Democracy is often seen as a political concept, to be contrasted with the various forms of authoritarian rule in which
government can only be changed by revolution.
However, freedom to change the governing party - whilst essential - ignores the economic dimension.
We have now largely returned to the classical laissez-faire 'liberalism' which first surfaced in
Britain after the
Napoleonic Wars, in which it is axiomatic that the government must free "the market" from regulation.
The so-called "credit crunch", and the ensuing recession, is a direct result of the weak regulation required by the
Washington Consensus.
The Guardian's Larry Elliott points out that
government's job is now to control voters in the interests of the 'free' markets.
It's the inverse of democracy; it's the corporate state
The demise of neoliberalism has been much exagerated, as the latest proposals to, er, 'reform' the NHS confirm.
The plight of the unemployed now underlines both the absence of solidarity, and the relentless drive towards heightened insecurity demonstrated by
the fact that more than 1 in 5 are now working part-time.
ResArmy
It's not just the economy, stupid
Private equity - a new capitalist mutation
The perils of more globalisation
David Cameron: stop the madness of Europe red tape
'Mighty mouth' wants more precarity ... all workers should be on the same conditions as China's iPad workers
"Europe's lack of competitiveness is its Achilles heel."
He said: "In the name of social protection, the EU has promoted unnecessary measures that impose burdens on businesses and governments, and can destroy jobs.
"The Agency Workers Directive, the Pregnant Workers Directive, the Working Time Directive. The list goes on and on.
"And then there’s the proposal for a Financial Transactions Tax...
"Even to be considering this at a time when we are struggling to get our economies growing is quite simply madness." ...
Tel 26 Jan 2012 Coalition Log 'Divi' Dave Log
Agency Workers Are we on the same planet?In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
Cameron moves to water down new EU job laws
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
Precarity
Even more than Britain, the United States has experienced the emergence of an arrogant and deracinated “overclass” of super-rich.
Economists say that the super-rich in the United States are now seven times better off than they were 30 years ago.
Troublingly, this massive growth of wealth and power has come directly at the expense of ordinary people.
Statistics show that the income of the average working male in the United States has flatlined since the 1970s.
This sharp division of wealth has been accompanied by an even more troubling phenomenon: the ideals of the founding fathers have been shattered as class divisions in the US have widened beyond anything seen in Victorian Britain.
Social mobility is in the process of grinding to a halt, as the American sociologist Charles Murray has exposed in a brilliant new book, Coming Apart.
Murray exposes how the new United States upper class, which he labels a “cognitive elite”, has developed an hereditary stranglehold over the top professions and management positions.
The brightest people tend to marry each other, then ensure that their offspring get to the best schools and universities, with the result that, to quote Murray: “The parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.” ...
Tel 20 Jan 2012 Blog Growing Inequality
Inequality, Consumerism & BiodiversityIncome Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
RBS axes 3,500 jobs at investment arm
The move at Global Banking and Markets (GBM), which has employees in Stoke, Manchester, Edinburgh and London, follows Government pressure for the 83% state-owned bank to pull back from its ambitions to be a global investment player ...
The job losses come amid reports that John Hourican, the head of GBM who will continue to oversee the restructuring of the business, is in line to pick up £4 million in long-term incentive shares that he was awarded in 2009.
The latest round of job cuts come on top of 2,000 losses announced by the bank last summer.
The new losses will mean nearly 11,000 posts have been cut at GBM from the pre-banking crisis headcount of 24,000 ...
Ind 12 Jan 2012 A 'Greed is Good' Wealth Log Bankocracy Log Bonus CultureRBS chief in line to pick up more bonus millions
Charity chair pledges to track how cuts are affecting poverty levels
With all the main political parties hell-bent on refashioning the welfare state to reduce its spiralling costs, by siding with hardworking people (the deserving poor) and labelling anyone else as benefit scroungers (the undeserving), it is reassuring to learn that at least the UK's leading voice in social policy research is not adopting this invidious rhetoric ...
Over the next three years, the [Joseph Rowntree Foundation] will pump £23m into research in three main areas: identifying the root causes of poverty and injustice, supporting communities where anyone can thrive, and planning and developing for an ageing society.
In particular, it will track how the coalition government's public spending cuts are affecting levels of poverty and inequality, and how disadvantaged people are coping, or not; the foundation will help to develop practical solutions to reducing poverty ...
Of working across the foundation ... the majority as care workers, many on the minimum wage.
The trust wants to pay ... [its 800 staff] ... something called a "minimum income standard" ...
"We don't yet have a final figure, but it will be way above the minimum wage," he says.
Similar to the living wage then, which is £8.30 in London and £7.20 outside of the capital and designed to provide every worker and their family with the essentials of life?
"Yes, the same sort of thing," he replies ...
Gdn 12 Jan 2012 Inequality What is to be done? LogMinimum wage
Poverty
Social exclusion
Ed Miliband must trust his instincts and stand up for real change
The message is quite clear: get rid of Balls!
If Ed Miliband is to seize the initiative in 2012, this has to be a year of surprises.
He should jettison Labour orthodoxy, reach out to people and grasp the ideas that will reverse the national decline ...
Ed is going to have to show some leadership and courage if the political dynamics of this year are to be different.
The good news is that he has. Ed built his leadership bid around the campaign for a living wage, and has not renounced it.
The logic of the living wage is that workers should earn enough to feed their families.
It is an alternative to tax credits and welfare. It recognises the importance of work, family life and relationships ...
The problem with Brownite political economy is that, even though it was true that a 3 per cent deficit was not excessive in the context of economic growth, it was debt that was growing at the time, rather than the real economy ...
