conveyancing.htm
14 http://www.jonesday.com/pubs/pubs_detail.aspx?pubID=S684
15 www.cumberlandellis.com/docs/newsletters/winter03.pdf
16 www.baineswilson.co.uk/pdfs/Squatters%20Rights%20April%202005.pdf
17 www.smartandbright.co.uk/a-z/land_reg_act_2002.html
18 http://ld.practicallaw.com/5-107-6954
19 http://uk.geocities.com/nevill5/adversepossession.html
20 http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199284436/sexton_chap10.pdf

Multicultural LONDON

Multiculturalism as any other notion has its supporters and critics. Its supporters often see it as a self-evident entitlement of cultural groups, as a form of civil rights grounded in equality of cultures. They often assume it will lead to rather important interculturalism - beneficial cultural exchanges, where cultures learn about each other's art, literature and philosophy, and influence each other's cuisine, music and fashion. Its opponents often see it as something which has been imposed on them without their agreement. They fear it will lead to cultural misunderstandings, undermining national unity. Especially in Europe, opponents see multiculturalism as a direct assault on the national identity, and on the nation itself.
Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural groups, with equal status (Baker, 98). It contrasts with the monoculturalism which was historically the norm in the nation-state. The term multiculturalism is almost always applied to distinct cultures of immigrant groups in developed countries, not to the presence of indigenous peoples.
Multiculturalism began as an official policy in English-speaking countries, starting in Canada in 1971. It was quickly adopted by most member-states in the European Union, as official policy, and as a social consensus among the elite. In recent years, several European states, notably the Netherlands and Denmark, right-of-centre governments have reversed the national policy consensus, and returned to an official monoculturalism (Shaffer, 34). A similar reversal is the subject of debate in the United Kingdom. Some argue that the world is going into an era of conflict and war driven by a 'clash of civilisations'. The Mayor of London’s policies are based on the exact opposite idea — that the multicultural city is part of creating a new concept of world civilisation that corresponds to a globalised world.

