Should Greens back the Merkozy Plan for Europe?

As I see it (and I may be wrong, and certainly not telling the whole story) Merkozy are following an impeccable logic.

To preserve the Euro, while at the same time guaranteeing failing economies within the Eurozone (EZ), it is necesary to bring about fiscal union, as in common tax laws.

Failure to preserve the Euro would bring about the end of the world as we know it.

Therefore fiscal union it is.

That's the logic, like it or not.

We can confidently expect that the mighty Eurosceptic Right are not going to like it.
So in that case, they are just going to have to lump it, because the the alternative, as far as I know, is global economic malaise. Global recession. A Great Depression.

Maybe I'm being a wishy-washy bleeding heart soft headed liberal treehugger greenie here, but I think this is an outcome to be avoided.

Maybe we should welcome the downfall of Capitalism (whatever that is), and join Nigel Farage in calling for its immediate death through doing whatever we can to disrupt closer European Union as a response to the economic crisis.

Unfortunately, I see a big economic crash as causing huge pain, chiefly manifested as unemployent, but with risks of crime, conflict, social disquiet, riots, attempted revolutions, international quarrels, wars and even, God forbid, nuclear war.

This tips me personally towards trying to fix the present system, by rapid introduction of reforms, as follows:

1. Global Financial Transaction Tax Agreement
2. Global closure of tax havens
3. Trans-National corporations acounts transparency
4. Stimulus not Austerity as the way to renew broken economies

Austerity measures are toxic in a depression. It is necessary to stimulate the economy, but the block to this approach is that we are up to our necks in debt, so we need a very low cost approach to stimulus. It would ideally work equally for both public and private employers. It must be an investment in the future, since we have got to hand on something other than debt to our children.

That is a tough set of specifications. Hmm...Ah yes. The Green Wage Subsidy.


There are many other measure to be added, from controlling TNCs to living on a low income, but I can't cover everything in one posting.

So, on balance I reckon that we should back the Merkozy Plan, but insist that it is followed by radical reforms to terminate the haemorrhage of wealth from the pockets of the 99% into the accounts of the 1%.

I could be wrong, but it feels right to me.

OccupyBristol workshop reveals Dictator-friendly Communist Position

I went to #OccupyBristol last Saturday for a workshop on the "Crisis of Capitalism".
There were about 12 people there, and it was led by a guy I think by the name of Eric, leading a group of 4-5 allies, (they were not occupiers per se) who gave a textbook old-school Communist analysis: Capitalism is totally evil, and must be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Three or four of us put forward the view that the word "capitalism" needs to be defined, and that we are against crony-capitalism, greed capitalism, and free market fundamentalism. We are not against the liberty of an individual to use his or her own money to meet a genuine need in society, and to take a fair and reasonable profit from success. For instance, we are not against the freedom of  individuals to use their redundancy money to set up a business in providing insulation for domestic property.

This was all overridden by the insistence that Capitalism itself is totally wrong and must be overthrown, by violence if necessary.

This black/white, right/wrong analysis is exactly what we find in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, which looks at the belief systems that underpin individual psychological dysfunction. People who carry these absolute distinctions end up with trouble relating to reality, because much of their psychic energy is taken up in reacting to perceived absolutes, either trying to live up to impossible standards, or in reacting to perceived absolutes found in every aspect of the established economic order.

Absolutism negates any single practical reform, or set of economic reforms. There are no policy changes to be requested; only a complete replacement of the whole system from top to bottom, and replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat, will suffice.

It emerged that Eric approved of Stalin, Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and AhmediNajad of Iran.
Four bloodstained dictators.

It is very clear that the entire global #Ocupy movement is against dictatorship. We may in the UK have one of the weakest forms of democracy going, where participation is limited to the use of an inefficient and unrepresentative FPTP electoral system every four years, to elect a government that will be substantially in thrall to the trans-national corporations. But even this defective system is better than outright political dictatorship, because it gives us the power to turn out one set of individuals every four years, even though it means replacing them with another set of individuals with substantially the same policies.  The advantage is that if an individual or party is in power for too long, power goes to the head, distorting thinking, abolishing humility and care for anything other than the interests of the ruling party.