There was not enough investment in the productive economy, not enough private-sector growth.
The financial sector and the welfare state were the public-private partnership that underwrote the wealth of the nation, and this needs to change.
The heavy reliance on tax receipts from the City of London was not accidental, but spoke of a fundamental dependency on invisible earnings that was only exacerbated by the growth of the virtual economy ...
Endogenous growth, flexible labour-market reform, free movement of labour, the dominance of the City of London - it was all crap, and we need to say so ...
New Statesman 04 Jan 2012 Ed Miliband Economic Democracy Whither Britain? Log
A History of PrudenceEd Miliband's leadership attacked by Lord Glasman
Brown Helped Cause the Crisis
Economists attack Brown's legacy
Ed Balls: Speech to The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, 13 Sept 2006
Sharp increase in income inequality
The study - Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising - published by the forum of 34 countries that earn the most, said the annual average income of the top 10% was almost £55,000 in 2008, nearly 12 times higher than that of the bottom 10%, who earned an average of £4,700.
This is up from a ratio of 8 to 1 in 1985, the OECD said.
Data showed the money earned by the country's top 1% of earners doubled from 7.1% of the total UK income in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005 ...
In order to combat the problem, the OECD said: "Work is the most promising way of tackling inequality.
"The biggest challenge is creating more and better jobs that offer good career prospects and a real chance to people to escape poverty." ...
"This must begin from early childhood and be sustained through compulsory education," it concluded.
"Once the transition from school to work has been accomplished, there must be sufficient incentives for workers and employers to invest in skills throughout the working life." ...
Ind 05 Dec 2011“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”
About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America
I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.
When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! ...
Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.
Individually, everyone needs to be compensated. But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country.
The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too!
Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, "Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school."
I say, "Why? Why not science and engineering?" They say, "Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money."
So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people ...
The Atlantic December 2008 A free market train wreck Blog Inequality Whither BritainIncentive to work has been cut, says Iain Duncan Smith
UK pay gap rises faster than other rich nations - OECD
Nick Clegg vows to get tough on excessive executive pay
A variety of looters
Switching on any channel carrying ads is to be bombarded by the 'have it all, have it now' consumer culture, which depends on credit for its existence.
As viewers we have been routinely encouraged to feel that owning the latest 'whatever' is vital to the enhancement of status and self-image.
The notion that the marginalised should be strong enough - stoical enough - to accept their failure to participate, is a counsel of perfection addressed to those least able to manage it.
The possibility that full - and fulfilling - employment might be the royal road out of this dystopia is unmentioned by the the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, as is the strong possibility that vastly unequal 'societies' vastly increase the difficulty of finding detachment.City workers still banking on bonuses despite gloom
Based on average salaries of £83,000, a payout of 24 per cent would translate into a bonus of £19,920.
A managing director would receive a bonus of £166,000 if their expectations are realised based on an average salary of £237,000.
City workers have enjoyed rises of around 12 per cent to their basic pay, according to Astbury Marsden, at a time when most other workers are dealing with either below-inflation rises or pay freezes as the economy stumbles.
The higher expectations of those at managing-director level come because the more senior a banker is, the greater the proportion of pay linked to performance when compared with more junior staff.
At director level within investment banks the expectation on average is for a bonus worth 42 per cent of basic pay ...
Ind 28 Nov 2011Consumerism and police failures to blame for scale of summer UK and London riots
The hypocrisy involved in blaming 'consumerism' is breathtaking, since it is the key source of corporate-created discontent.
A desire to “have what we want when we want” and "expecting something for nothing" drove the looters on to the streets in August, a review set up by the Government said.
It claimed consumerism and peer status through owning top brands had become a “new religion”.
Looters were able to raid thousands of shops and businesses because a failure by police to tackle the first disturbances encouraged others to go on the rampage.
The public felt “abandoned” by the police while a lack of action and apparent inability to contain the disturbances meant others were willing to “test reactions” elsewhere, the Riots Communities and Victims Panel found ...
“In the Panel’s conversations with communities and young people, the desire to own goods which give the owner high status (such as branded trainers and digital gadgets) was seen as an important factor behind the riots.
“In addition, the idea of ‘saving up’ for something has been replaced by the idea that we should have what we want when we want.” ...
Tel 28 Nov 2011
A 'Greed is Good' Wealth Log Blog Inequality Riots Third Meltdown Log
A Very Neoliberal Catastrophe Family Breakdown Neoliberal Consumer Culture5 Days in August
FTSE 100 directors' earnings rose by almost half last year
A question for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Dean of St Paul's:
Total earnings for directors of FTSE 100 companies increased by 49% last year, far outpacing pay claims for workers outside the boardroom.
Whose side are you on, Gordon Gekko or Giles Fraser?
A FTSE 100 executive typically received an average of £2.7m in 2010, according to the research by Incomes Data Services, which analysed payouts of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive plans the last financial year.
For chief executives, the average total pay deal was £3.8m – an average rise of 43.5% – while IDS calculated that finance directors received an average increase of 34.1%,to take their average to £2m, while all other directors received an average increase of 66.5%, to take their average to £2.2m.
The directors enjoyed such large increases in the total take-home pay as bonus schemes compensated for the average 3.2% rise in base salaries that they were awarded last year. Inflation is running at 5.2% while data from IDS shows that pay deals in the private sector are running at 2.6% ...
Gdn 28 Oct 2011 A 'greed is good' wealth log
Corporate Sociopathy Growing Inequality Third MeltdownTop Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds
In praise of … Giles Fraser
Britain's Society Broken by Greed
Great Britain, a country where the gap between rich and poor is wider than almost anywhere else in the Western world, can still be a miserably tough place to live, especially for the children of the poor.
