Understanding is vital to saving the real economy

Instead of Austerity, the Green Party wants to do lots of nice things for people, things like NHS, education and Basic Income.

It is quite reasonable for critics and commentators to ask how these nice things will be paid for.
Will it be from more borrowing? If so, what about the budgetary deficit?

The short answer is, no, not from borrowing. It will come from taxation applied to the 1%, and by accurate understanding of how money is created.

First, the deficit, the difference between the Government's income and expenditure. We have been told that it is very serious and that we are very nearly on the edge of bankruptcy, that the only  way is to cut spending, mainly through cutting welfare because they are all scroungers who deserve to suffer etc. We are told that the deficit is a HUGE TERRIFYING NUMBER and that Osborne must make "tough decisions" to bring it down.

In fact, he has borrowed more in 5 years than Labour did in 13.

Of course, this was due to the crash of 2009, which was caused by the banks, but since banks payroll the Tory Party, the blame is heaped instead on Labour for borrowing too much.

However, Labour did not in fact borrow all that much. Here is a record going back to 1977. Blue line = Tory Govt, red line = Labour. 0.0 line means budget is balanced. Above the line we are in surplus, below the line we are in deficit. Mainly we are in deficit. Note that Labour's surplus moments under Gordon are bigger  than Tories surplus moments.

We are being given porkie pies. The weird thing is that Labour do not defend their record. 

Note above that the debt after 2009 is £60 billion before intervention to save the banks, but £150bn with the £90 bn needed to save the banksters' sorry assets.

Note also that Gordon was taming the deficit, prior to 2009. In the figure above, the deficit is anything above the line. Much less under Gordon Brown than back in 1993 under the Tories.

In fact the deficit is getting worse over the years. Look at this

Going back to 1948, there is a definite trend towards a greater deficit. Why? Because the Government has to borrow money from the banks. 

To borrow requires payment of interest. One loan of £10,000 at 5% over 10 years requires payment of an additional £2,728 to the bank in addition to the original £10,000. 

So we are in a vicious cycle. The more we borrow, the more we owe, and the more we have to pay to the banks.

But when the banks foul up, the Government has to bale them out to the tune of £100s of billions, so that the banks are in a position to lend to Government again. Our Government loaned them £90 billion to save them in the crash of 2009, and gave them a further  £375billion in Quantitative Easing. £475billion given to the banks in all. Nearly half a trillion pounds, mostly created by the State, given to the banks to save them, and then we have to go to them, cap in hand and borrow that same money back, as an interest bearing loan, on condition that we flog the poor with austerity while the banksters pay themselves bonuses with the money that we, the people, created through our agent, the Bank of England.

This is, quite simply, a mad situation, and it would be laughable if its impacts on our lives were not so serious.

It is vital for us to understand this madness if we are to save our reality, that is, our society and  environment. 

Osborne's shattered economic plan put in context

Above is George Osborne's economic plan. On the left, in brown colour, is the projection he made in 2010, with the deficit - the difference between Government expenditure and income - falling year by year until it is gone in 2016-17. In red, we see what actually happened, with the deficit way above his projection. In pink, we have his present projection, from last Thursday. Again, as in 2010, he projects a falling away to nothing in the next 5 years.

Are we to believe him? Only the Tory press and their dupes believe him.

The UK economy is rarely not in deficit. Here is the trend since 1980:

Note that the yellow bit on the right is Osborne's 2010 projection, the brown in the top figure. Note the rarity that it crosses the line into surplus. Note that Labour under Gordon Brown inherited a surplus and held the deficit down until 2008, when he got generous with education and the NHS, and then the spike in 2009, when the idiot/criminal banksters blew the whole thing apart. 

Let's look further back, to 1948. Here we can see a definite trend towards greater deficit. 

Osborne was able to browbeat the UK voters on the necessity of austerity on the basis of big deficit figures, but only because the media, in the main, colluded with him, either out of stupidity or because they share his ideological belief that all state spending is bad.

One factor in the increase in the deficit is that most money is created out of debt. The more money is in circulation, the more debt in existence.  Here is a post on why debt is breaking the world economy.

The real answer to deficit is not to shrink the state, which is what Osborne wants to do,  despite the horrendous effect it will have on the UK, but to take back the monopoly of creating money from the banks.

Voters are not stupid. They dismiss Osborne's plan by a margin of 2:1

source: http://t.co/eWsI7kzb3m

This is all a good reason to vote Green in  May 2015, since the Green Party is the only party that wants to do this.

Meanwhile, we have to grit our teeth while the papers and the BBC parrot Osborne's lies.

More on this blog: Four Tory lies and myths about the economy

Small state, low taxation - will it make us happy?

Niall Ferguson did not predict the financial crisis of 2009

I've been busy with Prof Niall Ferguson, the right-wing ideologue and current Reith lecturer. He tends to contradict himself - here is Matt Yglesias' collection of his contradictions - and the blog Though Cowards Flinch points out that he said in 2006 "I was sure that this financial crisis was going to happen" but that in 2005 he had said "Recessions are happening less often and when they do they are not too steep and not too protracted." This quote has disappeared from the Los Angeles Times, but it is still up here in the Telegraph.

And just in case it should accidentally disappear from the Telegraph too, I am going to copy and paste it here as well. Here goes:

We're turning Japanese - so Labour could have 30 more years in power

By Niall Ferguson

12:01AM BST 09 Oct 2005

A politician without office is like a snail without a shell. There is simply no way of disguising the inherent, slug-like vulnerability of being in opposition. Yet hope springs eternal, even for a naked snail. It is not only the British Conservatives who cling fondly to the illusion that if they can only find the right leader, they will return to power on a wave of rekindled public enthusiasm. This is also the collective fantasy of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Yet what went on in Blackpool last week strongly reminds me of the energies the Democrats expended in 2004 to find a candidate capable of beating George W Bush. Like the arcane rituals that ultimately brought forth John Kerry, the process of selecting a new Tory leader is not without its human interest. In each case, there is something of the beauty contest, but also something of the freak show.

And yet the ghastly possibility cannot quite be extinguished that it is all a complete and utter waste of time. Perhaps it simply doesn't matter who leads these parties. Perhaps they would be doomed to lose even if they could rejuvenate Margaret Thatcher or resurrect Franklin Roosevelt.

To this proposition, all politicians who inhabit the shadow world of opposition have a knee-jerk response. Sooner or later, they say, the public will tire of the party in power. Then, under the new, modernising, charismatic leadership of (fill in the desired name), we shall sweep back into office.

