Can we really have sunk so far that we are prepared to abandon all this without a fight? I don’t think so. So here are the five tactics the government are using. Now you can spot them, and challenge them where you find it.
1. Never let a serious crisis go to waste
2. Launch a scapegoating campaign
3. Don’t talk about government subsidies and corporate welfare
4. Tell the people that we can’t afford welfare
5. Avoid common sense
Category Archives: Blog
Military and the Climate Change
Sara Flounders’ remarkable 2009 article on the Copenhagen climate meeting tied together the military and climate change, but delinking of the two persists. She wrote that “with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets – it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions? …the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.”
Overall, environmentalists pay little attention to the military, and the anti-war movement does not address the climate. Both squander precious time. At a slow pace, industrialized countries have been “transitioning” to clean energy since the 1960s, without any specified and enforceable time frame. Renewables remain a very small part of the energy mix and will not remedy the carbon-intensive military or industrial agriculture. Transition fuels like natural gas and biofuels have proven to be disastrous to human communities and to the climate. By contrast is the fast pace rapidly rising temperature, accelerating greenhouse gas concentration (due to amplifying feedbacks), increased military spending including nuclear weapons, and new weapons/surveillance/pacification technology.[1] At some point recently, the climate goal shifted from elimination of greenhouse gases to mitigation. Continue reading
Basic Income, Bullshit Jobs, Poverty and Military Spending
To begin with, basic income would give us all genuine freedom. Nowadays, numerous people are forced to spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless. Jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. “Bullshit jobs,” the anthropologist David Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.
And we’re not talking about just a handful of people here. In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission. Another recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37% think they have a bullshit job. Continue reading
Corruption in military aid programs
One issue that is ripe for attention is the effect corruption has on military aid programs. Providers of such assistance need to take more care to ensure that their partners are not subverting the purpose of these programs by engaging in corrupt practices.
U.S. military aid programs are a case in point. According to data compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor, this year the United States is providing over $8 billion in arms and training to 50 of the 63 nations that Transparency International has identified as being at “high” or “critical” risk of corruption in their defense sectors. …
Widespread corruption poses other serious challenges to providers of military assistance. There is a danger that tilting aid too heavily toward the defense sector can strengthen it at the expensive of civilian institutions, undermining civilian control of the military. There is a significant risk that this may be occurring among key recipients of U.S. security assistance. The Security Assistance Monitor’sassessment of dependence on U.S. military aid demonstrates that, for 2014, U.S. military aid accounted anywhere from 15% to 20% of defense expenditures of recipient countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Burundi; over 50% in Liberia; and over 90% in Afghanistan. …
Corruption in defense assistance programs is about more than just a diversion of funds. It is also a threat to local, regional, and global security. Any effort to reduce global corruption must make cleaning up corruption in military aid programs a top priority.
Corruption in Military Aid Undermines Global Security
http://lobelog.com/corruption-in-military-aid-undermines-global-security/
Basic Incone is a necessity
He argues for a new view of minimum basic income, not as a safety net to save people who may fall, but a foundation on which people can stand to rise up as productive citizens. His presentation includes the new technological context that for the first time in history, smart machines will eliminate far more jobs than they create. This then, according to Varoufakis, necessitates a basic income for all citizens.
What is really significant about this presentation is the creation of an alternative view of wealth creation which he brings about through reframing the concept of how most people think about wealth.
Continue reading
British railways – a privatisation scam
The economic historian Robert Millward points out that the popular notion of nationalisation in Europe as a 1940s phenomenon, driven by the perceived failures of capitalism in the 1930s and the successes of the planned economy in wartime, ignores the earlier history of state direction of the universal networks. Gladstone wanted to nationalise the railways in 1844. Even earlier, at their genesis, the railways were dependent on the state to force private landowners to yield right of way to the iron road. The problem of the publicly owned British railways after 1948 wasn’t that they were publicly owned, but that they were expected to do so many things for so many people, often for less than they actually cost, that it was no longer possible to be sure exactly what they were doing with their share of the nation’s resources, or why. What was clear was that they kept failing to meet one of their key targets, which was to break even.
Continue reading
A multi-party politics can’t fit into a two party system.
The days of a meaningful mandate under FPTP have gone. Even a new New Labour project is impossible to assemble against the backdrop of an economic system that’s isn’t working for a growing majority. The vast bulk of the party has decided irrevocably to turn away from the politics of compromise beyond purpose. But a single Big Tent of the left is equally impossible. The social, cultural, regional and nation tensions are too great for one party to hope for a monopoly of the progressive vote. Continue reading
Trident to cost £205bn in total, 6% of defence budget a year
The total cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system will come to at least £205bn, far more than previously estimated, according to figures drawn up by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
It has calculated the total on the basis of official figures, answers to parliamentary questions and previous costs of items including nuclear warheads and decommissioning nuclear reactors. It says it has not taken into account that past Ministry of Defence projects have frequently gone well over budget. …
The most expensive item would be the cumulative running costs, estimated by the government to be about 6% of the total defence budget. Crispin Blunt, Tory chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, has calculated, on the basis of parliamentary answers, that a new Trident system would cost £167bn over a 30-year lifespan.