According to a UNICEF study, the UK is ranked as the most child-unfriendly of 21 major industrialized nations.
There are 3.4 million children living below the poverty line in Britain, a seriously distressing number.
And for anyone who has the misfortune of growing up in a bad neighborhood, beatings and assaults are merely part of everyday life.
Some 60 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 become a victim of crime at least once ...
Der Spiegel 16 Aug 2011 FYB Log 'Greed is good' Log
London riots: the underclass lashes out
The difference between a rioter and a 'white collar criminal' - like an MP bilking the taxpayer - is that the damage caused by the latter does not - usually - involve the fire services, or other damage to property.
It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall.
But the absence of a moral compass is exactly the same, and wider damage to society - and the increasing cynicism about the ruling élite - is compounded by the gargantuan greed which they, and their corporate 'friends', aggregate to themselves.
They are not best placed to indulge in moral outrage.
The social Darwinism at the centre of neoliberalism further confirms the degredation of previous ethical systems, which emphasised the social norms which are now absent from both ends of what now passes for society post-Thatcher. [APWCC] [GiGW] [WS]
The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.
All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income.
Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then.
Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion ... successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.
Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet.
Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures ...
Tel 08 Aug 2011
FYB Log Inequality No such thing as society Riots Whither Britain? Log
Consumer Culture Family Breakdown Inequality, Consumerism & Biodiversity Marginalised
Trashing Democracy, Society, Environment They take all our jobs Victorian ContrastsGang suspect killed by police did not fire his gun
Getting into the mindset of a mob mentality
Urban riots: Thirty years after Brixton
Livelihoods destroyed as looters roam streets
Another way to reward the fat-cat directors
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
Inside Britain's New Street Gangs
The Lonely Robot
Libya's oil wealth not trickling down
More than half of Libya's GDP comes from the oil and natural gas sectors, which also account for more than 95% of exports, according to the World Bank.
Before the unrest began, the country's economy was enjoying a boom. The International Monetary Fund reckons Libya saw growth of 10.6% last year and had projected a growth rate of 6.2% for 2011.
But one of the big reasons for the protests is that this enormous wealth is not trickling down to the population at large ...
BBC NEWS 21 Feb 2011Libya: 'vicious repression is appalling' ... Cameron
Libya unrest leads to rise in oil price
Oil spills. Poverty. Corruption
Poverty, climate and energy
Nigerians want oil on road to peace
Chad Proves Oil and Poverty Alleviation Don't Mix
Oil & Poverty
The failure's the same on the trains, the buses and the planes
There are two major problems with the transport industry.
One is having quarterly results fixated private companies providing essential services that usually require long-term strategic thinking and lots of investment.
That's not easy to fix given that it requires action from politicians with both vision and a degree of common sense (good luck).
The other problem – and it applies to the railways, the airlines and airports, and even bus and coach operators – is that those companies treat their customers not as valued commodities, but as an inconvenience.
The most egregious example of this is the way passengers have been kept on planes and warned that they will be arrested under terrorism laws if they attempt to disembark.
Cue the cries of "it's the airlines fault" "it's the airport's fault". But there are plenty of others.
How about the rail operating companies that, on busy commuter routes, cut the number of carriages on trains where passengers are already jammed in like sardines.
Or the bus companies which shrug their shoulders when their drivers treat people with small children and prams with a quite astonishing level of rudeness.
All of these examples – and there are many others – stem from the same root cause.
That is, a complete lack of any incentive to do better ...
Independent 23 Dec 2010 Corporate Public 'Services' Corporate SociopathyAirlines 'ignoring passenger rights'
Fiscal squeeze will squash the poor
Child poverty? Going up over the next three years.
Poverty from working-age adults with children? Going up.
Poverty for working adults without children? You guessed it. Going up also.
And these – lest you get the wrong end of the stick – are not increases in relative poverty.
They are increases in absolute poverty: the number of people living on less than 60% of the national income adjusted for inflation.
And they are not nugatory increases either: by 2013-14 an additional 900,000 people will have slipped below the breadline ...
Guardian 20 Dec 2010
Cutting the Deficit Inequality Should we care ... ? Thatcherite BritainLatvia provides no magic solution for indebted economies
Child and working-age poverty set to rise in next three years
NHS staff told to give up annual pay increments or 35,000 jobs will go
Coalition wields axe over Christmas as 100,000 jobs to go by spring
A brand of austerity about as progressive as Thatcher's
Victorian Contrasts
Britain must close the great pay divide
UK wage inequality is approaching levels not seen since the end of the first world war.
Equality expert Danny Dorling argues a cap on bosses' pay is vital if Britain is to become a fairer place ...
A recent poll by Compass and the Joseph Rowntree trust showed that only 1% of people think that top executives should be paid as much as they are.
Another striking figure revealed that 64% believe that a chief executive should take home an annual salary of less than £500,000.
This contrasts sharply with the actual pay figures.
Research by Income Data Services found that the average FTSE 100 chief executive was paid £4.9m, a figure that had risen more than 50% in a year.
This equates to 200 times the average wage.
The previous year – between June 2008 and 2009 – the earnings of the FTSE 100 chief executives had fallen 1%, in the wake of the financial crash.
Examining this year's figures, it seems that restraint at the top was short-lived, and it's back to business as usual ...
Observer 28 Nov 2010 InequalityLloyds and RBS under pressure to disclose boardroom pay
The pension scandal behind the corporate burqa ...