London considers to be not only the capital of United Kingdom but also the capital of multicultural world. More than 270 nationalities make up the fabric of the city. Many have family roots in Africa and India, formerly governed by the British empire. Although predominantly white and Anglo-Saxon, more than a quarter of London's population is from an alternative ethnic background, making up half of the Britain's total ethnic minorities. This gives London the largest non-white population of any European city and is an important part of its cosmopolitan feel.
The whole world lives in London. Walking down Oxford Street you will see Indians and Colombians, Bangladeshis and Ethiopians, Pakistanis and Russians, Melanesians and Malaysians. Fifty nationalities with communities over 5,000 make their home in the city, 300 languages are spoken daily, it is estimated that by 2010 the so-called ”ethnic minorities” population will have reached almost 30 percent. Cultural diversity, racial mixing, cosmopolitanism and a gradual Europeanization characterise London at the beginning of the new millennium.
In the 2003, the population of London classed their ethnic group as the following (Lemelle, 56):
76% as white (classified as British White, Irish or "Other White"),
10% as Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani,
5% as black African,
5% as black Caribbean,
3% as mixed race and
1% as Chinese.
It began under the Conservatives (1979-1997), when multicultural rhetoric and policies were confined to left-leaning councils. Since the election of the Labour government in 1997, multiculturalism has influenced government policies and statements. Precursors of present policy include the Race Relations Act, and the British Nationality Act of 1948 (Freeman, 41).
'Britain is a multicultural society' - the phrase is bandied about religiously, but the meaning is hardly examined. The whole panoply of multiculturalist clichés serves more to obscure than to clarify the situation. Some people really think that these glib pronouncements are now reaching the end of their useful life.
From an anti-racist perspective, multiculturalism was always a double-edged sword (McGregor, 46). At times, it was an effective riposte to the anti-immigrant politics of Powellism that began in the late sixties, challenging the myth of an ethnically pure society. The fact is those who were born and grew up here wanted to remake society, not just be tolerated within it. The uprisings of the early 1980s were the most obvious expression of this shift. And at this point, multiculturalism changed from a line of defence to a mode of control (McGregor, 54).
Multiculturalism now meant taking the variety of “bed”, inapropriate cultures off the streets - where it had been politicised and turned into a rebellion against the state - and putting it in the council chamber, in the classroom and on the television, where it could be institutionalised, managed and reified. Multiculturalism became an ideology of conservatism, of preserving the status quo intact, in the face of a real desire to move forward. As post-modern theories of 'hybridity' became popular in academia, cultural difference came to be seen as an end in itself, rather than an expression of revolt, and the concept of culture became a straitjacket, hindering rather than helping the fight against race and class oppressions (Freeman, 78).
Such phenomena as heterogeneous British multiculture, in which cultural and religious fragments and ideologies coexist as a simple fact of life, albeit reflected upon and questioned with openness without any doubt influences all the spheres of life. Investigations show that 75% of Londoners support "the right of all persons to dress in accordance with their religious beliefs"(Gilroy, 91), with 18% against. Plus, 82% said "everybody in London should be free to live their lives how they like as long as they don't stop other people doing the same"(Gilroy, 94); 76% balked at the idea of the government dictating how people should live their lives; and 94% expressed similar sentiments about media. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents said it was important that "there are regular events and festivals to celebrate London's different ethnic and religious communities"(Gilroy, 101). Over 250 languages are spoken in the city, making the capital the most linguistically diverse city in the world. 25% of London's population was born abroad (Gilroy, 104), where English is not spoken as the first language but a lot of people don’t speak their native language, fake or otherwise, but they don’t speak Cockney either. They speak with the help of some variants of the "multicutural London English". Of course we have to be aware that "Multicultural London English" is about as unlikely to become a popular piece of terminology as "African-American Vernacular English" was. Communication problems may arise - especially where complex language and technical jargon are used. These can be compounded by people’s lack of understanding of their cultural background and of the challenges for new and recent migrants in understanding how things work in the UK.
From its earliest days as a bustling centre for trade and commerce this city has been home to people of all races and creeds. Over the centuries, as London has grown, so too has the number of different nationalities, cultures and languages. Today this is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world with people from every corner of the globe living and working here in London. London's successful mixture of cultures and communities makes it a richer city in every sense of the word. It plays a huge role in making London such a thriving centre of business and commerce.
In today's global economy, people with talent and creativity move to the best location. London has always known that to be successful, a society has to be open. That's why I am proud that it is such a magnet for creative and innovative people from all over the world. Their talent and hard work bring new jobs, business and wealth to London. It rightly recognises that London's diversity helps it to compete in today's global marketplace and it has a vital job to do in communicating London's strengths as a multi-ethnic open and multi-cultural business location to the rest of the world. Of course in today's world, education is the key foundation to economic success. Many children from ethnic minorities do extremely well in our system, but often pupils underperform too. For that reason the Government already makes extra help available to local education authorities to help improve educational attainment among ethnic minorities.
London is an international centre of culture in terms of arts, music, festivals, museums and much more. The diversity of cultures within London is so great that easy definition is impossible. Because of the fact that the city is home to many nationalities that have over time moulded and shaped the city's culture into what it is today. London culture has evolved through a combination of its natural features, man made developments and cosmopolitan building blocks. It hasn’t escaped people’s notice that London isn’t known for its wildlife or breathtaking landscape, but nature, and by that I mean the weather, the river and the green spaces, has certainly shaped our way of life.