It can happen, of course. In Poland, the two centre-Right parties have just won decisively, ending four years of incompetent rule by former Communists. In Spain last year, the Social Democrats returned to power after eight years in opposition, ousting José María Aznar's People's Party. Yet democracy in both those countries is a relatively young phenomenon. In more mature democracies, I venture to suggest, there is a discernible tendency for incumbent parties to stay in power for longer.

We in the English-speaking world still tend to expect the major parties to take fairly regular turns at running the country. Power in Britain has changed hands seven times since the Second World War - in 1945, 1951, 1964, 1970, 1974, 1979 and 1997. In the United States during the same period the White House has been home to six Republicans and five Democrats. But consider the cases of Germany and Japan, where democracy has also been functioning smoothly since it was restored after the Second World War. The German Christian Democrats have lost power only twice since 1949 and are on the brink of regaining it as I write.

In Japan, voters swing even less. Last month Prime Minister Junichoro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party won a decisive election victory. This means that, apart from a brief ten-month interlude in 1993-94, the LDP has now been in power for more than half a century.

With its elaborate code of politeness and its intricate social hierarchies, Japan is the nearest thing to another planet you are ever likely to visit. Things work with an efficiency that irresistibly reminds the Western visitor of Star Trek's Mr Spock (a perfect example being the automated toilets that wash and dry your backside for you). Yet in some ways Japan is not Vulcan at all. It is simply the future of planet Earth. Ahead of the curve in so many ways, Japan may also be showing us where 21st century Western politics is heading: forward to the new one-party state.

The phrase "one-party state" is usually associated with undemocratic regimes. Fascists and Communists alike were always attracted to the forms of popular rule - speeches, rallies, campaigns and even votes - while dispensing with the essential ingredient of choice. Yet one-party states can also arise in free societies.

The Japanese case is, in fact, far from unique. The Social Democratic Party governed Sweden without interruption from 1932 until 1976. The Christian Democratic Party occupied a position of similar dominance in Italy from 1945 until 1980. The Labour Party ran Israel from independence until 1977.

It has happened in the English-speaking world too. Apart from Peel's government in the mid-1840s and a handful of short-lived minority ministries on either side of it, the Whigs were in office from 1830 until 1874. The Tories were in power (albeit sometimes in coalitions) from the First World War until the end of the Second, with only the briefest of Labour interludes in 1924 and 1931.

In the United States, the Democrats had a virtual stranglehold on Congress from the 1930s until the 1960s. My colleague at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Marty Anderson, points out that since 1968, the Republicans have been quietly building up a position in all the key institutions of US government that could prove equally enduring.

To be sure, in every case apart from Japan, all these near-monopolies on power have expired after around 40 years - slightly less than a generation. But if a week is a long time in politics, a generation is an eternity. Just ask any of today's Tory wannabes how they fancy shadowing their Labour counterparts for, say, another 32 years.

Is it conceivable that this is not the beginning of the end of Labour rule, but only the end of the beginning? Is Britain turning Japanese? I can think of four good reasons why it might be.

First, our old anxieties about the Left's reliability with regard to defence have ceased to matter since the end of the Cold War. Second, our increasingly "liberal" social behaviour (more children out of wedlock, less attendance at church) has eroded the credibility of conservatism as an ideology. Third, our transformation into one of the world's most urban societies has marginalised the Tory party's traditional rural base.

The fourth and most important point, however, is economic. Tory optimists have been telling themselves since 1997 that sooner or later Labour must blunder, just as the Tories did over the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. They fondly remember how often economic crises have pulled the rug out from underneath Labour prime ministers. Yet they overlook three things. First, economic volatility has declined markedly since the 1970s. In all the G7 countries, annual growth rates vary much less than they used to. So do inflation rates. Recessions are happening less often and when they do they are not too steep and not too protracted.

Second, the huge increase in international capital flows mean that it is far easier than it used to be for advanced economies to finance both budget and current account deficits. This year the United Kingdom will run a current account deficit that 30 years ago would have sent the pound over a cliff, closely followed by the party in power. Today no one cares.

The third point is simply that we now have lower expectations of economic policy-makers than we did in the 1970s. If growth slows, we are more likely to blame Asian competition than Gordon Brown. If inflation or interest rates jump upwards, we throw our brickbats at Threadneedle Street, not Downing Street.

For all these reasons, I find the idea of another few decades of Labour rule distinctly more plausible than a Tory election victory under yet another brave new leader. Apart from anything else, Western societies are following Japan in getting steadily older. Already, close to one in six of us is 65 or older; 30 years from now it will be one in four. "Time for change" is a slogan that excites young people. It has less appeal to a senescent society.

So good luck to whichever snail finally wins the race for the Tory leadership. I only hope you are ready for a lifetime of slugging it out in opposition.

• Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford www.niallferguson.org

© Niall Ferguson, 2005

How could income inequality cause bank crashes?

This is dynamite:

David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes. 

Look at his graph. Sorry I cannot open it here, but it is worth the click.

It relates income inequality measured as share of income held by the top 10% of the pile compared to bank failures going back to 1917. There is a very clear correlation between income inequality and bank failures. It is strong backing evidence for the position of the Equality Trust -  that greater equality is better for social cohesion.

Now correlation is not causation, though causation must always be accompanied by correlation.

Naturally the Free Market Fundamentalists (="neo-liberals") will wish in to deny causation, because it negates their assumptions.

They have an easy task, because it is impossible to "prove" causation.

The Scottish empirical philosopher David Hume (1711–76), "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" said "The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another ".

Causation is not a matter of irrefutable positive logical deduction, but rather a matter of inference, of pattern recognition. This recognition is very much related to our basic assumptions, as well as a mounting body of evidence. Neo-liberals will be far slower to recognise causation in David Moss' observation than someone who understand the scientific truth that man is a social animal.

One of the elements of recognising causation is that of finding a plausible mechanism to relate cause and effect. So the question is, how could income inequality cause bank crashes?

I am going to dip into psychiatry to advance a possible mechanism.
I do not claim to be a scientist or a scholar, but I do know about bipolar (manic-depressive) conditions.

In bipolar illness, the moods of an affected individual swing between the extremes of happiness and unhappiness, euphoria and dysphoria. Now, it is a common feature that in the upswing ("high" or hypomanic phase), the individuals will believe themselves to be rich. It is common for them to spend absurd amounts of money and wreck their bank accounts in an upswing. Conversely, in the depressive phase, they will feel poor. Even very rich people suffering from depression will feel poverty-stricken.

As an interesting aside, in the other main form of psychosis, schizophrenia, the sufferer is more likely to regard money as meaningless. They may regard love or some other abstract value as a more meaningful entity, and give money away.

