Discussion of All Things Political

What does it take to make the food speculators at Goldman Sachs look like they’re playing for lunch money? A secretive Swiss-based company, and one of the world’s largest commodity trading firms, knows. With its initial public offering announced on Thursday,Glencore – a multibillion-dollar mining, energy and food trader that will soon list in London and Hong Kong – is the envy of Wall Street. When Goldman Sachs was floated, the then CEO Hank Paulson made off with $219m. Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, has already earned the moniker “The Ten Billion Dollar Man” for his share of the bonanza.

 

Glencore will be the first company in 25 years to make the FTSE 100 on its first day of trading, with an estimated valuation of about $60bn. The company has had an average return on equity of 38% (compared to Goldman Sachs’s 12%). Its base in the Swiss town of Baar has freed it of even the minimal regulation US-based companies entertain. Not by accident does Glencore find itself in Switzerland. Like the mining and oil trading companyTrafigura, Glencore is a descendant of the Marc Rich group. Rich fled the US in 1983 after being indicted by a federal prosecutor, Rudolph Giuliani, for tax evasion and trading with Iran (though he was pardoned by Bill Clinton). As Marcia Vickers reported in a Businessweek exposé: “Rich’s philosophy is that no law applies to him.”

In exchange for going public and raising money for further acquisitions, Glencore will now have to submit to the bared gums of UK regulators – whose rules are far less onerous than their US counterparts. With the funds from its flotation, the company looks set to dominate the fields in which it chooses to operate. Although primarily a mining and energy company, it has substantial interests in food – controlling around a quarter of the global market for barley, sunflower and rape seed, and 10% of the world’s wheat market.

In the weeks before flotation, Glencore allowed us a glimpse of the kind of power it wields. Last year Russia, the world’s third largest wheat exporter, experienced a drought the like of which had never been recorded; fires damaged tens of thousands of acres of cereal.

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ZURICH, Oct 13 (IPS) - Switzerland is a tough place for asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants. In Zurich, they have been running a remarkable campaign for the past year, challenging the canton's asylum policy. Now, they have opened their own school.

"Please show me your homework!" Bah Saidou tells his students. Some hand in their papers, others haven't done anything, and a few are new in the class. The classroom is packed full. The lesson of the day focuses on grammar.

This isn't a regular school though, Saidou isn't a usual teacher, and the students aren't quite common either. The class takes place in a squatted, autonomous school, and Saidou is a so-called "sans-papiers" - an undocumented migrant. The more than 60 students in the class are asylum- seekers, immigrants with temporary admission, and people whose stay is illegal under Swiss law.

It is estimated that Switzerland is home to 100,000 to 200,000 sans-papiers. Among them, three main groups can be distinguished: the first group consists of those who entered the country on work permits, didn't get them renewed but decided to stay. Those who came to Switzerland looking for clandestine employment make up the second category.

As a consequence of Switzerland's harsh asylum policy, a third group is steadily growing. It contains migrants whose asylum request was rejected or not even looked into, and refugees who've lost their temporary admission when they were asked to leave because their countries of origin where considered "safe to return". MORE