It’s the great diversity brought about by these elements which makes this culture difficult to make sense of but at the same time truly fabulous and unique. In this regard it is the model for all future cities. It even boasts some famous ex-patriot Americans: Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna to name but two.
All the word’s religions and cultures are represented with forty per cent of the population of the metropolis now not from these shores. The result is a rich, vibrant and sometimes troubled city where ethnic diversity means that you can eat, dress or be entertained in any language you choose.
London schools are fifty per cent mixed with a host of languages from Punjabi and Urdu to Kurdish and Greek found in the playground. Since their first arrival in the late 1948, ethnic groups (of whom Moslems make up the largest sector, with Hindus next) make up 2.5 million people, the equivalent of the population of Wales and 500,000 new arrivals from the European Union (especially Poland) make up the new faces.
Multicultural London has gained a reputation for not only being a melting pot of various cultures and people, but for its diverse range of restaurants as well. Serving an eclectic mix of Asian, Oriental and traditional English dishes, these London restaurants cater to all palettes and provide connoisseurs of good food with a chance to take their taste buds on a wild ride they will never forget. England's multicultural cities and towns are a testament to all the different peoples who have met and mixed there over time. One aspect of this is the prevalence of international cuisine in England, particularly Indian food. Birmingham, for example has more Indian restaurants than some major Indian cities! Few places in the world can boast as international a population, meaning that you can truly develop cross-cultural communication skills while still studying in an English-speaking environment.
A recent addition to multiculturalism of London in the spheres of cuisine are gourmet joints, bringing London's multicultural popular cuisines closer home now is the “Piccadelhi”', a food court opened by the ARA Hospitality group in the PVR Plaza complex. In short, it is the closest to being in the multicultural Piccadilly Circus - complete with the entire buzz that makes it one of London's most popular hotspots.
If the London-inspired décor provides respite from the usually loud fare at most of the city's restaurants, the cuisine offers a wide range, giving everything from Indian to Oriental and Italian to Continental. A popular London junction that forms the centre point of London's five busy streets, the Piccadilly Circus represents the multicultural spirit of the city. And much like the original streets that it tries to recreate, Piccadelhi offers more than a slice of London. From Southall offering Indian - the most popular cuisine in London as of today - to Soho that offers Oriental and Little Venice that has Italian delicacies on offer, there is a Victoria corner that offers mouth-watering desserts. Spread over 10,000 square feet, the restaurant has a cover of 250 and is all set to add a bar very soon. Adding to the ambience is the live music, another conscious attempt to keep the spirit of London alive. With the Soho area being the stronghold of the Chinese and oriental community in London, this section offers delicacies like prawns red and green chilly; crispy lotus honey chilli, dim sum baskets, drumsticks and spring rolls and an array of seafood.
Famous writer Orwell did as much as anyone to confer the trivial pleasures of multicultural British life – be it a "nice cup of tea" (Orwell, 61) or the enjoyment of English cooking – on serious cultural study. There can be no assemblage of these fragments into some stable coherent national identity. Rather, nationalism remains shattered regardless of the efforts of all the king's horses and all the king's men to put it back together. What endure are pieces that can be shared and combined that conduct identification without requiring a stable identity at its core. This patriotism of fragments breaks with the longing for stable or whole identities and foregrounds that such grand national identities are forever in pieces. The affinities that result are loose, changing, and open yet powerful like the photographs collected in the Millennium Dome exhibit. The patriotism of fragments contains incommensurable political energies and forces where imperial nostalgia can resonate alongside a future-orientated inclusive worldly diversity. I think it is here that we should look to both describe and valorise what others like Paul Gilroy refers to as a convivial culture in which "a degree of differentiation can be combined with a large measure of overlapping" (Orwell, 64).
London's population lives the eclectic reality of a truly multicultural city. It is not uncommon to find a flat (apartment) inhabited by four or five people from different countries, speaking different languages, cooking different food, celebrating different holidays and traditions, etc. It all works. People learn to communicate despite language boundaries, to operate combining different strengths, and to appreciate each other as well as the rich heritage represented by their varied backgrounds. Cosmopolitan London offers incoming students the opportunity to experience a truly multicultural city with people from all over the world working, studying, and living together. Over 58,000 of the 300,000 students in London are international students. The city also offers a host of cultural and historical treasures and you have only to wander through central London to encounter famous places like St. Paul's Cathedral, Covent Garden, the British Museum, and many more world-class offerings. It is one of the best places in the world for students interested in international business to get an internship, for example. Over 13,000 international companies from 92 countries are based in London, which is a major financial capital for the European Union and the world.
England's multicultural cities and towns are a testament to all the different peoples who have met and mixed there over time. One aspect of this is the prevalence of international cuisine in England, particularly Indian food. Birmingham, for example has more Indian restaurants than some major Indian cities! Few places in the world can boast as international a population, meaning that you can truly develop cross-cultural communication skills while still studying in an English-speaking environment.
London is also the principal business center for Europe and provides the best opportunities for those wishing to become involved in international business. It is becoming the world's second financial capital. Currently 13,510 overseas companies from 92 countries are based in London. The city is also home to over 100 of Europe's 500 largest companies. With unrestricted access to almost 375 million European Union consumers, it is not hard to see why so many people are attracted to the city. Those wishing to explore the world of international business need look no further than London's intense, international business scene.