Now there is a very clear parallel between individual bipolar illness and the behaviour of the markets. Boom is high, bust is low. Bull markets are euphoric, bear markets dysphoric. Is this just an intriguing, fortuitous comparison, or could there be a common mechanism in play?

It is agreed the "Market" is the summation of a multiplicity of individual actions of buying and selling. Human actions are influenced by many factors, from absolute needs such as eating, to emotional factors such as how the trader is feeling that day. In a bull market, when share prices are going up, and most traders leave work significantly wealthier than they were at the beginning of trading, they are going to feel good. That feelgood factor will influence their actions on the trading floor the next day, and the summation of the euphoria of the individual traders will affect the judgments and guesses of all the market traders. There is a also a group consciousness going on; if we find ourselves among an excited crowd, we are going to pick up on the excitement.

There is a positive feedback factor; feel good, buy in the expectation of more profit, get profit, feel good. The market as a whole is bouyant; nothing could go wrong. Buy, buy! And so it goes on, activity spiralling upward, until the whole system parts company with reality* (exactly as occurs in the course of an individual's manic phase), and the rake handle of Reality connects with the nose of the Market, which goes into free fall, wiping out whole fortunes.

Whereupon the market goes into a decline, just as the hypomanic sufferer suddenly realises that they have blown their bank balance, and made a fool out of themselves, and plunges into depression. The market goes into recession, which if it lasts long enough will be called a depression. The choice of words endorses the parallel between the individual, psychiatric state, and the collective, financial/economic state.

Depression  is just as much capable of generating false beliefs as mania. This is very relevant to our present economic situation, where Osborne is about to slit the nation's economic wrists in the belief that if he does not do so, the Market will come and take away our AAA rating.

In this view of things, Osborne's economicidal cuts, in the face of double dip recession, can be seen as a delusion of poverty, the mirror image of Gordon Brown's hubristic "we have abolished boom and bust".

The UK is certainly up financial shit creek, but at least we still have a paddle - a functioning economy. Unfortunately Osborne is trying to saw it into bits and sell it for firewood.

To summarise: the Market is composed of the summation of individual trading actions, and those traders are also influenced by emotions. There is a positive feedback loop between trading success and market euphoria, which drives those who are profiting from a rising market to make ever more euphoric guesses and judgments until contact with more basic economic realities bring about a deflation. In the boom phase, the profits accruing to bankers (who are in the top 10% of the economy) will expand, which is a plausible mechanism to explain Moss' observation that growing inequality precedes a market crash.

____________________________

*Even more than it already is. The financial market is commonly distinguished from the "real economy" of manufacturing and production, and the whole orthodox dys-economy itself is divorced from the basic reality of ecological economics.

This is an edit of a post from 2010

UK National Debt: 22% of increase due to Labour, 78% due to banks

< Graph via Economics Blog from ONS

Since Labour seem incapable from responding to the Coalition mantra "Labour left us with this huge financial deficit", this Green Party member will try to do the job for them.

The graphs show the UK Budget Deficit (gap between Government income and expenditure) as a percentage of net National Debt.

On the right, it shows National Debt without the ~£100 billion pumped into the banks in 2009.

It shows the debt coming down from 40% of GDP to 29%, presumably from Gordon Browns famous prudence. It then rises to 32% in 2008. This is due to Labour's spending on the NHS, education, and social security. I suspect that Blair's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan play a part.
And as an astute comment below points out, as GDP falls (recession) the percentage played by debt goes up. This is made worse as tax revenues fall in the recession.

But look at the graph on the left, which includes the banks bailout. The debt rises from 60% of GDP to 150% - a rise of 90%. Nearly double.

Labour's overspend accounts for 22% of the debt increase, and the bank bailout accounts for 78% of the debt.

In round figures, the banks are responsible for 4/5ths of the deficit.

This demonstrates the basic dishonesty of the Coalition's mantra.

Yes, Labour took us into 2 futile and counter-productive wars. Yes, Labour overspent on health and education, but that overspend could be construed as investment. The social security increases are unavoidable in recession.Without the bailout, Labour increased our national debt by 50% from the figure they inherited in 1997.

But with the bank bailouts, debt accounts for an increase of 375% in the inherited national debt - nearly a fourfold increase. As opposed to a 50% increase.

Apologist for the bankers will argue that the bailout is a loan, and we will get it back when the banks get around to it. Let us hope so. Nevertheless, it is a huge unplanned imposition on the common wealth.

And the Tories are indulging the banks, because 50% of their funding comes from the city.

It is time the Paxmans and Humphrys of this world started to challenge the Coalition mantra "All Labour's fault". It is one part Labour's fault, but four parts bankers' fault.

Labour is 100% faulty in not pointing this out.

Feeling Sorry for David Cameron

Pic from PA via Telegraph

This may lose me followers, but I have to say it.

Yesterday I had a tiny twinge of feeling sorry for David Cameron.

Ye I know. He is privileged, been to Eton, and is about to tear the country apart, plunging us into the deepest recession in 70 years, is a friend of the bankers, and is a Tory.

But I still feel sorry for him. Just as I did for Gordon.


Dave had nothing to say of any importance yesterday, and had to read, not recite, but that was because he has been changing nappies. Notionally. I'm sure he has someone to change nappies for him really.

He stood up and failed to impress his party, because large swathes of his party actively hate him. And Tories are very good at hate. They do it well. It's their Best Thing.

His Big Idea is the Big Society, and nobody knows what it means. Insofar as it means anything, it would mean better social cohesion, but his neighbour in No 11 is about to rip society apart, leaving Dave holding the limp tatters of a burst balloon of his Big Idea.

Dave is not a bad man. He has a good heart, and he means well. But he is leader of a party that is still very nasty, a party of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. They are setting about punishing the North, the poor, and now mothers who do the right thing by the Tory canon. Dave has the Spending Review to look forward to, and after that, the pain of imposing intolerable pain on the nation that he professes to care about.

Why did Osbore bounce the party with an ill thought through Reduction of Child Benefit for families whose mother stays at home looking after the children? Clearly this was a late entrant into the arena. Did Andy Coulson nudge The Boy George into doing it in order to divert attention from the Channel 4 programme that exposed once again his wet tissue of lies?

Clearly, Coulson is a dead man walking. He has become the story, not the story teller, and is doomed. The amazing capacity of the mainstream media to do a three wise monkeys on Coulsons mendacious pretence of ignorance of phone hacking is delaying Coulson's departure, but depart he will. The reason that he has hung on this long is that Dave is probably procrastinating, dreading the awful moment when he has to call Rupert Murdoch that his man Coulson has to leave Number 10. Even worse, who will Rupert install in Coulson's place? Richard Littlejohn? Mad Mel?