I know that the workshop was non-representative of the #Occupy movement as a whole, but it does show the problem posed by the designation by the media of Occupy an anti-capitalist movement, rather than an anti-inequality movement.

If we are to own the label "anti-capitalist", the term needs to be rigorously defined as free-market capitalism, neo-liberal or neo-conservative capitalism.  We are not against individual freedom to trade and create work that benefits society and environment.

In particular, I think there is a need now for the influential eco-socialist group within the Green Party to build a clear firewall between their position and the position outlined above by Eric, by insisting that they are against all dictatorships, even dictatorships that may have taken up a position antagonistic to Western Mega-Capitalism.

Occupy Bristol and the Air Ambulance

In view of the controversy about the Occupy Bristol protest on College Green,
I have emailed the Wings Aeromedical Group here, along these lines:

 I would be grateful if you could let me know how many times College Green has been used for a landing site for an air ambulance in the last 10 years. Is it indeed a suitable site? Would it not be a good idea to adapt the roof of the BRI to act as a helipad?

We must accept that even if the answer is zero, there is still a finite chance that College Green could be required tomorrow. In that case, the tents could be removed in 3 minutes. In fact the downwash from the rotors would probably remove them automatically.

The Air Ambulance thing is another bullsh*t reason to be used against Occupy, like the faux Health and Safety arguments used at St Pauls and OccupyWallSt.

Funny how the Right rails against H&S, but is then prepared to use it when convenient.

Occupy in One Word: ENOUGH!

It's a great word, because it sums up the two sides of the #Occupy message.

Enough as in

• No more.
• We've had enough. 
• We've taken it up to here. 
• We want no more of the effluent that our rulers are throwing at us. 
• No more of the broken society, the lack of even handed justice, the ugliness
• Enough of the news:
• Enough of wars, of bad economics, of unemployment, poverty and homelessness
• Enough of crime, of miscarriages of justice, of deaths covered up whether at Deepcut Barracks or elsewhere. 
• Enough of repressive policing.
• Enough of the people taking the blame for the faults of the bankers.
• Enough of the cuts, the student loans, and the 1001 cuts affecting women, children, poor and elderly
• Enough of making ends meet while vast amounts of  money are being hoovered out of the national economy into tax havens.

The economic system we live in is slowing up like a computer with a virus in it, a virus which is doing its own thing, taking up memory and processing power.

A virus which needs to be removed. A bit of software that needs to be identified and quarantined.

It is important for us to realise that our enemy is not the specific people in power, even though many of them will need to lose their jobs, and some of them will need to be put through the courts.

It's not specific human individuals, it's their delusional thinking that needs to be overcome.

The virus in the prevailing mindset will run any number of scripts, but here are a few such assumptions and memes to look for:

• Money is more important than whether everyone has food on the table. (It isn't)
• There is no such thing as society (Yes there is)
• Individualism is a valid ideology. (No it isn't. We are social animals).
• It is necessary to expand economically forever (Impossible)
• If you try to change the system it will break (It's going to break anyway)
• Inequality is not a problem. (Yes it is)
• If you try to tax the rich, they will leave (Not if it is done globally)
• Leave it to the people who know. They will sort it out. (We have. They haven't)
• If you regulate the corporations, they will leave. (Not if it is done globally)
• The News of the World is a little local difficulty (No it isn't)
• Protest is useless (Not so. Most if not all of our rights and freedoms have come from protest, and if all the people who say "Protest doesn't work" would join the protest, it would succeed) 

And so on.

Enough of the malfunctioning software.

But what's the remedy? How do we quarantine and/or neutralise this virus?

The solution can be put in the same word as the problem: Enough.
The concept of Enough, running like a piece of software in all of our heads, is what is needed.
We need to learn how to appreciate when we have had enough.

• Enough to drink, enough to eat, enough to live on.
• We need to know when there are enough humans in the world.
• Enough noise
• Enough toys
• Enough stuff.

Now this changeover from the mania of 21st century consumerism is going to take a bit of work, we can't deny it.
In fact it is going to take a lot of work.
A lot.

Which is good, because we have loads of people out of work.
The Green Wage Subsidy will get us going on that work.

