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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Category Archives: Blog
Shortage of Nurses gets worse
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%.
Bernie Sanders
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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Inverse relation between private debt and unemployment
Figure 7: Acceleration of private debt and change in unemployment (Correlation coefficient -0.82)
CAAT: £5.6 Billion Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia since 2010
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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How the US blew $17 billion in Afghanistan
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.
Strict Banking Regulation is essential
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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Cartel Corporation Cocaine Capitalism
A new book by Roberto Saviano:
The realisation that cocaine capitalism is central to our economic universe made Escobar the Copernicus of organised crime, argues Saviano, adding: “No business in the world is so dynamic, so restlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free-market spirit as the global cocaine business.” It sounds simple, but it isn’t – it is revolutionary and, says Saviano, it explains the world. …
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Congressional Rsearch Service annual report: arms sales 2014
Foreign arms sales by the United States jumped by almost $10 billion in 2014, about 35 percent, even as the global weapons market remained flat and competition among suppliers increased, a new congressional study has found.
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Utrecht to trial a ‘Basic Income’ system
It’s an idea whose adherents over the centuries have ranged from socialists to libertarians to far-right mavericks. It was first proposed by Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, as a system in which at the “age of majority” everyone would receive an equal capital grant, a “basic income” handed over by the state to each and all, no questions asked, to do with what they wanted. …
Utrecht, one of the largest cities in the Netherlands, and 19 other Dutch municipalities, a tentative step towards realising the dream of many a marginal and disappointed political theorist is being made. …
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The Great Recession and the Housing Bubble
When the bubble burst housing construction fell back not just to its normal levels, but to its lowest share of GDP on record. The reason is that the construction from the bubble led to enormous overbuilding, which meant record high vacancy rates. The loss of $8 trillion in housing wealth led to an end of the bubble driven consumption boom. Taken together, the falloff in residential construction and the drop in consumption implied a loss in annual demand of more than 6 percentage points of GDP (@ $1.1 trillion in today’s economy).
There was no easy way to replace this loss in demand. Investment was not about to jump by 50 percent. Net exports could and did increase, but this is a slow process. In short, when the bubble burst we were destined to have a serious recession with or without the financial crisis.
U.S. military aid and endless war
The reason lies with the incentives that U.S. military aid creates.
Limitless and beyond the view of the public, U.S. military aid is a tap foreign governments don’t want to turn off. The longer they’re “fighting terrorists,” the more “security assistance” they get. There’s no reason for them to actually defeat terrorists, because if they did, the cash would go away. Instead, foreign security partners are incentivized to maintain a form everlasting instability, wherein nobody wins and everybody loses.
Extra F-35s and F/A-18s in US Budget 2016
The $1.15 trillion spending package would fund the government in Fiscal 2016 if passed by both chambers of Congress. It includes $572.7 billion for defence, of which $111 billion procures new hardware and $69.8 funds research and development.
If passed, the spending deal would bless the F-35 programme with $1.33 billion in additional procurement money for an extra three F-35As, six F-35Bs and two F-35Cs, just as production ramps up in Fort Worth, Texas.
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The priority for the NHS is healthcare not balancing the books
I would add, before commenting, that Sir Amyas Morse was previously a senior partner at PWC.
Maybe that is what informs his view. I cannot, of course, be sure, but what is offered here is quite extraordinary. First there is surprise that:
Running a deficit seems to be becoming normal practice for acute trusts.
Of course it is! Why on earth would an NHS trust want to underspend the money it has been given? When its job is to provide health services why would it decide not to do that? These are not private sector activities run for gain. They are public sector services run to meet need. In that case of course deficits are what they should expect. That Sir Amyas does not comprehend that leads to doubt as to his fitness for the task given to him.
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SIPRI: Rising arms exports from Germany and Russia
The first development which has to be pointed out is the fact that the total sales of the world’s top 100 arms producing companies are quite stable. They have gone down a bit over the past two years, but not that much. We are also seeing a more regional, or more national development – and one of them is very clear: Russian companies have seen a very steep increase in their total sales. So, the companies in the top 100 based in Russia have increased their revenues from 2013 to 2014 by almost 50 percent. That is a very significant change. By contrast, there was a fall in revenues of companies in the US and western Europe.
NHS trusts are forced to take pay day loans
Some NHS hospitals are so cash-strapped that they are having to take out emergency loans to pay doctors, nurses and other staff salaries every month, HuffPost UK can reveal.
A string of NHS trusts are taking out multi-million pound loans – and having to pay interest on them to the Government – simply to ensure wages are met at the end of each month.
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Fracking firms’ tax haven ownership
This includes companies based in tax havens such as Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, all of which were recently placed on an EU tax haven blacklist for being “non-cooperative” with efforts to combat tax avoidance.
45% of Cuadrilla is held by Riverstone Holdings through a Cayman Islands-based investment fund, while another 45% is held by Australian company AJ Lucas, which is 50% owned and substantially bankrolled by Kerogen Capital, registered in the Caymans.
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Illegal weapons can be easily bought on Amazon online
Banned and dangerous weapons, many of them disguised as everyday items, are being routinely and illegally sold to online shoppers on Amazon.co.uk, a Guardian investigation has found.
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United States Air Force may reduce F-35 purchases
The United States Air Force may have to reduce the amount of F-35s it buys over the next 10 years as aircraft research and procurement threatens to overwhelm an already tight military budget, according to a Congressional research report released earlier this week. The Air Force is looking at the possibility of cutting back on the 60 F-35 purchases a year that are currently proposed over the next decade.
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UBI: Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands
Switzerland has turned its back on a basic income scheme, in which the federal government would have given every resident a monthly payment – expected to be around 2500 Swiss Francs ($2,500) – “regardless of their income and assets”.
Although voters rejected the move in a referendum at the weekend, Switzerland isn’t the only country weighing up a basic-income experiment. Around 10,000 people in Finland could soon be paid €550 each month if the government goes ahead with a universal basic income pilot project.
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Tipping Point North South 