Faced with the prospect of 4 years of sharing space with Rupert's next place man, in addition to  the impossible prospect presiding over a  recession while simultaneously cutting public spending, it is not unreasonable to feel a tiny bit sorry for Call Me Dave.

MetGate: Coulson is finished. Next up: Scotland Yard and News International

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe)  

So.
Farewell then Andy Coulson,
Dave's Director of Communications and Planning.
You have become  the story, not the storyteller, and you will will leave your office at Number 10 in the next few days, after Dave has expressed his confidence in you &c.
The briefest yet most damning verdict came from Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown's spokesman, who tweeted "By Bye Andy Coulson" yesterday, as his sole comment on the affair.

Credit to the Guardian for persisting with the story, and to the blogosphere for bringing the pressure that has forced the BBC and other broadcast media to carry it too. Alan Duncan and the conservatives will be fighting their rearguard action, dissing and smearing the two reporters who have had the courage to testify that Andy Coulson promoted the "Dark Art" of illegal invasions of privacy in the News of the World. Other reporters on other papers will be coming out with the truth in the next few days.

The danger is that we sit back on our laurels. The Guardian has a useful list of other developments in the unfolding scandal, which has 3 elements:

1. Coulson
2. The Metropolitan Police, who clearly failed to exercise due diligence in their investigation of the phone taps. This requires a judicial inquiry (Tom Watson MP) or an inquiry by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary (Alan Johnson MP). The Police should interview Coulson. Some public figures including John Prescott are considering sueing the police.
3. News International, which is the key player. George Galloway may sue News International for hacking his phone.

Rupert Mordorch  has too much power, being overlord of too many news outlets. In the UK he owns:

1. The News of the World
2. The Times and Sunday Times
3. The Sun
4. Sky TV

Note that Mordorch's News Corporation only pays 7% tax on his UK profits.  ( pp. 300–303, 87–90, 177) 

The question is, what to do about over-powerful influence of single news corporations. There is most certainly a problem, since the media strongly influence public opinion, and public opinion is the source of power in a democracy. We need diversity in the media, otherwise we are little better off than the masses in the Soviet Union.

I went to look at the Culture Media and Sport section of the Green Party's Policies for a Sustainable Society, but there is no link to it on the Green Party website. Which means that all the toil that we carry out in Conference is to no avail. *sigh*.  I guess this is because...well, better not to say. But it is the opposite of transparency. (Now I bet someone will tell me it's there and I didn't click the right links).

So what to do about the Dark Lord?

1. Oblige all news outlets to carry the name of their proprietor. On newspapers, this would be in 10-point on the banner. On broadcast media, it would be in the credits. 
2. It would be not unreasonable to pass a law restricting any one person or corporation to ownership of only one news outlet.
3. Reclassify some organs as "Newscomics" based on the ratio between celeb gossip and hard information. Newscomics would lose any financial advantages enjoyed by newspapers.
4. Corrections to be given same position and prominence as the original incorrect article.
5. Press Complaints Authority to be reformed and given real authority.
6. A Media Commission should be set up  to examine Britain's media ownership and competition rules. (Will Hutton)

Any other ideas? I suppose I should go and mug up at the Index on Censorship website, but I need to go for a walk.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Mabingogiblog links:
http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-is-coulson-affair-not-story-for-uk.html
http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/write-to-your-mp-about-coulson-affair.html
First Mab'log on the affair.

Other sites:

Click this link to find if Andy Coulson has resigned yet.

Next Left has an interesting challenge: find a media manager who will affirm this proposition:
"Of course, Andy Coulson did not know about the phone-tapping operation which took place while he was editor of the News of the World. It is quite absurd to suggest that he might have done".

Here is an example of a Murdoch newspaper distortion 

John Pilger on Murdoch 

The financial markets and bipolar illness

This is dynamite:

David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes. 

Look at his graph. Sorry I cannot open it here, but it is worth the click.

It relates income inequality measured as share of income held by the top 10% of the pile compared to bank failures going back to 1917. There is a very clear correlation between income inequality and bank failures. It is strong backing evidence for the position of the Equality Trust -  that greater equality is better for social cohesion.

Now correlation is not causation, though causation must always be accompanied by correlation.

Naturally the Free Market Fundamentalists (="neo-liberals") will wish in to deny causation, because it negates their assumptions.

They have an easy task, because it is impossible to "prove" causation.

The Scottish empirical philosopher David Hume (1711–76), "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" said "The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another ".

Causation is not a matter of irrefutable positive logical deduction, but rather a matter of inference, of pattern recognition. This recognition is very much related to our basic assumptions, as well as a mounting body of evidence. Neo-liberals will be far slower to recognise causation in David Moss' observation than someone who understand the scientific truth that man is a social animal.

One of the elements of recognising causation is that of finding a plausible mechanism to relate cause and effect. So the question is, how could income inequality cause bank crashes?

I am going to dip into psychiatry to advance a possible mechanism.
I do not claim to be a scientist or a scholar, but I do know about bipolar (manic-depressive) conditions.

In bipolar illness, the moods of an affected individual swing between the extremes of happiness and unhappiness, euphoria and dysphoria. Now, it is a common feature that in the upswing ("high" or hypomanic phase), the individuals will believe themselves to be rich. It is common for them to spend absurd amounts of money and wreck their bank accounts in an upswing. Conversely, in the depressive phase, they will feel poor. Even very rich people suffering from depression will feel poverty-stricken.

As an interesting aside, in the other main form of psychosis, schizophrenia, the sufferer is more likely to regard money as meaningless. They may regard love or some other abstract value as a more meaningful entity, and give money away.

Now there is a very clear parallel between individual bipolar illness and the behaviour of the markets. Boom is high, bust is low. Bull markets are euphoric, bear markets dysphoric. Is this just an intriguing, fortuitous comparison, or could there be a common mechanism in play?

It is agreed the "Market" is the summation of a multiplicity of individual actions of buying and selling. Human actions are influenced by many factors, from absolute needs such as eating, to emotional factors such as how the trader is feeling that day. In a bull market, when share prices are going up, and most traders leave work significantly wealthier than they were at the beginning of trading, they are going to feel good. That feelgood factor will influence their actions on the trading floor the next day, and the summation of the euphoria of the individual traders will affect the judgments and guesses of all the market traders. There is a also a group consciousness going on; if we find ourselves among an excited crowd, we are going to pick up on the excitement.