It will need a lot of thought, but there is no shortage of books and reports on society and economy.
Here's a 15-point starter.
We just need to make a synthesis of the many threads and proposals to bring about a more equal society.

And we need to create channels of communication between the people and our Government. Lobbying of MPs is OK, but it needs to be amplified, and we need to establish a regular, continuous conversation between the people and Government, where the debate and the information can be passed on directly.

There is a model for this in Neal Lawson's idea of a Peoples Jury.

There's much much more to be said about the changes taking place globally, but it's nice to know that they can be summed up in one word: Enough.

#Occupy and the Banksters: Abolition or Modification?

"Apologies for Inconvenience" - @occupyLSX

There is a nice balance between abolition and modification that applies to both the Occupy camps and to their target, the City of London.

Generic "anti-capitalists" might demand the abolition of the whole bang shoot of the City and the money markets.  This  absolutist solution would be resisted absolutely by the plutocrats, and they would use their superior force (the met Police) to clear the camps and repress dissent. Result: much unpleasantness that could lead to violent demonstrations further down the road, which could even, in the worst case, result in a right wing coup.

The alternative is to modify the City and the money markets through a series of reforms designed to address the deficit by closing tax loopholes and havens globally. It would start by removing the special privileges of the City by making them just another local authority through a simple amendment to the Local Government Act 1972.

The same choice applies to the camps. The authorities can try to abolish the camps through violent policing, causing anger, resentment, and social disorder. (see above).

Alternatively, they could tolerate the camps, and set up continuous round-table talks between representatives of Parliament and representatives of the people. These speakers could be chosen by ballot or even by sortition, and could feed back to the people. Maybe we need to set up a People's Parliament to collect and prioritise the feelings and ideas of the people. The talks would be long-term and continuous, and entirely equal. No more the talking down from "experts" through the media. Recent history has shown the human failings of MPs, newspapers and bankers. It is clear that the authorities do not have a solution to what is going on in the world, and that their claim to "authority" is severely compromised. They actually need help from the people, who after all are the ultimate authority in a democracy.

So we have a clear choice: either both sides take an absolutist approach, which leads to violence and disaster, or a relativist approach, which leads to dialogue, reform and a peaceful solution.

It is clear which approach sensible people would prefer.

Those Occupy Demands in Full

The media know - or should now - what the #Occupy movement is against: Poverty, cuts, inequality, the lack of opportunity, the scandalous bonuses and immunity from prosecution for the banksters who wrecked the economy, the overweening power of the corporations, environmental degradation and 1001 other gripes.

The media want to know what solutions the protest wants. The protesters say they are working on it. The media want answers now - despite the fact that it is blatantly obvious that the Governments do not have any answers.

I offer here my own solutions, derived mainly from Green Party policy. The Green Party has been working for the past 30 years on the precise problems that move the protesters.

So here are my personal solutions. I cannot claim to speak on behalf of the #Occupy movemnt, nor even fully for the Green Party, but believe that the measures here capture the aims and aspirations of both. They do not claim to be complete, but they are a reasonable start, and hopefully will form the nucleus of an emergent Manifesto for the Occupy movement.

The aim of these changes is (a) to fill the hole in the finances not just of the UK, but of all nations, (b) to pull the economy out of recession in a Green way, and (c) to bring about more equal and sustainably prosperous economic and social conditions.





1. Close all tax havens & loopholes, globally.

We live in a globalised economy, and if follows that therefore should be a global tax structure. This will not be uniform, to allow countries to adjust rates to suit local conditions, within set limits.


The aim here is to stop the perennial threat made by big corporations in response to taxation by one country to relocate to a country with a more lax tax regime.This will enable us to roll out change #2:




2. Tax the rich


The richest 1% are taxed at far lower rates than the lowest 99%. They siphon the wealth out of the nations in which they operate into tax havens and offshore accounts. Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK estimates that in the UK these total £120 billion lost from the economy, and the Compass report In Place of Cuts proposes specific changes that will net £40 million a year - enough to pay off the interest payments on the National Debt.

Greg Philo proposes a one-off 20% wealth tax on the richest UK citizens which could offset the National Debt entirely. Radical, but radical problems ask for radical solutions.

Note that taxing the rich solves two problems: the deficit and national Debt, and also inequality, which causes many expensive social problems, as shown in Spirit Level.