David Cameron says that the coalition government wants every company to provide a pension scheme for employees; that way we will all be compelled to save wisely for our futures.
But is entrusting our savings to private corporations sensible? Thousands of former milkmen would certainly say no ...
Uniq is a company hardly anyone has heard of but it is the rump of a former FTSE 100 giant, Unigate ...
But conglomerates went out of fashion and Unigate was dismembered. Dairy Crest bought much of the milk and cheese business. Cow & Gate became part of Danone. The transport business, Wincanton, was floated on the stock exchange.
What was left was a company of 2,200 people re-named Uniq and dedicated primarily to making sandwiches for M&S.
What was also left was a massive pension liability ...
A company of 2,200 was expected to fund the pensions of 21,000 people, milkmen and others who had loyally served the Unigate conglomerate and expected to have reasonable pensions to carry them into retirement.
Those expectations have been dashed ...
The companies who were able to buy Unigate's assets without taking on the accompanying pension liabilities have done very well.
That points up an underlying moral issue in the Uniq case.
The pensioners will lose their benefits even though the money is there to provide them.
Danone is a major French multinational. Dairy Crest and Wincanton are FTSE 250 companies.
They could afford to pay for the milkmen's pensions but they have legally binding contracts that say they don't have to – contracts that the pensioners were not party to ...
openDemocracy 28 October 2010 Corporate Sociopathy
Labour tilted the tax and benefit system in the direction of children and families, particularly low income single parent families ...Child benefit saga: Lessons to be learnt
The BBC's Stephanie Flanders sums up the benefits dilemma.
It is going to be hard to raise serious money from the benefit system without tilting it back.
According to the IFS, single parents are now about 13-16% better off as a result of Labour's tax and benefit changes, depending on whether they work.
Non-pensioner households without children, on average, are worse off than they would have been if the 1997 system had remained unchanged.
(These averages exclude people earning more than £100,000 a year who have been hit by higher tax.)
Interestingly, given this week's debate, Labour's changes also turn out to have favoured families with "stay at home" mums.
Other things equal, the average one earner household with children was nearly 6% better off in 2010 than they would have been under the old system, whereas, households with children where both couples work were just over 1.2% worse off.
But note this last group still did a lot better than dual earner couples without any children in the house, who were about 4% worse off as a result of the changes Labour brought in.
The upshot is that the coalition is not going to be able to take a lot of money out of the system they inherited without leaving a lot of families worse off.
Put it another way: "family-friendly" deficit cuts on the scale that Mr Osborne believes to be necessary are almost certainly a contradiction in terms.
BBC NEWS 06 Oct 2010 Alternatives to Welfare Crackdown on Welfare
The national minimum wage has risen to £5.93 an hour from £5.80 and for the first time people aged 21 will benefit from the rate.Minimum wage up to £5.93 an hour
To earn the Minimum Income Standard of £ 14400 after tax, a single person on the
miniscule wage would have to work a 56 hour week assuming a 5-day week, and 50-week year.
Previously the full rate applied to employees aged 22 and older.
There are also corresponding increases for younger workers, with 16 and 17-year-olds seeing a rise from £3.57 an hour to £3.64.
For 18 to 20-year-olds the rate is increasing from £4.83 to £4.92 an hour, the new rules state ...
... the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has warned the government about further rises that could damage job creation.
It said next year's increase must be no more than 1.7%, as a larger rise would seriously impede retailers' ability to maintain and create jobs.
Stephen Robertson, of the BRC, said the government must strike the right balance between higher wages and more jobs.
"Trading conditions are tough, higher costs, such as next April's National Insurance increase will pile on even more pressure," he said.
"Even a small increase in 2011's minimum wage could choke off retailers' vital potential to create new jobs." ...
BBC NEWS 01 Oct 2010 Growing InequalityLiving 'costs at least £14,400' for a single person
Blackwell owner is giving bookseller to staff 'to keep the name over the door'
• John Lewis partnership model to be adopted
• Toby Blackwell, 81-year-old owner, fears damaging takeovers ...
Guardian 09 Sept 2010 Plato v Illich
The top-scoring FTSE 100 company in our employee engagement survey, BT won points for having reported on the issue for the past five years and for providing consistent data for the past three.Companies that put employee engagement policy into practice
Of course, a 147-page corporate social responsibility report does not automatically mean that BT is getting things right all the time, but it does show a willingness to be open about employee relations.
Giles Slinger at Transparent Consulting, who compiled the rankings, says:
"Lots of information in itself does not make a company a high performer, but BT's reporting was also clear and consistent, giving a window on its efforts to evolve how it engages with employees."
The telecoms group has been collecting employee feedback increasingly regularly and putting more of an onus on managers to engage with their staff.
As of this year, each manager gets a report on their team's aggregate responses to feedback schemes, and they are expected to work with the team to make improvements.
Sharon Darwent, head of employee engagement, stresses the need for action to be taken quickly and locally:
"Our current survey closes this Wednesday. Ten days later, we'll deliver the results to the board and to every manager whose team has responded. We'll be looking at what actions have had the most impact on engagement and what can we replicate elsewhere." ...slabmanGuardian Plato v Illich
22 Aug 2010, 8:09PM
The paper promised a poll on this issue. Can't find that so I'll comment instead.
Employee engagement comes under the heading of corporate bullshit.
The board read the staff survey, barricaded behind their bags of money, and wonder why they are so roundly despised.
In a desperate attempt to appear caring, they implement employee engagement measures.
The poor old employees have to pay lip service, because it's not enough to do the job - you have to show the brand values run through you like a stick of rock.