There is a positive feedback factor; feel good, buy in the expectation of more profit, get profit, feel good. The market as a whole is bouyant; nothing could go wrong. Buy, buy! And so it goes on, activity spiralling upward, until the whole system parts company with reality* (exactly as occurs in the course of an individual's manic phase), and the rake handle of Reality connects with the nose of the Market, which goes into free fall, wiping out whole fortunes.
 
Whereupon the market goes into a decline, just as the hypomanic sufferer suddenly realises that they have blown their bank balance, and made a fool out of themselves, and plunges into depression. The market goes into recession, which if it lasts long enough will be called a depression. The choice of words endorses the parallel between the individual, psychiatric state, and the collective, financial/economic state.

Depression  is just as much capable of generating false beliefs as mania. This is very relevant to our present economic situation, where Osborne is about to slit the nation's economic wrists in the belief that if he does not do so, the Market will come and take away our AAA rating.

In this view of things, Osborne's economicidal cuts, in the face of impending  double dip recession, can be seen as a delusion of poverty, the mirror image of Gordon Brown's hubristic "we have abolished boom and bust".

The UK is certainly up financial shit creek, but at least we still have a paddle - a functioning economy. Unfortunately Osborne is trying to saw it into bits and sell it for firewood.

To summarise: the Market is composed of the summation of individual trading actions, and those traders are also influenced by emotions. There is a positive feedback loop between trading success and market euphoria, which drives those who are profiting from a rising market to make ever more euphoric guesses and judgments until contact with more basic economic realities bring about a deflation. In the boom phase, the profits accruing to bankers (who are in the top 10% of the economy) will expand, which is a plausible mechanism to explain Moss' observation that growing inequality precedes a market crash.

____________________________

*Even more than it already is. The financial market is commonly distinguished from the "real economy" of manufacturing and production, and the whole orthodox dys-economy itself is divorced from the basic reality of ecological economics.

Hanging about waiting to hear the Clegg/Cameron decision

I might as well add my voice to the susurration of ignorant speculation about what Nick is agreeing with Dave.

My prediction is that Clegg will get some kind of milksop referendum on PR as a condition of sharing the poisoned chalice of power, and that the Tory press will spend the intervening months treating their readers with a barrage of anti-PR propaganda along the lines of “Do you want these shenanigans after every election?”.


I met a man in Plymouth who told me that 62% of peeps want PR at the moment. Murdoch should be able to get that down to 49% with one hand tied behind his back.

We need a good, clear web-based campaign to put the all facts of the case in front of the voters. The Guardian and Indie should at long last begin to provide the facts. Hopefully the Mirror may come onside. But Mordor still has 3 orc readers to every 1 progressive hobbit.

So we need to sweep the blogosphere with factual arguments.

PS I also predict that in years to come, Number 10 tour guides will draw attention to the still-visible marks of Gordon Brown's nails on the door of Number 10 Downing St.

Gordon and Mrs Duffy - did he mishear?

• I've just been looking at the video of Poor Gordons encounter with Mrs Duffy. Go here, third vid down for the whole thing. It is worth a look. She is a smart woman, articulate and confident, community minded, a good citizen  (worked for the Rochedale Council for 30 years). She covers a lot of ground, tax on 66-year olds, Government debt, Education, Health services and fraudulent claimants, before moving on to Eastern Europeans.

What is noticeable is that Gordon keeps interrupting her.

She says, "These Eastern Europeans, where are they all flocking from?"

Maybe she thought she said "focking". That would explain why he thought she was a "bigot".

I'm trying to be helpful here.

Gordon needs to "Get Real" over Trident

Gordon told Nick to "Get Real" about Trident, the UKs independent nuclear deterrent Weapon of Mass Destruction.

No, Gordon, you get real. Your argument about Trident being an insurance policy does not stack up. Nuclear deterrence is totally illogical.

We cannot afford the £100 billion cost of Trident - nor any substitutes. We need to save money. We have a huge budget deficit, remember?

Even cold warriors like Kissinger are calling for a nuclear-free world. The only place for Trident and the UK's non-independent nuclear WMD is on the negotiating table, on the way to a world 100% free of nuclear weapons.

Conservative poster campaign; big error of fact. Will Labour notice?

Here we go, the Tories are charging up the negative campaign, and subtly displaying their interest in bear-baiting and other blood sports.

So much for Dave's 2005 claim to "Put an end to Punch and Judy politics"

However, it looks as if Dave's researchers have let him down. Again.

Far be it from me to defend Labour, but it is by no means clear that the Gordron has increased the gap between rich and poor.

There were BBC reports in 2008 that the rich poor gap (RPG) had increased since 1997, but in the required-reading-for-all Spirit Level book, there is a slide that shows that the RPG (rich-poor gap) has in fact lessened under Gordon's chancellorship.

Run this slide show through to no 33:

The Spirit Level - slides from The Equality Trust

View more presentations from The Equality Trust. (if the slide show won't open here, click the upper link to view it.

It does show a slight decline in the RPG. Not a lot, and a nasty little uptick at the end, but nevertheless, is has come down, and it is certainly better than the disgusting sight of the rapidly widening gap under Thatcher, who, some readers may remember, was a leading member of Dave's Conservatives.

There is other data showing how pathetically marginal Labour's efforts have been, and how they have pandered to the rich, (cf. Lord Mandelson of Sith: "I am intensely relaxed about people getting intensely rich"). Here is a PPT from the IFS, and the last slides do show a re-distributive effect. 

Here's the Office of National Statistics take on the matter:
Income inequality narrowed slightly in the early 1990s, widening again in the late 1990s. It narrowed again between 2001/02 and 2004/05, only to widen once more between 2004/05 and 2006/07.
This makes it sound like a description of someone learning the accordion.


The Conservative posters assert that Gordron increased the gap between rich and poor. The evidence does not back this up. It is unclear, and the bean counters would have to wade in and do weightings and disaggregations and all the things that bean counters do, which is fine in theory, but they have more important things to do, such as lunch with their bank managers.

In the end, the Tory are asserting as fact something that is a matter for debate. Their advertisement   have got it wrong.

Will Labour have the nous to complain? I doubt it. The thing about Labour politicians is that they are not really very aware of what is going on, and if they are aware of the problems with this Conservative campaign, they will probably send it to committee, to report on May 9th.

So it is up to those of us whose bitter disappointment with NuLabour is only exceeded by our dread of an overall majority for Double Dip Dave to take action.

I find that the Advertising Standards Authority does not have a remit over political advertising, and, with a sinking heart, we learn that it goes to the Electoral Commission, 0207 271 0500. The Information officer's voice mail box has my number, and will ring back, hopefully some time before May 8th. (He didn't: but I rang back, and this is what they said).