3. Future Quantitative Easing to go preferentially to the Green Bank.

QE is necessary when banks are failing to make loans, but the first two bouts of QE have been ineffective in their aim of getting banks to lend again, because they have been paid into the banks, who have used it to try to fill the enormous vacuum in their accounts caused by the credit crunch and sovereign debt crisis, and to pay themselves bonuses.

By directing QE to the green investment bank, the new money will stimulate energy conservation and renewable energy generation through the Green New Deal.

the effect will be:

1. job creation 
2. taking households out of fuel poverty 
3. reducing our energy imports, thus reducing the budget deficit 
4. assist in achieving our CO2 reduction targets 

4. Introduce a Green Wage Subsidy


This allows organisations operating in the green sector of the economy (i.e. those whose effect is to benefit society or environment) to take on new employees from the Job Centres without those new employees losing their benefit. It transforms the benefit into a subsidy for the green sector. This stimulus to the economy comes cost-free, because the benefits would have been paid in any case. It acts as a precursor to the introduction of Citizen's Income.

5 . End private banking's monopoly on issuing money through debt.

It is no wonder that the UK and the world is drowning in debt, since money is created through debt.

Positive Money has set out a plan to remove this monopoly from private corporations and make money creation work to the benefit of the people. They even provide a draft Parliamentary Bill to bring this about.


6. Rein in the multi-national corporations.

Multinationals have more economic pswer and influence than many countries. At present they have many privileges in law, including legal personhood and limited liability for shareholders. This post shows how their wings can be clipped.

7. Regulate the money markets.

The present crisis can be traced to the deregulation of the financial markets, and the growth of a totally unregulated and uncontrolled derivatives market, parts of which are nothing more than Ponzi schemes according to the economist Minsky.

The first change is to separate retail and investment banking.

A comprehensive review of the derivatives market is required.

8. Impose a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, and earmark it for poverty projects.

Tobin, Robin Hood, or Financial Transaction tax is a tiny levy on each currency transaction that will both put a brake on destabilising currency transactions, and also generate huge sums in revenue that should be directed to poverty reducing schemes.

9. Cap donations to political parties

Since it is by massive donations that wealthy corporations buy influence with political parties and distort the democratic process by having more influence on elected politicians than the people who elected them. Instead, parties whose aims are consistent with law and open democracy must be funded out of general taxation in respect of their service to democracy


10. Impose limits on salary ratio of lowest/highest remuneration.
This ratio represents an immediate measure of income inequality. It can be controlled, and the Coalition Government has taken steps to introduce it in the public, but not the private sector.

11 Reform the credit ratings agencies.

These tiny organisations have a disproportionate influence on the economy. They failed to spot the causes of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and some of their operatives appear to have indulged in insider dealing during the US downgrade.


12. Cancel Trident and reduce military spending worldwide.
In a global economic recession, there is an increased risk of war, as happened in the Great Depression of the 1930's. At the same time, all governments need to reduce spending. There is a choice available to avoid the risk of war, and to save money.

13. Provide enough affordable housing
Housing is a basic human need, and in providing housing, the government is relieving stress and ill-health in a more cost-effective way than putting homeless families in temporary accomodation. In doing so, it will be stimulating the building industry.

14. Stimulate local economies and communities.
In practicing community living and co-operation, the #Occupy movement is pioneering local community living and - dare I say it - realising Cameron's Big Society. Many organisations, notably the Transition movement, are working to the same end.

15 Stimulate the formation of Co-operative enterprises.

I repeat that these 12 measures are not complete, nor can they ever be complete. But these are a few necessary changes to bring about a more healthy, happy and equitable society and economy.

What are the demands of the #Occupy Movement?

Richard Wilkinson, co-author of  Spirit Level, spoke at Bristol last Wednesday. His case is that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it faces. There is a mass of evidence to back up this thesis, although as is to be expected, there is criticism from the usual quarters, the far right neo-con ideologists.

Hearing Richard again reawakened a question that has been gestating in my mind for many months -  why should it be that we are happier and healthier in a more equal society?