London also provides superb cultural exposure. The variety of arts, theatre, performances, and other cultural venues available in London is stunning, and almost all of them provide student rates. London has some of the best museums, historical attractions, and buildings in the world, and these places capitalize on the city's turbulent and varied history. From the violent past of the Tower of London to the stately grandeur of British Museum exhibits, London has much to offer.
London also acts as a great hub for those wishing to explore the rich history of Europe. From London it is easy to explore the United Kingdom or the European mainland, especially with the selection of low cost airlines quickly expanding to allow reasonably cheap access to most of that area of the world.
However, of all the benefits of London, the best ultimately remains the opportunity to meet and interact with people from around the globe. The inhabitants of London can claim that everyone ends up there eventually because the inhabitants are truly from everywhere.
For such extraordinary city even the new kind of literature is found. New concepts and new examples of world literature call attention to new horizons of language and text: to the explicitly ambiguous and negotiable cultural symbolizations. Contrary to the languages of global internationalisation, which express and support a growing assimilation of life circumstances, the decentralized literatures of the world are an important medium of difference. They go beyond the scope of traditional views of a pre-defined (Western) common language of a universal culture and literature. They require permanent mutual processes of translation by way of negotiation of cultural differences, as they are carried out in and are provoked by the literatures themselves. Big attention is paid to multicultural children literature to grow up the future citizens of the world, not single country. They even created games, which help to understand the sense of multi-consciousness. This is a fun, warm-up, cross-cultural activity. The group tries to come up the word(s) for "hello" in as many different languages as possible or haring the story of where your name comes from and what your name means. Helps to build intercultural respect and understanding or group activity, which explore and celebrate the rich diversity of people's past experiences.
Many people say about their voyage to London: : “It means travel the globe without leaving the country”. And they really mean it. First of all they talk about Shop South African. This store, found near Richmond Park’s Roehampton Gate, sells exclusively South African foodstuffs and has been operating for the past 20 years, supplying ex-pats with its unrivalled selection of biltong (a delicious form of spicy sun-dried meat) and boerewors (sausages). Other recommendations include Steers’ Monkey Gland Sauce (it’s made from fruit and spices, not monkeys), Ouma’s eminently dunkable rusks, and Nestle’s Bar One. They’ve got an online shop if Roehampton’s too far forpeople to travel to.
It is also a drive along the North Circular which doesn’t offer many sights, but the sight of the Hindu Shri Swaminarayan Mandir temple rising out of the concrete is impressive enough to make you choke on your travel sweets. Sitting incongruously in a suburban steet near Neasden’s other main attraction, IKEA, the multi-billion rupee temple required 5,000 tons of marble and limestone for a building project unlike any seen in this country since the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Artisans and skilled sculptors from Gujarat and Rajasthan chipped away around the clock to complete the largest Hindu temple outside of India. Definitely worth the trip, this fairytale, architectural feat really has to be seen to be believed. Modest clothing is strongly recommended.
The south end of Hackney’s Mare Street is home to a thriving Vietnamese community that was established in the 1970s when Vietnamese fleeing communist rule set up home here. Excellent groceries abound but this shop is a particular gem. Fruit is piled high and fresh fish is available on Thursdays. The chiller cabinets hold fresh goods like egg noodles, fish balls and pigs’ trotters, while a freezer at the back stores meat and dim sum. Look out for the kitsch painted tins containing biscuits.
Very welcoming family-run Spanish grocery has neat displays of reasonably priced cakes, biscuits, confectionery, oils, cheeses, wines, olives and much more. There’s also a good selection of salt cod, chorizo, tinned calamares, piquillo peppers in jars, canned vegetables like white asparagus – and even paella pans in different sizes. Particularly notable is a top-notch selection of speciality, region-specific El Quexigal honeys from Avila, in aromatic varieties such as eucalyptus and lavender. Staff are happy, helpful and very smiley.
There are 27,000 Portuguese people living in Lambeth. Walk along the South Lambeth Road between Vauxhall and Stockwell in the early evening and you’ll find the atmosphere is almost as much Lisbon as London. It’s no wonder the area, a thriving barrio with many bars, cafés and restaurants, has been dubbed ‘Little Portugal’. Close by, the Madeira Pâtisserie, under the railway arches near Vauxhall station, supplies Portuguese baked goods to many of London’s cafés and its custard tarts, pastel de nata, are heaven.
A series of lectures, discussions and exhibitions organised by City University and continuing throughout June explores Balkan art and identity. Illustrious Notting Hill boutique Aimé offers a smattering of ultra-chic French designer labels under one roof bringing a little bit of jolie Paris to London. Run by two French-Cambodian sisters Val and Vanda Heng, the shop stocks coveted French brands such as APC, Isabel Marant and Claudie Pierlot. The elegant toiletries are also worth a look.
Of course, for politics such notion as multiculturalism has not only nice sides. Many politicians and media pundits appearing on television speak as apologists for liberal immigration policies, claiming multiculturalism gives the U.K. an advantage in international commerce. They claim having citizens from a variety of nationalities and ethnic groups will increase sales of UK products on the world market. Two of the founding grandes dames of British multiculturalism got into a fight recently. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has been “pandering to the right”(Freeman, 56), spat Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London.
Phillips’s crime was to state that Notting Hill carnival “can hardly be said to represent the everyday culture of most of London’s communities”(Freeman, 57). A pretty obvious statement to make as most people in London are not black. But Livingstone had a hissy fit and accused Phillips of selling out black people. “He’d had a brief sort of black power fling,” said Livingstone, “dissing” Phillips’s past activism, “and ever since then he’s gone so far over to the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP.” (Freeman, 57).