It will take a lot of pressure to get them to make the Tories pull this advert, but it must be done, for the sake of the peace prosperity and security of the country and indeed the world, because the Tories are stuffed with climate change deniers, will increase the RPG, and support FPTP 100%*.

Do not expect Labour to thank you for defending them and defeating the Tory menace. When I was on Woodspring District Council, the Tories were making a particularly vicious attack on the Poor Old Labour group, who were sitting in a line, silent, like a tray of seed potatoes, chittin. So I got up to defend them. Afterwards, the leader of the Labour group came up and warned me quite emphatically  never to defend his party again. But here we go again, Silver Surfer Green defending the ingrate weak and vulnerable old NuLabour.

*as opposed to the 95% support offered by NuLabour.

Is political blogging just about gossip? If so, where does that leave the Green Party?

I have been blogging since 2004, have put up 1,300+ posts, much of which were about what I thought was "politics". Recently I have been wondering if I am indeed a political blogger. I have been looking at the top political blogs like Iain Dale and Paul Staines Guido Fawkes, and realised that what they do in fact is purvey political gossip.
Theri stuff is mainly  about political personalities in and around Westminster. So no wonder that Greens, despite having more bloggers per capita than comparable parties, are out of the loop - we're not in Westminster.

In any case, I have no interest in gossip. This is not meant in a lofty or superior way. I just do not care, except insofar as it has a bearing on policy. It looks as if on the balance of tittle tattle that  Gordon Brown has a volcanic temper and maybe is a bully. Well, I have a tendency to lose my rag in meetings, for specific personal-historical reasons, so I cannot cast the stone at Gordon  - but I do wonder whether his temperament might lead us into a war.  It hasn't so far - he has just had to continue the wars started by St Tony of Bliar. Might Gordon start the Second Falklands war, in order to destroy that Conservative 7% poll lag (remember the rule - the corporate media always supports a good war)? It is a possibility - but this decision would be much more likely to be the result of calculations by his spin doctors, rather than an explosion of personal rage. 


Wouldn't it?

Anyway all this leaves us Greens out of the political loop, as usual.

Which is probably a good thing. It is impossible to think while your mind is saturated with the noise of gossip.  And somebody needs to do some thinking about the real political and economic problems we face. So, Iain, Guido and the rest, carry on with the gossip, and leave the thinking to the Greens...

Blogspot working again; Green Party Conference; time to mend the Broken Society

Hooray! I'm back in to Blogspot again. For the last 7 days I have been unable to open any URL with "blogspot" in it - including the blogspot help. I got some advice from a .blogger site, and it seems to be a known issue (not a Government hack on my site because it is so subversive, sadly); I cleared my cookie list as advised, but that did not help immediately. Anyway I'm back to being able to consume vast amounts of my time and yours in writing.

Main event last week was Green Party Conference. I put an account on my Facebook while the blog was down. 

The highlight of  Conference was the panel on Equality with Johan Hari and Kate Pickett. Kate works with Richard Wilkinson. Their book The Spirit Level should be required reading for all politicians and commentators, because it shows that the RPG (Rich-Poor Gap) lies at the root of our "Broken Society". So if Dave "I'm not Gordon" Cameron is really sincere about mending said Broken Society, he will aim to do what NuLabour has failed to do, i.e. reduce the RPG.
It would be churlish to add "Pigs might Fly".

The RPG is a lethal weapon aimed at the heart of society. There is good scientific evidence, chiefly from Richard Wilkinson et al.  to show that inequality causes unhappiness, ill-health, social breakdown, crime and stuff.

So what do we do about it? Here's what:

1 Citizen's Income, introduced by means of the Green Wage Subsidy.
2 Community spaces and community workers.
3 Government issued QE grants, zero- or low-interest loans to sound investment projects for the Green New Deal.
4 Progressive taxation
5 Robin Hood Transaction Taxes
6 Close tax loopholes used by rich individuals and corporations
7 Internalise all environmental and social costs caused by multinationals (that is, make them pay for the damage they cause)
8 End the monopoly of banks on money creation
I am probably going to blog obsessively on this over the next few weeks.

The other Green Party Conference highlight for me was getting an Emergency Motion on the
Dodgy Donations Disgrace.
Tories: "Lord" Ashcroft:
Labour: "Lord" Paul and Lakshmi Mittal;
LibDems: Convicted fraudster Michael Brown.

All 3 main Westminster Parties are up to their ears in doggy-doo, in terms of massive political donations. So it's up to the Green Party to kick up about the issue. Spent yesterday researching it.

Four Steps for Fairness Worth Fighting For

Er.

The Green Party slogan for the General Election is "Fairness is worth Fighting For".

The LibDem slogan is "Four Steps to a Fairer Britain".

Labour has A Future Fair for All.

Of the main parties, only the Cameroons do not mention fairness, relying on a vacuous "Vote for Change". (= NBG; Not Brown (Gordon)

I hope the BNP doesn't come out with "Fighting for a Fair Haired Fair Skinned Britain". That would make it really confusing.

As (Ex-) Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Weston-super-Mare, it is my duty to try to make some kind of distinction between our positions.

The Green approach to "fairness" (we prefer the word "equity", except it would put people off) is that it includes our full agenda:

1. Fair distribution of wealth within a nation, because that is associated with a healthier, happier people.
   
   

   To achieve this, we need
   

   • a better electoral system, where more varieties of opinion are represented
   • redistributive taxation
   • a radically revised financial system, with new money created by the Bank of England as well as by the private banks
     

2. Fairer distribution of wealth between nations.
   
   

   To achieve this, we need
   

   • to abolish the debt burden on heavily indebted poor countries
   • to solarise the world economy so that hot poor countries become energy rich
   • to tackle dictatorships which cause poverty, oppression and war for their people, through the Index of Human Rights
   • to get the UN to set up an agency to negotiate separatist movements (1/3 of current wars are based on separatism; Angola separatists attacked the Togo football team yesterday)
     

3. Fairer distribution between present and future generations
   
   
   • -which brings in our whole sustainability agenda - climate change, reforestation, peace not militarism, economics based on ecology, respect for biodiversity and all the rest
     
     So that's what is implicit in the Green view of fairness (though I should point out that one or two points are not yet official Green Party policy).
     

What is the LibDem take on fairness?
I have highlighted the bits of Nick Clegg's Four Steps that catch my interest:

1. Tax Reform: stop up the loopholes that the rich use, and give £700 to everyone else. OK.
   
2. Reduce Class Sizes in schools. Cool.
   
3. Spread the profits of the City of London, out to the country generally. Have community banks (good classic Green policy), invest in infrastructure and green technology, invest in reliable public transport, (I think)
   
4. Political Reform - openness, transparency, 150 less MPs, local communities to control police and NHS (classic green policy), powers of recall.