The answer may lie in our history. Homo "Sapiens" emerged roughly 200,000 years ago. The earliest known urban civilisation dates back to around 12,000 years ago, and development in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilisation can be traced back 5000 years before present.

However, apart from the rise and fall of the occasional city-state, the majority of non-urbanised humans lived as tribes, and indeed, many at present still do live in tribal and village settings.  Homo "sapiens" has evolved to live in tribal groups. Only for about 2.5% of our time on earth have we built cities.


From Wikipedia;

Anthropologist Elman Service presented a system of classification for societies in all human cultures based on the evolution of social inequality and the role of the state. This system of classification contains four categories:

1. Gatherer-hunter bands, which are generally egalitarian.
2. Tribal societies in which there are some limited instances of social rank and prestige (see Chiefdom).
3. Stratified tribal societies led by chieftains.
4. Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.

This has implications for human behaviour.  Tribal living is radically different from urban living. Note that at the most basic level, the group is egalitarian. The tribe lives by co-operation: the men co-operate in hunting or fishing, the women co-operate in gathering and cooking, and the children co-operate in caring for younger children.

Now, a thought experiment: imagine a tribal group that is functioning well, food is plentiful, life is good. Now imagine that they look to the horizon, and see a far larger, more powerful people approaching. This is a threat situation; adrenaline is released, and efforts (hopeless efforts) may be made to fight. The village is taken over by the more powerful tribe, who now have second class status. They have low status, low self esteem, and low self-determination. They live in an unequal society and economy. It is a stressful stimulation, and they can be expected to display social and physiological symptoms of stress.  Wilkinson and Pickett's research confirms this pattern.

So we have a plausible explanation for the case that inequality leads to social and even physiological dysfunction.  We are social animals designed for functioning in small social groups. We can adapt to urban living, but if that urban living is marred by gross inequality, things will not go well.

Now let us put the Occupy movement into that framework.

What we are seeing is the emergence of a kind of tribal living in the centre of 1,000 cities worldwide, as a spontaneous movement of people who fundamentally disagree with the way our society and economy is being run.

The movement is focussed on forming these strange camps in the middle of cities. There are several reasons for this.
First, as the anti-Iraq War demonstrations proved, Government and media can choose to ignore large peaceful demonstrations which disperse at tea-time.
They find it more difficult to ignore violent demonstrations, but the police can fairly easily out-violence even the most violent demonstration, and media can deconstruct and demonise violent demonstrations fairly easily. The Occupy movement is solving this problem by having a non-violent demonstration that does not go away.

So they form camps. And what happens in camps is that people learn co-operative living again. This happened in Tahrir Square, where people soon evolved consensus decision making, with all the talking and negotiation that is involved with that. They evolved the leaderless structure that is being replicated worldwide. True, social media help to propagate the model, but it is reasonable to suppose that we are witnessing a spontaneous recrudescence of egalitarian tribalism in response to the grotesque inhumanity of the Behemoth of the modern Corporate State.

This would explain the common complaint of the media - "The protesters won't say what they want, they just say they don't like the way things are".  Which is true to some extent. The formation camps, of functioning co-operative micro-economies in the centre of cities is to some extent a statement in practical terms of what the protesters want - a cooperative economy, the kind of society that humans are designed to live in.

As Marshall McLuhan said - The Medium is the Message.

The camps are in process of evolving an more detailed answer to the media's question - What do you want?

The camps are evolving a more detailed answer, but this will take time. There are not many economists in the camps, nor all that many academics, and it is unreasonable to expect people who spend much of their day deciding the best way of providing for their basic security to come up with an quick answer to the economic problems which are so baffling the world's top economists.

However, there is another group within the global society, the Green Parties of the world, who have been working on exactly the same problems of sustainability and equality for some thirty years. Greens cannot speak for the #Occupy movement - #OccupyWallStreet have made it very clear that they will resist any attempt to be co-opted - but the fact remains that the Green Party agenda is the answer that the journalists  say they are so desperate to hear.

The Green Party in England and Wales has the distinction of being the party that has spent the longest time excluded from the political process, and we have used that time to develop a massive (too massive) body of reformational aspirations in exactly the same leaderless way that the Occupy movement is setting out to do.