Like in America, Britain’s debate on multiculturalism is becoming an empty-headed bun-fight in which race is a convenient bat to beat your opponents with. The United States has always been fraught with individuals tapping ethnic anxieties to further themselves. The Rev Al Sharpton and his jerry-curled hair became famous throughout the country as he jumped on the flimsiest bandwagons to make hysterical overstatements about race.
Britain’s irony is that the person profiting most from exploiting racial tensions is not a glamorous funky demagogue but a white middle-aged nerd. But K Diddy is savvy to the way race is skilfully employed in America and has imported those techniques here.
It’s easy to disregard Livingstone as just another cheesy lily-white leftie associating himself with ethnic groups to prove his hipness and moral perfection. But there’s a sinister consistency in his approach to minority issues. Two years ago he welcomed Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist Islamist, to Britain, praising him as a “powerfully progressive force for change”(Freeman, 58). He canoodled with him for the cameras and compared him with the Pope, although the sheikh endorses suicide bombings, despises gay people and thinks it is acceptable for men to beat their wives. But Livingstone knows what potential there is in cultivating ethnic and religious support.
As so few people bother to vote in local and regional elections, Livingstone would love to garner the support of the hardcore element of London’s Muslim community. The value of the lumpen ethnic block vote was obvious in George Galloway’s victory at the last general election. The podgy ex-pugilist knew nothing about the people of Bethnal Green & Bow but ousted Oona King, a hardworking, wholly committed MP.
Galloway has rarely voted in parliament since his election and has achieved little of practical value for his constituents. But he exploited the anger over Iraq to get himself elected, although he was never going to remotely alter government policy.
Similarly, Livingstone smartly antagonises the Jewish community. He argues that he’s not an anti-semite, but anti-semites will warm to his snide remarks — particularly those who are hardline Islamists. He knew exactly what he was doing when he attacked David and Simon Reuben, the Jewish businessmen, saying they should “go back (to their own country) and see if they can do better”(Freeman, 58). He would never dare tell black people to go back to Africa and try their luck.
Phillips annoyed Livingstone when he challenged his declaration that the carnival had been a “triumph of multiculturalism”(Freeman, 59). As great as the event is, Phillips argued that combining diverse peoples into a cohesive society is a painstaking process that requires more than a day out in the sun shaking your booty. He touched a raw nerve when he undermined Livingstone’s attempt at congratulating himself for his cool exotic tastes, saying: “We wouldn’t, frankly, think of participation in a day’s morris dancing or caber tossing as a valuable exercise in building a modern multicultural society”(Freeman, 59). Let’s face it: the carnival is as outdated and irrelevant to a lot of black people as cheese and pineapple on sticks are to most whites. Hats off to Phillips for having the guts to say it.
Livingstone clings to the myth that he is Britain’s Mr. Multicultural. In his view even black people can’t be less than euphoric about the carnival. He makes glib associations between Phillips and the far right, while snuggling up to dark-skinned fascists himself. The mayor pats himself on the back for an occasional street party while sneakily exploiting ethnic divisions.
People may only hope that London voters will forget their differences at the next mayoral election and join forces to show this clown the door. Now that would be a real “triumph of multiculturalism.”
The problem is also that immigrants have always tended to settle in parts of the city where there are significant numbers of persons who share their ethno-cultural heritage and language. This has given each district unique combinations of ethnic and racial communities. For example, there are large numbers of Englishmen of Chinese and South Asian origins in one place, whereas Englishmen of Caribbean descent tend to be concentrated in another. Because London attracts many French-speaking immigrants, it has the highest percentage of of Vietnamese, Haitian and Lebanese origins.
But everywhere in London, visible minorities are the fastest growing sub-group in Canadian society. By 2006, they will represent between 14.7% and 20% of the population nearly one in six persons living in london are expected to be members of a visible minority group.
One of the factors leading to this increasing diversity is youth. UK’s ethnic and visible minority population tends to be younger than the national average. Forty-five per cent of London’s children have at least one ethnic origin other than British, French or American. One of five citizen of London aged 18 to 34 are members of visible minorities and one of three aged 5 to 15 have visible minority origins. In another generation, a single racial group will no longer represent a majority of UK’ s population.
There is evidence of a stronger connection between multiculturalism and people living in London’s sense of identity. When these people were asked in 1999 about what contributes to their sense of identity and makes them different from others, multiculturalism came in second after the health care system (McGregor, 118). The multiculturalism policy itself, which provides a framework for nurturing and valuing diversity, contributes to citizenship acquisition, participation and quality of life, and a strong sense of pride in what London stands for internationally. The explicit recognition that diversity within a common citizenship is good, which is what multiculturalism is all about, encourages Englishmen to feel committed to UK, fostering a sense of belonging and attachment to the country and to one another, a collective state of being otherwise known as social cohesion. As London becomes increasingly diverse, efforts to strengthen social cohesion between and among all the many ethnic, racial and religious groups in UK society will be central to continued progress as a modern, united and democratic society. Ultimately, the challenges associated with ethno-cultural and racial diversity affect everybody. Racism, for example, is a pervasive problem. It makes no difference to an Aboriginal child whether the racial slur occurs in a public school lunchroom, a community childcare center, or a privately run amusement arcade. The pain for that child is the same. And ultimately, the damage is equally costly to us all. Multiculturalism is the first step towards real tolerance which must become the base of future world’s rules. Everybody must try it by visiting London. It also means to travel the globe without leaving the country!