Yet more of the smiley-faced lying through the teeth that makes the modern workplace such a stress-free delight.
Thanks Guardian, for the uncritical, one-sided article.
Employers - I suggest you take your employee engagement and shove it up your corporate bung-hole.
The Coalition Government has shelved plans for an independent inquiry into the £25bn-a-year energy industry amid accusations of profiteering on electricity and gas.Coalition turns down heat under energy suppliers
An industry ripe for return to public ownership
Before the general election, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats repeatedly criticised Labour for failing to tackle prices charged by the Big Six suppliers.
Both the opposition parties demanded an inquiry by the Competition Commission.
An inquiry would have the power to reform the industry, encourage new entrants to break the hold of players such as British Gas and EDF on 99 per cent of the market and, potentially, impose price caps.
However four months into the Coalition Government, no inquiry has been called and the Department of Energy and Climate Change confirmed last night that it has no plans to refer the industry to the Competition Commission ...
Homes in fuel poverty – defined as spending 10 per cent or more of their income on fuel – have trebled in five years to around 6.6 million.
Figures released in December showed that during the cold winter of 2008/09, “excess winter mortality” jumped by 49 per cent to 36,700, sending an extra 10,000 pensioners to early graves.
Meanwhile, profits have surged at the Big Six – British Gas, EDF, Eon, Npower, Scottish & Southern and Scottish Power – and the firms are accused of failing to pass on significant falls in wholesale prices ...
Consumer groups condemned the failure to act, saying customers needed a thorough investigation of the industry, whose numbers of major suppliers has shrunk through takeovers and mergers from 20 at privatisation in the early 1990s to 6 now ...
Independent 18 Aug 2010
Corporate State Energy Policy: The Market Failure Pawns or Players? Rebalancing the EconomyCameron warned over cuts to winter fuel allowance
Ministers consider cuts to winter fuel allowance
Winter fuel payment cuts to hit millions of pensioners
The rich want a better world? Try paying fair wages and tax
"Philanthrocapitalism", as it has been called, veers towards tackling symptoms of poverty and distress rather than underlying causes. Gates has done admirable work against TB, malaria and Aids, and begun work against diarrhoea and pneumonia, which are much bigger killers. He and his wife Melinda have started to talk about clean water supplies, inadequate housing, public health infrastructure and agricultural productivity. They are undoubtedly among the most sophisticated of the new philanthropists.
But it seems doubtful they will move into considering issues of, say, land ownership and distribution. The Gates Foundation wants to "give where we can effect the greatest change". But the greatest change is likely to come from transforming the economic system and the pattern of property ownership. Will Gates fund projects that undermine his own power and economic status?
There is another danger: that the poor are written out of their own story, that business tycoons, accustomed to getting their own way, do things to the poor, rather than with them ...
Guardian 05 Aug 2010 Inequalityphilanthrocapitalism
• Commodity speculators push cocoa to 33-year highHedge funds accused of gambling with lives of the poorest as food prices soar
• Bets 'risk the most vulnerable in the world starving'
The WDM's Great Hunger Lottery report says "risky and secretive" financial bets on food prices have exacerbated the effect of poor harvests in recent years. It argues that volatility in food prices has made it harder for producers to plan what to grow, pushed up prices for British consumers and in poorer countries risks sparking civil unrest, like the food riots seen in Mexico and Haiti in 2008.
Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: "Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving.
"Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world's poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable."
Guardian 19 July 2010Take the highest stakes, riskiest economic behaviour ever devised, and marry it to the most fundamental basic need of humankind, and you have the subject of this report.Food Speculation
Executive Summary
Over the past decade, the world’s most powerful financial institutions have developed ever more elaborate ways to package, re-package and trade a range of financial contracts known as derivatives.
A derivative is not based on an exchange of tangible assets such as goods or money, but rather is a financial contract with a value linked to the expected future price movements of the underlying asset.
Derivative contracts are traded on a growing number of underlying assets, from share prices, to mortgages, bonds, commodity prices, foreign exchange rates, and even index of prices.
Derivatives trading has been one of the most lucrative parts of the financial industry, but it is the increasingly complex, opaque and disconnected nature of these and similar products that ultimately triggered the collapse of the banks and the worst financial crisis in human history.
Of course, the financial crisis has been an economic disaster of seismic proportions for millions around the world, plunging many countries into recession causing millions to be thrown out of work, soaring public debts and cuts in vital public services.
But while betting on the value of sub-prime mortgages or foreign currency values undoubtedly leads to disastrous consequences, there is another area where the speculative behaviour of the world’s largest banks and hedge funds represents a threat to the very survival of people: food commodities.
In The great hunger lottery, World Development Movement has compiled extensive evidence establishing the role of food commodity derivatives in destabilising and driving up food prices around the world.
This in turn, has led to food prices becoming unaffordable for low-income families around the world, particularly in developing countries highly reliant on food imports.
Nowhere was this more clearly seen than during the astonishing surge in staple food prices over the course of 2007-2008, when millions went hungry and food riots swept major cities around the world.
The great hunger lottery shows how this alarming episode was fueled by the behaviour of financial speculators, and describes the terrible immediate impacts on vulnerable families around the world, as well as the long term damage to the fight against global poverty.
In the report we describe how the current situation came to pass, the risks of another speculation induced food crisis, and what specifically can be done by policymakers here in the UK as well as in the US and EU to tackle the problem.
But at its heart, The great hunger lottery carries a very straightforward message: allowing gambling on hunger in financial markets is dangerous, immoral and indefensible.
And it needs to be stopped before any more people suffer to satisfy the greed of the banks.