Replacing Trident will cost at least £205bn, campaigners say
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/may/12/replacing-trident-will-cost-at-least-205-billion-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament
Immigration
Most of us do not see the brutal parallel universe at the heart of the mainstream economy. But in the Fens, it has been highly visible – along with the transnational organised crime running a part of it. This has made people very angry. Now they want out of Europe – more than two–thirds of voters in Wisbech’s parliamentary constituency said in a 2014 survey that they would favour the UK leaving the EU.
The scene that plays out at the BP garage each day is not simply about migration or the human cost of cheap goods or isolated rogue operators. It is the manifestation of a profound social and economic change that has been enacted in little more than two decades.
From the late 1980s on, new technology allowed employers to eliminate much of the financial risk from their end of the chain. Supermarkets, for example, only reorder stock when a customer buys an item and its barcode is scanned, generating an instruction to their suppliers to replace it by the next day. Orders can double or halve within 24 hours, so workers to process and pack the goods are called in at short notice. This reduces costs and increases profits, since businesses no longer have to keep inventory or pay for full employment. Instead they have outsourced labour provision to agents or gangmasters. Agriculture and food processing pioneered this lean approach to business, but its zero-hours practices have spread to other sectors – to care homes, catering and food service, hotel work, cleaning, construction, and personal services such as nail bars and car washes. …
Blaming immigration rather than the forces that drive it, local people have turned to politicians who promise to curb it. In 2013, Ukip won all four Wisbech seats in the county council elections. There have been tense anti-immigration protests in the town. Both communities felt under attack – eastern Europeans remember how a gang of local teenagers beat up two members of their community in 2006. English residents I met were quick to say that they no longer felt safe or at home in their own town. …
Liberalising trade rules and financial flows has enabled the free movement of goods and capital across Europe – and, with them, people. But while World Trade Organisation rules prescribe global hygiene standards in minute detail, they are largely silent on the social and labour conditions in which the goods are produced.
A complex web of small rules widely obeyed – from paying your tax to insuring your car, to giving workers proper breaks – are the threads that weave a democratic social contract and a protective state. Many people in Wisbech have become more rightwing, in protest at what they see. The collapse of totalitarian structures of state control in former-Soviet eastern Europe has combined with a shrinking of state in the west. This shrinking of the state has created the vacuum into which organised crime has rushed.
The gangsters on England’s doorstep
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/may/11/gangsters-on-our-doorstep
A new politics for Labour?
On one level, new narratives around the economy, social security and immigration are really welcome. However, critically, little advance has been made on democracy and pluralism – or a strategy to fundamentally transform how politics is done, who by and with whom. The UK is made up of myriad communities, with differing levels of power, and a new politics is one in which every voice is heard. The whole Corbyn wave was a demand for a new politics – more networked, plural and bottom up. Instead tribalism, factionalism and parliamentarianism still dictate Labour’s Westminster mood. John McDonnell’s call at the weekend for Labour to back Proportional Representation is vital, but that still demands the Tories are defeated. The Labour Party can aim for a majority, but the reality is that it will have to talk to the Lib Dems about seats in the South West; do a deal with the Greens in Brighton to ensure Green votes go to Labour elsewhere; in Wales work with Plaid Cymru to see off UKIP and in Scotland talk to the SNP about federalism – especially now the rejuvenated Tories could pick up parliamentary seats in 2020. Labour has promised an all party Constitutional Convention and now need to deliver it. Worryingly, there have been no announced plans or process to reform the Labour Party itself and bring it into the 21st century. Will this be enough to hold on to those new members who expect a new politics?
Continue reading
Helicopter money – Inflation – Deflation
The only powerful argument against helicopter drops is the one that Heise and Hamada stress – the political risk of overuse. If monetary finance is no longer prohibited, politicians might use it to curry favor with political constituencies or to over-stimulate the economy ahead of an election. Hamada oddly suggests that proponents of monetary finance ignore this risk; but in my own IMF paper, and in Bernanke’s recent blog post, it is a central concern.
History provides many examples of excessive monetary finance, from Weimar Germany to the many emerging economies where governments have pressured central banks to finance large fiscal deficits, with high inflation the inevitable result. So a valid argument can be made that the dangers of excessive monetary finance are so great that it should be prohibited entirely, even if in some circumstances it would be the best policy.
But a valid argument is not necessarily a convincing one. After all, other policies to support demand growth, or a failure to implement any policy, can be equally dangerous. It was deflation, not hyperinflation, that destroyed the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s electoral breakthrough of 1932 was achieved amid rapidly falling prices.
40 million people internally displaced by conflict & violence
Highest figure ever
“Modern corruption has a white face”
But it is peanuts compared to the much bigger sums that are raked in by the lawyers, accountants and other silky advisers who base themselves in the City of London and use Britain’s network of crown dependencies and overseas territories in Jersey, Guernsey, the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
Until the UK stops encouraging, advising and facilitating guilty men and women looking to stow their shady cash offshore, corruption will continue to flourish.