Works cited:
1. McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
2. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Multiculturalism Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
3. Shaffer, Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and Tuning the World, Richmond, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994.
4. Freeman, Simon , "Maximum security as London bomb suspects appear in court", www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1726498_1,00.html.
5. Gutmann, Amy, ed. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
6. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture, London: Routeledge, 2004.
7. Orwell, George , "Notes on nationalism", in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 3, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1945] .
8. George Orwell, "In defence of English cooking" and "A nice cup of tea", in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 3, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, London: Penguin Books, 1970.
9. Lemelle, Sidney J. and Kelley, Robin D.G. (eds.). Imagining home: class, culture and nationalism in the African diaspora. London: Verso, 1994.
10. Douglas, Ann. Terrible honesty: mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: The Noonday Press, 1994.

Civilization

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself
—Friedrich Nietzsche

The Female Body,” by Margaret Atwood is a prose fiction. Atwood’s language has visible denotation and hidden connotation. She utilizes language to show that society subjugates the female body when she uses words such as “the female body”, “my topic feels like hell”, “a renewable one luckily”, and “made of transparent plastics”.
Atwood constantly pits civilization against the wilderness surrounding it and society against the savagery from which it arose. She considers these oppositions to be some of the defining principles of Canadian literature. They also provide a metaphor for the divisions within the human personality. Society, civilization, and culture represent the rational, contained side of humanity, while the wild forest represents the very opposite: the irrational, primeval, and carnal impulses that exist in every living being. Usually landscapes in Atwood’s poems are harsh and brutal, wild and unconquerable, like the heart of darkness within all humans unlike the description made in the “Female body”. A critic once observed that Atwood's poetry concerns "modern woman's anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of the sex role power structure."
The female body represents servitude and entrapment, victimization and imprisonment — otherness as defined by a men. It is a battlefield of violence in which the speaker describes a woman’s body as a “mute symbol” of grotesque weakness. A woman’s body is the theatre on which men’s brutal rituals are enacted, as they vie for supremacy.
The female body in Atwood’s work also demonstrates the unbreakable connection between the Earth and women, proof of a woman’s vulnerability and mortality. While the female body can represent continuity, sensual pleasure, and self-reliance, in most of Atwood’s work, there is some disjunction between substance and spirit, between flesh and essence.
Atwood’s sculptures do not convey an attitude of female passivity. While the pieces invite the viewer to look closely, they modestly don't allow one to look inside. They coyly resist revealing all their secrets. At the same time, an ineffable joy in celebrating the body, and the inner life that it carries, emanates from the pieces. Atwood reimagines the idea of the female body, allowing the viewer to be a participant in a woman’s experience of her own body, an experience that is delicate, peculiar, comic, charming, romantic, and demanding. The pieces provoke delight, introspection, awe, and sometimes discomfort as opposed to gawking or self-satisfaction. And the fact that the figures are abstract reduces the potential for gaping.
“Female body” is two words that play an important part in Atwood’s argument that society has domination of the female gender. The denotations of female are simply the characteristic of or appropriate to this certain sex and body is the entire material or physical structure of an organism. Yet in Atwood’s essay these two words are not that simple they carry with them much more meaning and profundity. Atwood uses the words female body to describe all female bodies; she uses singular form when she could have used plural form. One can see that Atwood chooses the singular path because society views females not as individuals but as one whole. Atwood is being ironic by writing about the female body as if there were only one female body, which all females can associate with.
The range for the interpretation of the words “female body” is vast; it goes beyond merely the organs and the physical state. The female body can be: political when it goes on strike for its rights, it can be social when going on a job interview, it can be nurturing when it feeds its offspring, and it can be an object when used to sell products for companies. Atwood does not use any type of these female body images yet she chooses to group them all as one “the female body”. Atwood opts for the singular form of the female body because society makes it that way. Society views a female body as being typical and all female body coincide with each other. The female body in society is comparable to hell.
Atwood uses her body in her work to show the audience that “my topic feels like hell”(409). Atwood uses the word topic in place of body. She uses her body assuming that all other female’s body resembles her and can associate with her because of society’s view. The explanation for the word topic is a subject of discussion or conversation, and hell is a place of eternal punishment for the wicked after death, presided over by Satan. These negative words are used to describe a female’s body. The gist of the words when using it to describe the female body should be disapproving. How is it that a female body can be a subject and feels like an eternal punishment?
Atwood uses words that she believes society would use to describe the female body. In society the female body is viewed as a topic because they are continuously being talked about. They are talked about sexually, mentally, physically, mothers, lovers, and children. Inexorably the female body is constantly a hot topic of the day. Beyond calling a female’s body a topic, Atwood also says the female body feels like hell. The female’s body feels like hell because metaphorically it is worn out from being talked about frequently. The nuance for the word hell is more than just a place of eternal chastisement for the wicked. In this case Atwood uses the word hell as a sensation, a pessimistic sensation that a female body gets from being talked about over and over again without a break. One example of how a woman is always being talked about it through advertisements. The appearance of the perfect woman appears everywhere. When you turn on the television you see her face, when you look at a magazine you see her face and when you drive or walk you see her face on billboards. After having seen these pictures of the beautiful women there is immediate talk about it. There could be talk ranging from the way she looked to the mole on her face. Will the talk be able to continue because a newer, more youthful looking one can simply replace these women when they have become undesirable?
Atwood goes on to exploit the female body as “a renewable one luckily”(411). The female body will not always be desired by society. Once young and nourished the female body dries up like a raisin and is no longer enviable. The essence for the word renewable is replaceable by new growth. For the word luckily it is by good fortune. Therefore when interpreted literally the sentence is implying that the female body is replaceable by new growth because of good fortune. Looking into a deeper level these words hold more than their simple definition. At first glance it may appear that females are lucky that they have the opportunity to replace the unattractive part of their female bodies with what they feel is more attractive, basically something that pleases the public eye.
The public eye holds a superficial image of the perfect woman. When most women do not satisfy the public’s expectation they go in search of a new look or more exact “a renewable one luckily”. These females can go out and get plastic surgery to enhance their beauty, they can put on a layer of makeup to hide their old wrinkle identity, receive face-lifts to get rid of the sagging skin and liposuction to lose the fat that they have gain through child birth or the weight just accumulated through the years. When Atwood suggests that the female body is renewable she blamed society for making it that way. Society holds high expectancy for the perfect female. Most women fall into the trap of pleasing society and go through the trouble of changing their identity by any means. It becomes an issue when the women suffer physically from these transformations such as half of a face becoming paralyzed, completely destroyed or even death. Society makes women an object where they can be completely distorted.

Management

Internet is a real opportunity to start up and develop your business. The main problem is to find out what is in need now for people, what are their intentions and marketing opportunities. The schema of developing business is very simple. Have a computer, make your site and sell your product. No matter what it is. This may be information, or this may be any product, a thing, food, clothes, anything you want. The main poit is all these thing to be in popularity among customers.