So there we have it. Much overlap, as you would expect. So who do you vote for? Neither Party will form the next Government, so you are only voting for the principle in either case.

My case is that the Green philosophy, founded on the understanding of ecology, is more inclusive and sound than Liberal Democracy, which, like individualism and socialism is founded on the absurd notion that man is a self-existent being.

PS And another thing: Dave's slogan "We can't go on like this" would do for the Green Party too.
PPS Labour do not yet have a slogan afaik. May I suggest, free of charge, a simple

"Plod on",

or possibly,

"If you think we are bad, look at the Tories?"

Akmal Sheikh, Paul Clarke, law in mindless action

Gordon Brown and other senior British politicians have angrily condemned China for executing a British man said to have had mental problems. Akmal Shaikh, 53, was killed early this morning by lethal injection after being convicted of drug smuggling. (Guardian).

Gordon Brown says: ""I condemn the execution of Akmal Shaikh in the strongest terms and am appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not been granted. I am particularly concerned that no mental health assessment was undertaken."

Meanwhile, on 18th December, a British former soldier who faced five years in jail after finding a shotgun and handing it in to police in Reigate, Paul Clarke, 27, was given a 12-month suspended sentence for possession of a firearm at Reading Crown Court today. (Surrey Today)

Clarke had found the gun in a bag at the bottom of his garden, and handed it in to the police, but was arrested and told he faced 5 years in jail, because that is the automatic sentence for unauthorised possession of a shotgun. Possibly thanks partly to a Twitter campaign, Clarke's sentence was suspended, but even so a 1 year suspended sentence is a pretty dark cloud to walk under, especially as Clarke believes Reigate police seem to have it in for him because he had an affair with one of their establishment.

Both cases show the inflexibility of bad laws.
In the UK, unauthorised posession of firearm = 5 years.
In China, drug smuggling = death.

There is a difference in degree, and a certain amount of flexibility in the UK, but there is a similarity in kind, and no cause for smugness or finger-pointing on the part of Britons.

Another parallel that is shown up by the case is that the two major states, USA and China, are of a piece when it comes to belief in the death penalty. It is not good that they share this bararous practice.

Let us not forget the Tamils

Image acknowledgments


150, 000 INNOCENT CIVILIANS STILL LOCKED UP IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN SRI LANKA, SEND AN APPEAL TODAY TO BAN KI-MOON, BARACK OBAMA AND GORDON BROWN, SUPPORT THE ACT NOW CAMP APPEAL SUPPORTED BY CELEBRITIES AND BRITISH MP'S, INCLUDING BOB GELDOF.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS LINK TO ALL

Despite the official war having ended, major human rights violations are still being reported as over a hundred and fifty thousands Tamil civilians are still being detained in Nazi-style camps in northern Sri Lanka. They have been living in overcrowded conditions, lack of food and water, inadequate medical facilities and poor sanitation. The camps are very basic and are surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards and resemble Nazi-style concentration camps.
There are reports of large scale human rights violations such as rape, torture, abductions and child recruitment by government backed paramilitaries. Please click link and send an appeal today and forward this link to all your friends.

http://www.act-now.info/Site/Online_Camp_Appeal.html


Learn more about the appeal



U.N.: 150,000 still in Sri Lankan camps

Channel 4 News reports from a camp in the northern Sri Lankan city of Vavuniya, where Tamil refugees have been taken.
Hundreds dying' in Sri Lanka camp
Sri Lanka Tamil refugees under rape and kidnappings in camps - Sky News


Clinton's rape bombshell


Paramilitaries 'abducting Tamil children from Sri Lanka camps'

Blogging on Prime Minsters Speech

OK, I've never tried this before.

I'm going to try a simultaneous commentary on the Prime Minister's speech on Afghanistan.

He's speaking now here.

At the present a gent that I (having come in late) I take to be the Lord Mayor is verbalising well. He is extolling the City of London, reminds me of Lord Lawlor.

He's mentioning charities emanating from the City. I probably missed the bit where he thanks the us the people, for their charitable donations of £3000 per head.

Gordon is about to come on.
Toot toot (fanfare).

BG: Hello everyone, thanks. Today I am going to tell you about

• Climate change,
  
• Multilateralism,
  
• global rules for prosperity,
  
• NPT,
  
• Afpak, (stronger counterinsurgency)
  
• and a New World Order.

We face great global challenges.
There are Causes worth Fighing For.
Good stuff can happen:
Fall of Berlin wall, Mandela out of jail &c.
Yesterday's dream becomes todays impossibility and can become tomorrows reality.

We need strong alliances. Multilateral cooperation. Collective action. Recession, climate, &c. International action is necessary.

We must lead in global cooperation.

1 Climate Change.
International legal treaty asap.

2 Secure world economy.

• Restructuring banks...
• Fiscal stimulus
• world economy will double in size in 20yrs.
  

Trade abroad = jobs at home.

There must be a new contract of trust between banks and public.

Must address
Burma, Zimbabwe &c
Global Poverty.

3 Nukes:

• Bargain between NWS/NNWS
• NNWS renounce NW, get NP.
• NWS must make credible road map on Nuclear Disarmament.
  

Iran - end of year deadline to do something about terrorism.

[I'm missing bits. Gordon's breaking up. The feed I mean].

Tribute to soldiers. First bit of applause.

We are disrupting alQaeda (AQ) 7/12 AQ leaders killed. Sapping morale.
28000 Pakistani forces squeezing AQ in S Waziristan.
AQ atrocities.
200 persons convicted of terrorist offences since 2001.
AQ has extensive recruitment network
[RL: Recruiting sergeant No 1 is at the podium now.]

No appeasement. Public opinion is "the mood of a passing moment".
[RL: That's us!!]

We have a new Document on Partnering.
We're saved then! Hurray!!

Corruption is Bad and Something Must be Done.
RL: Opium is the food of corruption.
Passing districts to Afghan control, progressive Afghanisation til the cows come home. (or was that "boys"?)

If Taleban regain power, AQ will flourish.

Global society must become a reality.
Construction of a New Global Order.

We have every reason to be confident about our prospects.
[RL: so that's all right then. I have a bit worried lately.]
Architects of a New World that can truly become a Global Society.
er...
..that's it.

Well. Well-a well-a well.
Good stuff Gordon. You read it well, and you looked craggy and solid as Buaichlle Etive Mor on a windswept November night.