Modern corruption is a suit in a Panamanian office, who takes that general’s billions and sends it on to a private bank account, no impertinent questions asked along the way. It is the Mayfair estate agent who sells that multimillion-pound townhouse to an oligarch. It is that accountancy firm in the City that fills out the paperwork structuring the rich man’s affairs so that the money goes through one of their far-flung branch offices to wind up in a trust in the tax-free zones of the Caymans or the British Virgin Islands.
Continue reading
The Sanders effect
Monthly global temperatures from 1850-2016
Monthly global temperatures from 1850-2016.Ed Hawkins
Continue reading
Thoughts on the Local Elections 2016
“When it comes to assessing Labour’s electoral fortunes, Corbyn is treated with all the due process of a 17th-century woman accused of witchcraft and dunked in a river. If she drowns she’s innocent; if she floats she’s guilty and condemned as a witch. Either way the verdict is never in her favour,” wrote Gary Younge.
It was widely predicted before the election that Labour would lose 150 plus seats in the local elections in the England, according to the polls at the time; some even went as far as 300 seats. In the end, the Labour not only lose far fewer seats – one quarter less than the Conservatives – but also hold on to the same number of councils. Labour did not just hold to key councils, such as Southampton, Harlow, Crawley, Worcester, Redditch, Derby, Hastings, Cannock Chase, Carlisle and Nuneaton where the local MPs are conservatives, but actually increased its share of the vote in the majority of them. It is true that Labour failed to gain seats in contrast to what happened in the 2012 local election under Ed Miliband, but it is more to do with Ukip. Ukip was a much less significant force in 2012; this time their performance was strong while the Conservatives were lacklustre. People did protested against the Conservative government’s incompetent rule and its austerity but not all the votes went to Labour.
Continue reading
Beltwayland: The heartland of the military-industrial complex class
For them, a two-front war and Washington’s newly enlarged national-security state, much of which is hidden in plain sight, have ushered in a 21st-century gilded age only replicated in America’s few, most privileged enclaves. As Lofgren explains:
It is common knowledge that Wall Street and its inflated compensation packages have remade Manhattan into an exclusive playground for the rich, just as tech moguls have made San Francisco unaffordable for the middle class. It is less well known that the estimated $4 trillion spent since 9/11 on the war on terrorism and billions spent on political campaigns ($6 billion on the 2012 elections alone) have trickled down so extravagantly to the New Class settled around Washington’s Beltway that they have remade the landscape of our capital.
Bitcoins energy waste
Another hard thing to ignore is the amount of energy used by miners. As bitcoin has got more popular – not civilian-popular, but nerd-popular and cutting-edge-capitalist-popular – the mining process has had more and more computer power thrown at it. The process is wasteful, since most of the mining, most of the time, is by definition unsuccessful, because only one miner wins the race. As Vigna and Casey point out in Cryptocurrency, by the middle of 2014, the bitcoin network, which
was then producing 88,000 trillion hashes every second, had a computing power six thousand times the combined power of the world’s top five hundred supercomputers … And just two and a half months later, it had almost trebled to 252,000 trillion hashes. The world has seen nothing like this level of computational expansion. That’s why some doomsayers are predicting that if bitcoin continues on its present path, the planet faces an environmental catastrophe. Continue reading
Arms sale for ‘peace’
The chairman of BAE Systems has claimed his company’s weapons sales encourage peace, as he responded to questions from peace activists who infiltrated the arms maker’s shareholder meeting.
Sir Roger Carr was forced on the defensive by a salvo of questions probing BAE’s dealings with Saudi Arabia, which is currently at war in Yemen. According to a UN panel, Saudi forces have conducted “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian targets. Continue reading
The great PFI swindle
In 2011, the independent researchers Jim and Margaret Cuthbert showed the
scale of the returns to investors when they analysed three hospital contracts
for Hereford Hospital, the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and Hairmyres in East
Kilbride.2 Shareholders are predicted to make truly astronomical gains. Equity
of just £100 invested in rebuilding Hairmyres Hospital is projected to
earn £89 million in dividends over 30 years, while half a million pounds of
equity in the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary is expected to win dividends
of £168m and a £1,000 equity in Hereford will yield £555.7m. These high
rewards are contractually protected and underwritten by government. The
Cuthberts’ analysis of internal financial projections for six PFI schemes show
investors are expecting to recoup 12 times more than they invested. The UK
Government has ignored these findings and there has been no major enquiry.Using investors’ own projections, the Cuthberts calculated how much profit
was predicted from the six schemes and found that £42m of “subordinate debt”
invested by the companies building the six schemes was predicted to yield £517m. The profits on the £717,297 put in as equity by shareholders were projected to reach £350m.
Click to access TJF_2015_11-1.pdf
Click to access c_invest-JimandMargaretCuthbertsubmission1.pdf
Tipping Point North South 