Question 1: Using examples, identify some of the main ways in which the activities of small businesses have been transformed by the internet? Are there certain types of businesses which are less likely to benefit from the internet than others?
There are a lot of examples illustrating the success in the Internet when one person starts working in the Internet and then earns millions.
From my point of view among all the internet projects the following ones are the most successful ones. The first one is Google itself like the best research project. Due to its technical innovations Google became the owner of many rewards, including the win «Folk Eye» for the best technical achievement and reward «The Best Searching System in the Internet» fromYаhoo! Internet Life. Google won the prize of «Technical Perfection» by PC magazine и «The Best Searching Machine» by The Net magazine. A big amount of companies including AOL (Netscape) and Washington Post, use searching technologies of Google on their web sites. The leader of the searching machines of the Internet, Google keeps 70 % of global market. Google can find info on 101 languages. (3)
The second is youtube, which Google bought not so long. The project became a good means of entertainment and, having formed its own community, according to Alexa statistic data has left behind in popularity a social net MySpace.
The third one worth to mention is SourceForge. One of the biggest web sites in the world for f free and open source software developers, which is served by VA Software and uses SourceForge system. For the present moment on SourceForge.net are set more than100 thousand projects, the amount of registered users is over one million.
The following project, to my mind, is sure to draw our attention is plentyoffish. PlentyofFish is ranked as a top 10 USA dating site by Hitwise Competitive Intelligence and Nielsen//Netratings and is the top most visited personals site in Canada according to Alexa Internet as of October 2006. Markus Frind from this site PlentyOfFish.com has $300 000 per month. In addition he gets more than $10 000 per day from the context advert AdSense.
And the last one but not the list is Digg.com. Kevin Rose earns $250 000 per month on news site Digg.com. Kevin created the site in December, 2004, having in his wallet only $1000. Less than 2 years passed and Digg.com appeared to be the biggest news site in the WWW with more than более 400 000 registered users. His income consists of AdSense contextual advertisement and modul advert, which is sold through the agency.
The main reason of their popularity and success is in the first place advert, used in a smart and correct way, plus common attitude.
If to make a proper marketing analysis of the examples we should pay our attention on the following: 1) is the product in need? Remembering the fact that templates are very wide-spread today, we can answer this question positively. 2) Size of the market should be in the focus. The more people see your product the better. 3) Using all the means which lead to success.
Mentioning the examples of Forbes Manson and Virtual Scotland, we should take into focus the fact that “Forbes identified that information sites about Glasgow sites about Glasgow tended to be specific to an particular aspect of the city (eg history or pubs) but there was no site that constituted a comprehensive information service about the city including history, culture, places to go, and so on. Forbes also noted that information sites about Glasgow do not offer visitors information… On the other hand, he found that his strategy in terms of forming online communities was highly successful particularly with young people participation in online forums based on various nightclubs throughout the city. The original plan for the creation of these forums and communities was to have a strong consumer base of which to encourage films to become customers of inyourcity in order to access them. Forbes found that while did work throughout the inyourcity range, most lucrative were the very highly populated nightclub forums.”
Online Social Network is a “common term used to refer to the internet sites which unite and connect family, friends, fans, etc. In recent years, an overwhelm of online social networks has appeared on the internet. The functions and purposes of these groups range as do features and target audiences. For instance, LinkedIn prides itself on relationship building, creating and maintaining contacts, and locating career opportunities; Facebook is specifically for a college audience and requires a college or university email address to register; MySpace offers blogs, groups, video, among other features.”
“E-community is a group of people that may or may not primarily or initially communicate or interact via the Internet. Online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other in real life. The dawn of the "information age" found groups communicating electronically rather than face to face. A "Computer-mediated community" (CMC) uses social software to regulate the activities of participants. An online community such as one responsible for collaboratively producing open source software is sometimes called a development community. Significant socio-technical change has resulted from the proliferation of Internet-based social networks.”(1)
Today, virtual community or online community can be used loosely for a variety of social groups interacting via the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members. An email distribution list may have hundreds of members and the communication which takes place may be merely informational (questions and answers are posted), but members may remain relative strangers and the membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community.
So, we see that on-line projects which reflect the needs of society are in the success. Most of them deal with the searching information, be it the Information about Glasgo or some other, or projects deadling with connecting people in one unity, but this is side of the matter has some winning and loosing points.

Question 2: With reference to the two case studies, discuss the challenges involved in managing an E-business.
Recognition is important to online contributors such that, in general, individuals want recognition for their contributions, some have called this Egoboo. Kollock outlines the importance of reputation online: “Rheingold (1993) in his discussion of the WELL (an early online community) lists the desire for prestige as one of the key motivations of individuals’ contributions to the group. To the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person’s contributions. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. being designated as an “official helper”) has been commented on in a number of online communities…”
For every boon there is always a downside-such is the case with the Internet, which has become not only the information highway, but also a playground for individuals who seek to wreak havoc on others. As San Diego criminal defense attorneys are quickly learning, as useful and entertaining as the Internet can be, a lot of information about Internet users resides online and an enterprising criminal knows where and how to find it.
Although MySpace.com recently eclipsed more traditional Web sites to become one of the Top 10 Internet destinations, several widely publicized incidents of cyber stalking have also raised concerns about user safety. In addition, the discussion has now turned to questioning the responsibility of the management of these online communities when a domestic crime is committed by their members. San Diego criminal defense attorneys are aware that chat rooms and online communities are not the only electronic means used for cyber stalking; E-mail, text and instant messaging are also being used to harass victims. (4)
Cyber stalking may include the use of Email to harass the victim directly, posting the victim�s name, phone number, or Email address in a newsgroup or chat room in order to solicit third person harassment of the victim, preparing of websites designed to harass the victim by displaying personal or pornographic material involving the victim, or the use of the computer to access the victim’s personal or financial information, in addition to computer tampering which is also included as a cyber stalking crime. Currently, there are 45 cyber stalking (and related) laws on the books.
The management of the various online communities are also aware of these statistics, however, coming to terms with what they can do to prevent cyber stalking is proving just as difficult. Most agree that they have an obligation to their users to provide sufficient guidelines that clearly define what types of behavior is unacceptable, the consequences of such behavior and the steps that are in place to enforce the policy. Many of these Internet companies are now retaining lawyers to determine how they can protect their interests, as well as protect their members from cyber stalkers.
The growing amount of evidence of the damage of using the Internet as an instrument to harass, threaten and abuse, is the reason why courts have decided to include cyber stalking in the new definition of domestic violence. Cyber stalkers may claim the First Amendment as a criminal defense to any state law, but the First Amendment does not protect true threats.
Considering the example of Vetclick.Co.Uk, we see that “The start-up team discovered that although there was some competition amongst veterinary practices in some areas of the UK, as a service that would serve the industry as a whole they virtually had no competition. They knew they had to work quickly and create a service that would be difficult to imitate. One of the big problems for Internet companies is the fact that once others know the idea the idea may be easy to copy or imitate. The barriers to entry are often lower than that of bricks only business.”
This really a big problem in the business community.
Building a successful e-business requires such enterprise capabilities as global networking, integrated business processes, sharing information with supply-chain partners, agility in responding to the market, and intelligent decision-making. At the same time enterprise systems have extended beyond the traditional business functions and include features to support supply-chain management, customer relationship management and electronic commerce. The new focus on e-business is, in part, driven by the adoption of the Web as a new channel for product distribution, marketing, and interaction with customers. The integration of the traditional as well as the Web-oriented functions is the cornerstone of a successful e-business. This paper presents an e-business framework that, on one hand, builds on the enterprise system but, on the other, encompasses the new e-business dimensions.
Conclusion
Building the companies into successful e-businesses has become an important objective for today’s enterprises. To do so requires such business capabilities as global networking, process integration, information sharing, supply-chain agility, and intelligent decision-making.
Web as a new channel for product distribution, marketing, and interaction with customers. The integration of traditional as well as Web-oriented functions is the cornerstone of a successful e-business. At the same time, information systems have become the nerve center of most enterprise systems. As enterprise operations increasingly go global, proper coordination between business, manufacturing, and the global value-adding chain needs special attention. Information systems can help provide that coordination. What makes information systems the backbone of business operations is the emerging global information infrastructure. Through this infrastructure, enterprise systems can achieve business integration and coordination. That becomes the foundation of any e-business.