WDM: Full Report .pdf July 2010
Corporate Sociopathy Fractional Reserve Banking 'Golden Sacks' Wealth LogWDM
Choc Finger's Big Bet
Speculators Rediscover Agricultural Commodities
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs: Annual Report .pdf
Jarvis staff set to lose £28m in back pay
More than 1,000 employees of the collapsed engineering company Jarvis stand to lose the £28m they are owed in back wages, holiday pay and other benefits, its administrator has warned. Deloitte said the "unhappy" fact was that unsecured creditors, such as former staff, were unlikely to receive any of the money they were entitled to ...
Observer 11 July 20102,000 jobs at risk as Jarvis collapses into administration
The co-option of “fairness” by the UK's new government has unnerved many on the left. Yet in reality, all sides have always drawn on the language of fairness. What is at stake is really the interpretation of the causes of inequality; a matter of economics. This article suggests how we should interpret the inequalities of modern society from a post-Keynesian perspective ...Productivity does not explain wage differentials
openDemocracy 07 July 2010
Minimum weekly budget:Living 'costs at least £14,400' for a single person
BBC NEWS 06 July 2010
- Single working age: £175.34
- Pensioner couple: £222.22
- Couple with two children: £402.83
- Lone parent with one child: £233.73
A minimum income standard for the UK in 2010
FTSE 100: how London's leading share index lost touch with the rest of Britain
The disasters befalling BP, BA, Cadbury and the Pru might give the impression that British business had lost its way.
In reality, they, like so many in the FTSE 100, are now detached multinationals playing by their own rules ...
The FTSE 100 and many of the companies listed on it have evolved in line with a belief in the benefits of globalisation, a mania for ultra-liberal markets and an infatuation with mergers and acquisitions – a philosophy that has come in for sustained questioning in the financial crisis.
There can be no harking back to a mythical past: as a small island with an empire-building spirit and a powerful navy, the UK has always had what might politely be termed an international trading outlook. Only an extremist would argue for a John Bull index, if such a thing could be compiled.
Nonetheless, some commentators argue it is undesirable that our collective prosperity depends so heavily on investments that are so imperfectly understood.
Tony Manwaring, chief executive of thinktank Tomorrow's Company, says:
"There is a huge disconnect between business and society in the UK. British politics has failed to recognise the changing nature of business in the context of globalisation. We need to be asking on what basis pension funds invest our money in companies such as the Prudential and BP, and what are they doing to advance a stewardship agenda to deliver long-term value. We cannot go back to some mythical British past, but there is a huge deficit of understanding and discussion." ...
Britain's best-known share index now reflects the fact that this country acts as an offshore financial centre for brass-plate corporations. Whether that is desirable is open to debate. But when the Footsie flounders, it is pension fund members who thought their money was prudently placed who pay the price ...
Observer 06 June 2010 Branch Office Britain
LSE chief attacks short-selling ban as 'misguided' and 'counterproductive'
The chief executive of the London Stock Exchange has launched a stinging attack on the German government's unilateral decision to ban so-called "naked" short-selling in some financial stocks and bonds.
In an interview with an Italian newspaper, Xavier Rolet described the ban as a "mistaken decision that risks having an effect which is the opposite of what is desired".
He continued: "I would, in fact, suggest to eliminate the ban. And then to construct market infrastructure that helps investors. Markets are global: you can't think of acting unilaterally because it would be counterproductive." ...
Independent 31 May 2010 Blog Corporate Sociopathy Fractional Reserve Banking
George Osborne set to cut headline corporation tax
Zygmunt Bauman called it "Standortkonkurrenz" - competing with other countries, in a raceCorporation tax was expected to raise £42bn in 2010-11, according to the Budget Red Book produced during Labour's last Budget.
to the bottom, to lure footless corporate capital to invest in your country rather than someone else's.
The proposed tax cut would lower the figure to around £37.5bn leaving a £4.5bn shortfall that the Chancellor would seek to make up elsewhere.
The manifesto said the tax cut would be funded by "reducing complex reliefs and allowances" but the Tories have offered no further details. Experts say areas that could be targeted could be R&D tax credits and some capital allowances.
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, is reported to be pressurizing Mr Osborne to consider the possible negative impact of severe cuts to investment allowances.
The British Chambers of Commerce has also urged the Chancellor to make sure the corporation tax reforms does not come with adverse side effects. David Frost, director general of the BCC, has suggested lowering the rate in phases so that the reliefs can also be changed gradually.
Separately, the CBI on Tuesday said that establishing competitive business taxes is essential for delivering economic growth. The influential trade body published a list of priorities for the Government to cut costs, including the freezing the public wage bill for two years which it said could save £18bn over two years.
The CBI also called for a "re-engineering" of public services to make them more efficient.
Telegraph 19 May 2010
OFT launches stock-take into UK economic assets
The Office of Fair Trading is mounting a massive stock-take of the country's economic infrastructure, from energy and water companies to transport and communications assets, in order to investigate whether consumers are being ripped off as many of these businesses have changed hands in the past decade ...
Over the past decade a slew of British infrastructure assets have changed hands as buyout firms have looked to capitalise on the dependable revenues of many utility companies and many of the country's crucial services are now owned by foreign companies. For instance, only two of the UK's household energy suppliers – Centrica and Scottish and Southern Energy – remain in British ownership, just over a decade after the market was opened up to full competition.
Thames Water is owned by the Australian bank Macquarie, having previously belonged to RWE which owns npower; Powergen is owned by German energy group E.ON; the nuclear power company British Energy is part of the French group EDF; the airports operator BAA is owned by the Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial; and Scottish Power is part of Spain's Iberdrola ...