To spare my readers the task of wading through the Policies for a Sustainable Society, here is a condensed list of reforms designed to bring about a more equal, and therefore more happy and healthy society. It is not a complete list, nor is it all endorsed by the Green Party, let alone the #Occupy movement, but it is a start:

1. Tax the rich. 
2. Close all tax havens & loopholes, worldwide. 
3. Quantitative Easing to go preferentially  to the Green Bank. 
4. End the private banks' monopoly on issuing money through debt. 
5. Rein in the corporations. 
6. Regulate the money markets. 
7. Impose a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, and earmark it for poverty projects.
8. Question the credit ratings agencies. 
9. Cap donations to political parties
10. Impose limits on salary ratio of lowest/highest remuneration.
11. Introduce a Green Wage Subsidy
12. Cancel Trident and reduce military spending worldwide.
13. Provide enough affordable housing
14. Facilitate the development of local economies

These demands are expanded here.

So there we have it. Unequal societies are unhappy societies. The #Occupy movement is a physical expression of dissent, and a symbolic affirmation of the virtues of a more equal society. There are a set of alternatives to the abuse of the economy by the rich which have been developed, among others, by the Greens. If the journalists sincerely want answers to their question of  what the alternative is, they should look at the Green agenda.

Letter of protest to to St Paul's Cathedral

I emailed reception@stpaulscathedral.org.uk today.
You can too:

Dear Christian

I view the closure of St Pauls in response to the protest against economic injustice outside as a self-inflicted injury. It has gained you publicity, but bad publicity. You cite your "independent" H&S/Fire advisors. I understand that the official authorities had no objection.

It is not too late for St Pauls to repent. We all make mistakes.

There is a choice ahead for humanity, between supremacy of mammon or supremacy of human values of care for the vulnerable, co-operation and sustainability.

As things stand, St Pauls appears to be siding with Mammon.

Sincerely

Dr Richard Lawson

Twitter censors hashtags - the evidence

Twitter has a Trend list that is supposed to show the ten most frequent topics being tweeted.

Right now, (10:40am), Vince Cable is in 7th spot, on account of his tardy tax payments.

#OccupyOakland is a very busy hashtag, on account of the cowards in the Oakland Police attacking non-violent demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

I set up two tag pages alongside each other, both on Twitter, and set one going to collect #OccupyOakland tweets, and another to collect Vince Cable tweets.

Right now, ten minutes later, the #OccupyOakland tweets come in at 159, and Vince has 92 tweets.

Yet Vince is on the Twitter trending list, and #OccupyOakland is not.

I have run this test before with the same results: politically sensitive topics do not make it to the Twitter trend lists.

The question is, who censors Twitter? Is this a voluntary self-censorship, or does some Government agency visit them at their offices and sit on their desks?

Whatever the explanation, it stinks.

Occupy Bristol - bridging the gap between the nitty-gritty and macroeconomics

Just to give a flavour of the #OccupyBristol group meetings on Day 3 (Monday).

The meeting was very open and welcoming, but tended to be a bit unstructured, because most people (and that includes people who sleep in warm beds) do not know the difference between a decision-oriented meeting and a conversation, but I have been in more chaotic meetings in the NHS.

Most items discussed related to the nitty-gritty of setting up a camp in a city. Offers of water access from a local shopholder; site safety (random drunks had staggered on site in the middle of the previous night, causing trouble), how to protect the grass from turning to mud, whether to declare it an alcohol free site, what to do about people who wanted to play music all night, what to do about toilet and washing facilities; the usual, but interspersed with discussion of what message we could put out to those who asked what our agenda was.

Hurwitt - http://www.hurwittgraphics.com/homepage.htm

After the main meeting there was a sub-group on media. We asked people to say why they were there. A wide variety of expressions of  what we felt was wrong came out, deeply held, and related to immediate personal experience:

Poverty, food and energy prices, being thrown on the scrapheap, people are not valued, mega-capitalism overriding democracy. We have had ENOUGH!


What are we for?
Fairness, honesty, justice, the right just to be, opportunity.

Reference was made to the statements of other occupations.Here is the #OccupyLSX statement.

Detractors major on the lack of precise political agenda. This is unjust criticism. The majority of protesters are ordinary people who have been struggling along until things have now gotten so bad they have said 

ENOUGH! 