References:
1. (http://wiki.ittoolbox.com/index.php/Topic:Online_Social_Network
2. http://www.criminallawyergroup.com/criminal-defense/should-myspace-orkut-online-domestic-violence-crimes.php
3.http://www.truman.missouri.edu/uploads/Publications/Scott%20and%20Johnson%20Online%20Communities.pdf
4.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community
5. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
6. Smith, M. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons" UCLA Department of Sociology.

Starkman Versus Marathon oil Company

Like Radol v. Thomas, 772 F.2d 244 (6th Cir. 1985), this action arises out of U.S. Steel's November, 1981 acquisition and eventual merger with Marathon Oil Company. The plaintiff here, Irving Starkman, was a Marathon shareholder until selling his shares on the open market for $78 per share on November 18, 1981, the day before U.S. Steel's tender offer for 51% of Marathon's outstanding shares at $125 per share was announced. 1 On October 31, 1981, Mobil Oil had initiated its takeover bid for Marathon, a bid which Marathon actively resisted by urging its rejection by Marathon shareholders and by seeking and eventually finding a "white knight" or alternative, friendly merger partner-tender offeror, U.S. Steel. Starkman claims that Marathon's board violated Rule 10b-5 and its fiduciary duty to him as a Marathon shareholder by failing to disclose various items of "soft" information -- information of less certainty than hard facts -- in its public statements to shareholders during the period after Mobil's hostile tender offer and prior to Steel's friendly tender offer. In particular, he says that Marathon should have told shareholders that negotiations were underway with U.S. Steel prior to the consummation of those negotiations in an agreement, and that internal and externally-prepared asset appraisals and five-year earnings and cash flow projections should have been disclosed to shareholders so that they could make a fully informed choice whether to sell their shares or gamble on receiving a higher price in a possible Steel-Marathon merger.
Marathon mailed a letter to its shareholders stating its position regarding Mobil's tender offer. The letter urged rejection of the offer, stating that Marathon's Board was "convinced that the Mobil offer is grossly inadequate and does not represent the real values of the assets underlying your investment in Marathon." A. 182. The letter described a number of alternative courses of action that were being considered by the Board, including "repurchase of Marathon shares, acquisition of all or part of another company, a business combination with another company, (and) the declaration of an extra ordinary dividend and a complete or partial liquidation of the Company," id., and concluded by again urging rejection of Mobil's attempt to "seize control of Marathon's assets at a fraction of their value," and stating that "we are convinced that you and our other shareholders would be well served if Marathon remains independent."
Starkman contends that shareholders were not adequately informed of Marathon management's search for a "white knight" and of the negotiations with Steel, and that failure to disclose more information regarding these negotiations rendered statements suggesting that Marathon might remain independent materially misleading. Similarly, Starkman contends that if he had been told of the Strong and First Boston reports and the five-year earnings and cash flow projections, and also that Marathon management was using these figures in seeking an alternative bidder, then he would have anticipated a much higher bid than he did, and that failure to release this information rendered materially misleading the affirmative statements Marathon did make.
Marathon plainly had no duty to disclose the Strong and First Boston reports, because these reports contained estimates of the value of probable, potential and unexplored oil and gas reserves which were based on highly speculative assumptions regarding the path of oil and gas prices, recovery rates and the like over a period of thirty to fifty years. Disclosure of such estimated values could well have been misleading without an accompanying mountain of data and explanations. There is no reported case actually holding that disclosure of appraised values of oil and gas reserves is required, and several which agree with our decision that such disclosure is not required.
Similarly, Marathon had no duty to disclose the five-year earnings and cash flow projections given to Steel and First Boston. This information does not rise to the level of substantial certainty triggering a duty to disclose.
Finally, Starkman's claims for fraud and breach of fiduciary duty are completely unsupported by authority in his brief, and were similarly neglected in his arguments below. We therefore affirm and adopt the reasoning of the District Court finding that no claim for fraud has been made out because Marathon did not fail to disclose any information necessary to make its other public statements not misleading, and that the directors' statements, made at a time of extraordinary pressure on the board, comported in all respects with federal law and did not breach a fiduciary duty to Marathon's shareholders.


References:
1. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042-6601(198905)75%3A4%3C723%3AANOMAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2
2. www.secinfo.com/dsvRa.32c6.9.htm - 84k
3. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0094(198701)96%3A3%3C547%3AR1ATDT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5