Guardian 14 May 2010 Branch Office BritainWho owns Britain
Bankers' earnings surge towards pre-crash levels
Pay and bonuses totalled £20.5bn in four months to April, compared with £24bn at height of boom in 2007 ...
The steep rise in earnings is likely to put pressure on the coalition government to impose a clampdown on City pay practices, which the Liberal Democrats in particular attacked while in opposition.
Guardian analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics shows that bankers were paid £8.5bn in bonuses in the four months to April, compared with £7bn during the same period last year.
There was also a jump in pay across the industry of £1bn to £12bn as bankers shifted some of their earnings away from bonuses to avoid the former Labour government's bonus tax ...
Guardian 13 May 2010 Corporate Sociopathy Wealth Log
EU leaders announce €70bn plan to protect euro
Messrs Merkel and Sarkozy might do well to reflect on the time Britain took on the international speculators and lost.EU leaders have agreed a financial defence plan in an attempt to protect the eurozone countries from speculative attacks in the wake of the Greek debt crisis.
The day George Soros made a killing shorting the pound; the day the Treasury spent £27 bn trying to prop up an overvalued currency.
Is this the, er, 'thinking' behind the empty sub-Churchillian rhetoric from the corporate lackey in charge in Brussels.
They should be taking their cue from John Palmer and Joseph Stiglitz, and go back to the drawing board: the anti-IMF/WTO drawing board.
The one that puts people before the likes of Goldman Sachs. Black Wednesday
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said today that an "intervention unit" designed to preserve financial stability in the 16 eurozone countries would be in place by Monday when the markets reopen.
The creation of the unit, which will have up to €70bn at its disposal to shield the euro against further market speculation ...
The European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said: "We will defend the euro whatever it takes. We have several instruments at our disposal and we will use them."
Jean-Claude Juncker, who heads the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, said: "We are talking about a global attack against the euro, and the eurozone must react as one."
Guardian 08 May 2010It's time the EU had a new economic philosophy
The current system for running the euro structure is ... toothless ... that ... the Greeks are now paying a heavy price in social injustice for so-called Greek national sovereignty.
National governments are not obliged to work within a coordinated euro-area wide economic strategy. They pay no penalty for breaking the rules ...
There are other glaring deficiencies.
There is no adequate system for transfers of resources to compensate the less competitive EU regions and countries for the inevitable effects of economic integration such as exists in all other economic and monetary unions (such as the United States).
There is not even a symmetrical obligation on those euro-area countries that are strongest to stimulate consumption and growth and thus to balance measures by weaker economies obliged to curb consumption and employment because of excessive budget deficits and state debt ...
The EU leaders ... should unambiguously signal their intent to make European economic union a reality by give euro-area decision-making bodies real decision-making powers over fiscal policy, discipline and balanced economic growth ... the EU as a whole must accelerate plans for tough European wide regulation of financial markets, banks and speculators something which whoever forms the next British government would do well to support ...
In truth, the very foundations of the global neo-liberal system ... is now discredited.
The EU as a whole also needs a new economic philosophy based on green and sustainable growth and which encourages social cohesion ... and which actively promotes greater social equality.
Guardian 07 May 2010 Blog Economic Democracy IMF The Euro: A Question of SovereigntyEurozone crisis is 'postponed'
EU ministers offer 500bn-euro planDarling rules out British support for euro
Control the jackals
Greek Debt Woes Ripple Outward
Reform the euro or bin it
Dow Jones insanity shows the need to regulate the murky world of dark pools
We don't know all the causes yet of Thursday's bout of insanity on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but this much is clear: regulators have lost control of the equity market ... big buyers can go hunting for sellers (and vice versa) without having to reveal their hand.
It makes a mockery of the claim that published stock prices reflect the balance of supply and demand at any given moment.
It is because of the sheer lack of transparency that these off-exchange trading platforms are called "dark pools". There are more than three dozen alternative trading pools in the US now ...
The traders themselves long ago stopped being actual humans. More than half of all share trades in the US are now done by computer programmes, and the proportion is rising exponentially.
These black-box programmes are designed to trade at very high frequency, using impenetrable mathematical models to spot supposed trading patterns and eke out tiny profits, multiple times a second ...
The SEC recently – belatedly – began (the) review of high-frequency trading and dark pools.
It is difficult to be optimistic that it will get its head round all these issues.
This is the same SEC that couldn't catch Bernard Madoff when he was using an archaic computer to fabricate thousands of trades ...
Independent 08 May 2010 Corp Sociopathy Log Fractional Reserve BankingOrigin of Wall Street’s Plunge Continues to Elude Officials
Goldman Sachs boss faces an ambush at the AGM
In the absence of economic democracy, CEO's like Lloyd "I'm doing God's work" Blankfein can put two fingers up to "shareholder proposals" safe in the knowledge that fellow corporate investors will remain on side, on the understanding that the new "business standards committee" is empty corporate spin. This, after all, is the firm that worked both for the Greek government, and against it. All in the interests of corporate profit.He once joked that Goldman Sachs was “doing God’s work”, but yesterday Lloyd Blankfein came face-to-face with the Lord’s representatives on Earth.
A stream of Christian shareholders held him to account at the bank’s annual meeting in Manhattan, exhorting him to work “for the many, not just the few” ...
In hopes of deflecting further criticism from shareholders and the wider world, which he knew would be watching the meeting closely, Mr Blankfein said that Goldman would create a new business standards’ committee to conduct a comprehensive review of business practices at the firm and come up with recommendations to the board ...
