This from Financial Times:
A Bank of England official oversaw the move by the City regulator to scrap a review into Britain’s banks, it emerged on Tuesday, just a day after the Financial Conduct Authority insisted external pressure had not influenced its decision.
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The year 2011 is widely viewed as the peak of protest and dissent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity agenda that followed it. It was the year of the Arab Spring, Occupy, UK Uncut, indignados, urban riots and anti-austerity and tuition fee protests – and in which Time magazine famously named “The Protester” as its person of the year.
Yet in the UK, protests continue to occur at a rate rarely seen prior to the global economic crisis in 2008. Indeed, 2015 seems to have confirmed the suggestion, made at the beginning of the year, that 2011 was “really only just the beginning”. …
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The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead – they call us.
Pakistan has been selling weapons to many countries of the world including United States and Britain.
Minister for Defence Production, Rana Tanveer Hussain, while answering questions in the National Assembly session, said that during 2013, UK bought 69 Pakistan-made sub-machine guns (SMG MP5) and 250 G-3 rifles. … Continue reading
According to David Cameron, London is a floodplain.
This from Miles King:
[The PM] rejected the idea that it was a bad idea to build on floodplains claiming that London was a floodplain. Only a tiny proportion of London sits in the floodplain of the Thames, perhaps he was confusing Westminster with London.
That simple observation holds the key to explaining the post-79 era in British politics. How do you win an election? Inflate the property market. How do you mimic economic growth? Encourage housing equity withdrawal.
In savvier parts of the establishment, that relationship is now tacitly accepted. The latest Economist has a discussion on household debt in the UK that concludes: “It remains unsustainable for household debt to rise relative to incomes indefinitely … But for the time being rising debt may not be a bad thing … The British economy may be somewhat unbalanced, but at least it is growing.” This is the house journal of the departure-lounge capitalist class admitting that the British economy may be tapped out, but at least we can keep borrowing.
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Ministers had targeted a 25% cut in carbon emissions from government buildings and travel in 201 4-15 , compared to 2009-10, but achieved 22%. The failure was largely due to the Ministry of Defence, which accounts for half of all government emissions and cut its emissions by 19%.
A wide array of different approaches to a Basic Income have been proposed over the years. But perhaps one of the most credible and immediately possible proposals has recently emerged in a new report by the RSA.
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“The Hostile Use of Drones by Non-State Actors Against British Targets,” a new report by the Oxford Research Group’s Remote Control Project.
Chris Abbott, the lead author of the report and visiting research fellow at Bradford University’s School of Social and International Studies, said: “The use of drones for surveillance and attack is no longer the purview of state militaries alone. A range of terrorist, insurgent, criminal, corporate and activist groups have already shown their desire and ability to use drones against British targets.”
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The Ministry of Defence told the Sunday Herald that it will not investigate reports of deaths on the ground in Syria and Iraq – from anyone but UK military personnel, and ‘local forces’ deemed friendly.
The UK Government is being urged to launch an immediate investigation after independent monitoring group Airwars reported between 72 and 81 civilian deaths in Iraq could be linked to British air strikes.
The US Air Force won’t lift weight restrictions on F-35 pilots until 2018 — at the earliest — as more testing needs to be done to address safety issues with the jet’s ejection seat, Defense News has learned. …
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When the squadron has enough planes and trained pilots and maintainers, the air force can declare the first J-20 unit “combat-ready”—a milestone most analysts expect sometime in 2017. At that time, China will join an exclusive club—as only the second country to field a fleet of frontline radar-evading jets. The American F-117, the world’s first stealth warplane, entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1983. The U.S. B-2 stealth bomber followed in 1997, the supersonic F-22 stealth fighter in 2005, and the F-22’s smaller cousin the F-35 in July 2015.
By the 2030s, the Pentagon could possess as many as 1,700 F-35s plus 180 or so F-22s and 20 B-2s.
No other country has war-ready stealth warplanes, although Russia is working on one—and eight U.S. allies have ordered the F-35, with several more planning on also buying the plane in the near future. But while it’s pretty certain China will soon deploy J-20s, it’s not clear why—or how effectively—it will do so. Continue reading
A good brief summary of Realism approach to foreign policy by Stephen Walt:
To remind you: Realism sees power as the centerpiece of political life and sees states as primarily concerned with ensuring their own security in a world where there’s no world government to protect them from others. Realists believe military power is essential to preserving a state’s independence and autonomy, but they recognize it is a crude instrument that often produces unintended consequences. Realists believe nationalism and other local identities are powerful and enduring; states are mostly selfish; altruism is rare; trust is hard to come by; and norms and institutions have a limited impact on what powerful states do. In short, realists have a generally pessimistic view of international affairs and are wary of efforts to remake the world according to some ideological blueprint, no matter how appealing it might be in the abstract.
This is quite remarkable:
Here’s a summary of the anti-ISIS bombing campaign: 30,000 fighters – 20,000 killed = 30,000 fighters…
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More than 10,000 vacancies for nursing posts in London went unfilled in 2015, new figures from the Royal College of Nursing have shown.
The shortage of nurses worsened last year, with 17% of all London’s registered nursing jobs vacant, up from 14% in 2014 and 11% in 2013.
The figure is much higher than the national average of 10%.
A very good profile on Bernie Sanders.
Sanders prefers hating the rich. When Hillary Clinton was asked in a debate if corporate America should love her, she responded, “Everyone should. I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving, and the successful.” Sanders does not. When asked before a speech in Keene, N.H., what he would say to reassure the Bloomberg Businessweekreaders who work on Wall Street, or have millions of dollars, or run a hedge fund, and might be afraid he wants to tax them back to the Carter Age, Sanders puts down the manila folder containing his talk, which he delivers without a TelePrompTer. “I’m not going to reassure them,” he says. “Their greed, their recklessness, their illegal behavior has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Frankly, if I were a hedge fund manager, I would not vote for Bernie Sanders. And I would contribute money to my opponents to try to defeat him.” Then the only socialist ever elected to the U.S. Senate goes back to working on his prepared remarks.
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Figure 7: Acceleration of private debt and change in unemployment (Correlation coefficient -0.82)
David Cameron’s governments have overseen the sale of over £5.6 billion of military licences to Saudi Arabia since 2010, according to new research published by Campaign Against Arms Trade.
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ProPublica pored over more than 200 audits, special projects and inspections done by SIGAR since 2009 and built a database to add up the total cost of failed reconstruction projects. Looking at the botched projects collectively — rather than as one-off headlines — reveals a grim picture of the overall reconstruction effort and a repeated cycle of mistakes.
- In just six years, the IG has tallied at least $17 billion in questionable spending. This includes $3.6 billion in outright waste, projects teetering on the brink of waste, or projects that can’t — or won’t — be sustained by the Afghans, as well as an additional $13.5 billion that the average taxpayer might easily judge to be waste. Exhibit A for “You be the judge”: $8.4 billion was spent on counter-narcotics programs that were so ineffective that Afghanistan has produced record levels of heroin — more than it did before the war started.
So true.
Molly Scott Cato MEP:
In an economy where money is created in the private sector based on debt, a banking licence represents an extraordinary power granted to a small number of corporations by the state. Strict regulation of their activities, particularly when their risks are guaranteed by the public, is therefore essential.
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Tipping Point North South 