In the main, they are not economists or academics or politicos. It is up to us who are to provide a clear, pragmatic political programme as an alternative to the disastrous economic policies being visited upon us by the Coalition Government.

It's not rocket science - just a  bewilderingly diverse set of changes - ranging from high finance to community structure. It is in fact what the Green Party has been toiling over for the past three decades. The results of our labour is here, in the massive document that form Policies for a Sustainable Future. 

But in answer to the question that the Paxmen will want to put, "OK, how specifically do you want to change the present system, given that we have a massive global financial crisis?", here are 10 changes that need to be carried out to get the economy working for people :

1. Tax the rich. 
2. Close all tax havens & loopholes, worldwide. 
3. Quantitative Easing to go preferentially  to the Green Bank. 
4. End the private banks' monopoly on issuing money through debt. 
5. Rein in the corporations. 
6. Regulate the money markets. 
7. Impose a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, and earmark it for poverty projects.
8. Cap donations to political parties
9. Reform the credit ratings agencies. 
10. Impose limits on salary ratio of lowest/highest remuneration.
11. Introduce a Green Wage Subsidy
12. Cancel Trident and reduce military spending worldwide.
13. Provide enough affordable housing

Of course, there are many other changes that need to be made at community level also. The answers to the one question branch out into many areas, but these are some of the central reforms necessary to get the world economy started again, down a new path where people matter more than profit.

What is an #Occupy site actually like? What's it about?

Taken Monday 17th October

Welcome sign

Having been in to support the #OccupyBristol site on College Green today and yesterday, I can tell you.

It is tidy. No mud - yet. The people are very welcoming, and there is a good, purposeful buzz. These are early days - I was there for days three and four, to be exact. I brought stuff in, as per their wish list folding chairs, firewood, saws, pipe, and hazel poles. For a bender. 

Au urban camp is a strange space. Here's the city of Bristol going about its frenetic rush from home to work to coffee shop eatery and back again, and here are a bunch of people who are camping, talking, and (sometimes) singing. 

 Why?  What's the point? How is camping in the middle of the city going to change anything? 

Exactly the same questions were being in Cairo asked eight months ago. How will a bunch of young people camping in Tahrir Square change anything? Do they seriously think that they will be able to topple Mubarak by occupying space in the city?

But they did succeed, because of their persistence, and the fact that they were physically expressing the rejection of the majority of the Egyptian people.

Now I have been on many demonstrations since 1969. I always try to talk to passers-by, and am used to finding only a minority of support. #Occupy is different. 

People are walking in, bearing gifts of food. 

Everyone is sick of politicians and banksters and corporations and the Daily Mail. Except not the Daily Mail. They're still buying that. 

Which will probably lead to the Mail and Sun giving us a bad press. I heard today that the Bristol Evening Post belongs to Dacre and that he owns 50% of the local press.  Please tell me its not true.

But I digress. As in Egypt, so throughout the world. Obviously Cameron is no Mubarak. We could topple Cameron, but would probably wake up to find Liam Fox. Our struggle is not with a single dictator, but with the multinationals who have bought our politicians. 

It is a high mountain to climb. There are hardships ahead, right across the globe. And right across the globe, people of all types, shapes, sizes, ages, and colours are standing up and saying -

Enough! That's enough poverty and powerlessness for us, the 99%, when the 1% has so much wealth they do not know what to do with it.

These are ordinary people saying the system is broken. Back come the critics, asking what they offer to put  in its place. And they laugh because these are not economists or politicians, but ordinary (or extraordinary) people. They are not economists or politicians. They just want (as one activist said) to be.

It is up to us, the bloggers and writers, to work out the changes necessary to fix the system.

It'll take a bit of work, but we owe it to our brothers and sisters sleeping (or not sleeping) when their canvas is shaken by rain, wind, or drunks. We, the bloggers and tweeters and writers and thinkers, owe it to the activists to draw up a clear, pragmatic programme designed to remedy our broken economic system.

There are many such operations in progress, right across the web, but if you feel like staying on this blog, there is a starter right here on the Ma'blog, so you don't have to go flying around all over the Web.

PS here's an account of a #Occupyakland, in the USA.