Mr Blankfein looked remarkably more relaxed throughout than he did during his recent grilling by the US Senate.
He responded politely but rejected all shareholder proposals.
By the end, he looked unbowed, but relieved all the same that he had successfully got through another day in the spotlight at the Goldman Sachs circus.
Times 08 May 2010 Goldman Sachs
The mutual way to put Britain back on its feet
By any account the UK economy is in a dire position. According to a McKinsey report in January total British debt (that's corporate, personal and public debt) was 469pc of GDP.
Our situation is second only to that of Japan, whose economy has atrophied for nearly 20 years.
Heavily indebted, we must do what any household or business would do: cut costs and increase income. For a country this means getting more out of what we spend on public services and growing our private sector ...
Unable to make the most of our people and denied access to finance and long-term funding, both the public and the private sector need a new model to drive intensive long-term investment in research and development, business capacity and skill appreciation.
That new model could and should include an updated version of an old one: co-ops. A new, modernised mutualism is one of the ways we can escape the present economic crisis.
Right now we still operate under a shareholder value regime, where companies have increasingly focused on short-term gain using debt leverage to increase stock value.
A new mutualism, where every employee owns something, offers stakeholding instead of shareholding as a method to raise performance, productivity and investment.
And this is no fantasy. Employee-owned firms have outperformed the FTSE-All Share Index over the last 18 years by an average of 10pc ...
Daily Mail 04 May 2010 Philip Blond 'Red Tory'
UK unemployment surges to 15-year high
Unemployment rose unexpectedly in the three months to February to hit 2.5 million - the highest level in more than 15 years.
The number of people out of work increased by 43,000 between December and February, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The number of “inactive” people in the economy, classed as those who are not working because they are ill, studying or looking after children, also rose again, by 110,000 in the quarter, to reach a record high of 8.16 million ...
Overall employment also dropped in the three months to February by 89,000, to a 14-year low of 28.8 million.
There was also additional signs that increasing numbers of people are taking up part-time work because they can not find a full-time job.
The number of part-time workers who could not find a full-time job soared to 1,046 million in the three months to February ...
Times 21 Apr 2010Town halls ‘to bear brunt of 600,000 public sector job cuts’
Job prospects bleak in Black Country
The West Midlands has been hit harder than anywhere by the recession that leeched jobs from the economy.
The number of jobseeker’s allowance claimants, a key measure of unemployment, doubled in some constituencies during the downturn.
Although the numbers have levelled off in recent months, and today’s unemployment figures are not expected to buck the trend, the most recent figures suggest that this will remain a blackspot.
The number of claimants fell in February to 176,100 or 7.3 per cent of the working population but were still well above the national average of 5.8 per cent.
In Birmingham 12.7 per cent of the adult population is unemployed.
The figure is higher among school-leavers. Youth unemployment in the city is running at 24.4 per cent, almost double the national rate of 12.9 per cent.
A Birmingham City Council report last week suggested that soaring unemployment could cause another outbreak of gang violence as the young turn to drugs and crime for money and status ...
In the Black Country 138,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1998.
Dan Sloan, 19, from Cannock, said: “I have been looking for a job since I was 16. I would take anything really, building, gardening. It is tough. When I go for a job, somebody always seems to get there first. I feel like giving up now. I might as well resign myself to the dole and living on benefits. It may not be much of a life but at least it is better than no money at all.”
Times 21 April 2010 Youth Unemployment
Labour has failed to reduce 'Neets', say MPs
You can't blame young people for turning to drugs.
Around one-in-10 teenagers is still classed as “Neet” – not in education, employment or training – far short of official targets set by the government, it was disclosed ...
Short-changed by schooling, moving on to 'precarious citizenship' and the dreary prospect of life on the Miniscule Wage as a drone for corporate profit.
Keir Hardie's old party was founded to offer a better quality of life to everyone, until it was hi-jacked by Blair, Brown, and Mandelson.
Barry Sheerman, the committee’s Labour chairman, said number of Neets had failed to fall “despite one policy strategy after another” ...
“It is time to take a more radical approach and to look at the example of the Netherlands, where rates of youth unemployment are consistently low and where young people up to the age of 27 have a more unified support structure,” he said ...
The report said that the proportion of 16- to 18-year-olds classed as Neet had “changed very little since 1995”.
About 261,000 young people – or 10.3 per cent of the age group – had no job or training place at the end of 2008, according to the latest figures ...
The figure rose to 1,082,000 among 16- to 24 year-olds ...
The report also suggested that more "compulsion" should be incorporated into the benefits system.
It added: “We were struck by the approach taken in the Netherlands, in which relatively generous levels of benefits and other support are offered to young people in exchange for greater compulsion to take up education, training or work ... " ...
Telegraph 08 Apr 2010
Alternatives to Welfare 'NEETS' A Return to "Primordial Loyalties"Young people must attend college to receive benefits
Welfare
National secretary Alistair Maclean said it was clear there was "widespread anger" over plans to cap employee pensions ...AA patrol staff vote for strike on pensions
Mr Maclean said AA staff were set to lose thousands of pounds under changes to pension pay-outs, which they found "completely unacceptable".
He said the private equity groups which own the AA are "highly profitable", adding:
"Staff have gone through a major reorganisation. They have taken all the pain and don't accept that private equity can come in and buy and sell them like a tin of beans ... "
Independent 07 April 2010Barclays defends decision not to write down £2.4bn debt from AA/Saga deal
Private equity - a new capitalist mutation
It was turf war at the AA
Saga to merge with AA in £6.15bn deal
Private Equity