Great words. Who could disagree with most of it, apart from barking neo-cons who are allergic to words like "social" or "Co-operation".
What we need now is to get a few concepts and ideas to attach to the words, and the political will to realise the concepts and ideas, and off we jolly well go...

...except, between the word and the action falls the Abyss of indecision and mental conservatism.

And advisors who advise against even thinking about buying the opium.

Afghanistan: success is possible

The Green Party has consistently opposed the war in Afghanistan. In common with the majority of British opinion, we want to see the NATO troops withdrawn.

An IPSOS Mori poll in July found that 41% wanted to stay in Afghanistan, and 51% wanted our troops withdrawn. Yesterday the Independent on Sunday found this has moved up to 71%.

We Brits are not alone.
According to a November 11th poll, 58 percent of Americans oppose the conflict.
Of Afghans themselves, a poll in February showed that only 32% think US forces are doing a good or excellent job now, compared with 68% in 2005.
In Canada, a massive 76% oppose keeping any Canadian military forces in Afghanistan.

This amount of public opposition to a war is unprecedented, because normally in any war the corporate media supply automatic support.

Poor Gordon keeps murmuring his mantra that the boys and girls are there to keep the streets of our cities safe from Al Qaeda. Even my cat understands that the presence of our boots on Muslim soil is the best recruiting motivator for that bunch of fundamentalist killers. The best and most successful defence against terrorists lies in intelligence, police and financial controls, even though the latter efforts are pretty flaky at times, certainly in the case of Abu Musa al_Zarqawi.

What would happen in Afghanistan if NATO just pulls out?

We would leave a country at war, with an incompetent corrupt government, armed insurgents, some of whom are Taleban fundamentalists thirsty to get back in control of the Afghan Government, and active war lord culture, and an economy 50% of which is dependent on the illegal opium trade.

Now some will argue that all of this badness is the result of our presence, and will resolve itself when NATO pulls out, just as the inflammation is resolved when a splinter is removed.

I really wish I could believe this. But wishes are not much good in politics. The reasonable expectation is that Afghanistan will move to the state that Somalia has been in for two decades, with no central government, and the regions dominated by war lords fighting to maintain their manor. The Taleban could form a government in at least part of the country, with all that means in terms of subjugation of women and girls.

We should also expect a fresh wave of immigration, legal and illegal, from Afghanistan.

All this is not a good outcome. There is an alternative, one that could let our troops come home with honour, a job done successfully, leaving behind a peaceful, prosperous and stable country.

Here's how:

Every year, some 6 million people die of cancer in the Global South without the benefits of opiate painkillers. The Afghan opium crop, which at present supplies 90% of the heroin used on our streets, should be bought up by the World Health Organisation, purified to medical grade, and used to treat terminal pain. Green Party leader Caroline Lucas has been conducting a long correspondence with the Foreign Office, who respond with the absurd argument that some of the produce “might leak onto the black market” – absurd because at present ALL of it is leaking onto the black market.
They are deaf to the argument that it is impossible to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan farmers when their livelihoods are dependent on the opium crop, which is valued at up to 50% of the Afghan economy.
They are deaf to arguments that to legitimise and purchase the opium would pull the financial rug out from under the feet of the Taliban.
They refuse to understand that the policy would slash the criminal activity and health problems associated with illegal Afghan heroin.
They are blind to the corruption associated with the drugs trade, which penetrates high into the Afghan administration.
And they are blind to the immense suffering associated with untreated terminal pain in Africa.

The Green Party’s policy is shared by the International Council on Security and Development, the Afghan Red Crescent and the Italian Red Cross. The core objection by the Government to the is that the Afghan Government does not have the necessary control mechanisms in place; but this puts the cart before the horse. At present, the Afghan Government’s writ does not run in opium producing areas because the crop is illegal, and the Taliban is the farmers’ buyer. If the Government were to become the buyer, the allegiance of the farmers would change. We have a strong case for our policy, and should use every opportunity to publicise the irrationality of the Government’s position.

Gordon does Something Right (Tobin Tax) ; give positive reinforcement

Image : hat tip to Banksy

SHOCK NEWS, HOLD THE FRONT PAGE:

Gordon is saying the right thing for once.
He is calling for a Tobin Tax on financial dealings, the proceeds to go to help poorer countries and to fund future bank bailouts.

Telegraph: Predictable opposition coming from the expected quarters. Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, said: "That's not something that we're prepared to support." Canada's finance minister, Jim Flaherty, said: "It is not something we would be interested in in Canada. We are not in the business of raising taxes, we are in the business of lowering taxes in Canada. It is not an idea we would look at." Dominique Strauss-Khan, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also poured cold water on the plan. “I don’t believe it will be a transaction tax because transactions are very difficult to measure and so it’s very easy to avoid a transaction tax".

On Monday there will be a queue of financiers waiting for their turn at the microphone to condemn the proposal as a threat that will pull down the entire fabric of society, with gullible interviewers drinking in every word, and asking no tough questions about the finance markets and the impact of poverty on human beings.

The Green Party is among the many peoples' organizations to call for the Tobin Tax.
Sarkozy is on our side.


I have put a petition up the No. 10 website:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to persist with his praiseworthy plan to persuade the G20 to place a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, designed to aid poorer countries and increase financial stability.

Submitted by Richard Lawson – Deadline to sign up by: 8 December 2009

Category: Economics and finance

More details:

The PM has put forward the idea of a Tobin Tax at the G20 meeting in November. This is a tax on financial transactions, which will be hypothecated to poor countries, to which the PM has not unreasonably added a clause to put some to meeting the cost of the next bank bailout. The US and Canada have already talked sown the idea, but many poorer countries and nearly all NGOs will welcome it, and we encourage our PM to persist against all odds.

Please sign the petition, and even more, please, send it on to your contacts.

We should give bouquets as well as brickbats, to encourage Gordon to stick with it.

Every decision is multifactorial, and there is that of good in everyone. Gordon while Chancellor listened to Jubilee 2000, and took it on board. Maybe part of him has Finally Got It, and maybe also he realises that this is part of the electorate that he should be courting. Which is cool.

I am not saying he has seen the Light, but I am saying that, like good parents, we should reward good behaviour, as well as criticising the bad behaviour. We do the criticism 24/7, so he takes no notice of criticism.

Our praise and support will be so unusual that he will take notice. So this is one important petition. He is going to get a lot of flak for this from the US, Canada, ? Australia, and a lot of stick from the corporate media here, and from the Tories; so an impressive big petition of support for the Tobin Tax would be very influential.

[Update: the petition has just gone up, 9 days after I submitted it. Presumably they were so unused to getting support and praise that they thought it was some kind of Trojan Horse].