Greece has spent 3% of gdp more than they should have done on defence for the last 24 years at least. In that period, since 1988, Greek GDP has grown from $80bn to $300bn and still spending has kept pace!
See here Greek spending as a % of GDP since 1988 -graph
See here Greek GDP growth since 1988 – graph
If Greek spending on defence had been 3% lower then well over 50% of Greek debt would not exist.
Who benefited? Read the rest of this entry »
I would be delighted to hear from any Arabs who believe that the Arab League is truly representative of the Arab world! Run by a New York educated lawyer and its membership stuffed with US puppet regimes (including Qatar of course – the regime behind Al Jazeera).
It is no surprise that Lebanon and Yemen voted against the recent vote to exclude Syria.
If I have one call it is for the Arab world to work together and stop the infighting that has been and continues to be encouraged by the Judeo-Christian developed world!
I will not rest in my pleas to the Greek people to refuse categorically the pernicious austerity measures being implemented by their Government. Do not allow them to destroy generations of Greeks to save the bankers.
Some figures:
Greece joined the EU in 1981 and has spent at least $250 billion in defence spending since then. There debt is around $450bn. Remember that the German and French armament industry have done very well out of this as have their bankers who have lent Greece the money to gorge itself on missiles and such like. Greece is number 23 in the defence spending league!
I urge you to default on this debt! Say no to your Government now and make the Governments and bankers of the EU, the UK and the US face up to the consequences of their greed. Let’s cleanse ourselves and them in the process!
Markets have started to work out that debt can’t drive consumerism forever. The developed world is over-indebted, disparities between developed and developing countries and between rich and poor within those countries are more extreme than ever. When the poor have more debt than they can handle and the rich rely upon the masses to drive the economy then there is a problem!
A breaking story today from no lesser source than Press TV that their assets have been frozen by Nat West, a bloated UK bank. It would seem that Press TV is hurting the establishment in the UK with some radical reporting – the great star of course is George Galloway with his Real Deal show – catch a recent episode on Youtube and subscribe – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbbkEEEY2m0.
I am surfing the web and chasing up on various ideas and thoughts that I have had over the last few weeks. In particular along the theme of that old forgotten chestnut “a terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.
A great friend of mine, Johnny Marsh (Johnny HJ to a few), once took a leak against my Great Great Grandfather’s statue in Wexford, Ireland whilst hitching around that part of the world. He announced this proudly to me over a pint when he returned. It has taken until now for me to determine that in fact it was his Great Uncle who was called by the same name – John Edward Redmond.
John Edward Redmond Junior, still to this day unaffected by the disdain of my dear friend Johnny HJ, was not honoured by a monument but by the legacy of freedom at a big price.
Ireland was a hotbed of subterfuge. Cromwell invaded and injected Protestant Loyalists into the country having massacred many Catholics. After many years Parliament agreed to Home ruel for the Irsih except for the 6 districts in the North – these would be dealt with later. This area, that had only ever been considered as Ireland and only annexed to England for a temporary period after Home Rule, is what we know as Northern Ireland.
So, we inject Protestants into a country then carve out that Protestant area from the agreement and now claim that because the majority in this area are Protestant that this area must remain separated from the rest of Ireland! Wow!
If we not return to the original thought – what is a terrorist, we can start to see that there really are two sides to the story. Ask yourself the question, are the IRA monsters? The Kurds, are they terrorists? This most simpe of questions that we have all asked no doubt in our youth is forgotten when we talk of Iran, Libya, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Uganda – look at each of the stories here and you will see a much more complex story. Are there any universal truths that can guide us in finding the way forward in these discussions? What would King Solomon have said?
See this article in the Guardian
Mervyn King misreads the public mood on the bankers. He should look at our Robin Hood campaign
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, says he is ‘surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has’. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters
When you’ve been going on about something for a while, it is always satisfying to discover that other people agree with you. I have been arguing for the last year that the banks, hedge funds and other titans of the City of London whose gambling got us into this trouble should pay to clean up the mess they caused.
Now, no less a figure than Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has laid the blame for cuts in public services and welfare squarely at the door of the City. “The price of the financial crisis is being borne by people who did absolutely nothing to cause it.”
The evidence supporting him is overwhelming. The International Monetary Fund has warned that British government debt will be 40% higher as a result of the financial crisis. That’s equivalent to a total of £28,000 for every taxpayer in the country.
But King’s subsequent comment that he was “surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has” suggests that either he had a very high expectation, or that he has misread the public mood.
I’m an ambassador for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which calls for a tiny tax of just 0.05% on every casino-style financial transaction in order to help poor people, reverse public service cuts at home and abroad, and tackle climate change. In this role I’ve seen how people’s sense of fairness has been stretched to the limits by the continued spectacle of huge pay increases and bonuses in big companies while ordinary people suffer. Every time people turn on the television news they are bombarded with stories of job losses, disabled children forced into care, public sector cuts or young people left without a future. Meanwhile one of the country’s leading bankers claims “the time for remorse and apologies needs to be over“. If there has been any remorse it has escaped my notice. Of course people are angry!
Project Merlin, George Osborne’s agreement with the banks last month, was widely ridiculed because people are too angry to accept a backroom deal that does not address the fundamental issue of fairness. Our campaign is supported by Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, along with 250,000 Facebook users and 113 organisations from Oxfam to the Salvation Army. When, last week, I challenged bank chief executives Stephen Hester, Bob Diamond and the others, to visit people at home and abroad hit by the economic crisis, I was inundated with messages of support.
More dramatically, Barclays – which recently announced a £6bn profit and a 20% increase in pay and bonuses – found 40 of its branches occupied by protesters on the day it was revealed that it pays just £100m in tax.
Polls show this anger is felt by supporters of all political parties. A ComRes survey, carried out in January before the UK bonus season, found that 80% of people, including 76% of Conservative voters, want additional taxes on bankers’ bonuses. Polls regularly show majority support for a Robin Hood tax – it could be the most popular tax in history.
Mervyn King is right, though, that this anger has not yet forced politicians to make banks pay their fair share. Perhaps this is unsurprising: many MPs have spent years seeing the excessive profits and bonuses of the City as a sign of economic health. But this does not mean it will not happen. French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel have both responded to public anger by promising to go ahead with transaction taxes.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to the UK following suit is the fear, endorsed by many commentators, that a higher tax burden would encourage banks to up sticks and leave. But this doesn’t bear scrutiny. According to the Bank of England, the banks benefit from our taxes and the subsidy afforded them by the government to the tune of £100bn every year. They also benefit from the City’s excellent infrastructure. The idea that they are about to give this up to move to Dubai or the Cayman Islands is incredible, especially when you realise we already have a 0.5% tax on share transactions.
If the public see through banks’ scare tactics, their anger and their desire for justice really will force politicians to act.
Recently articles have appeared in the press and parent groups have demonstrated in front of Asda – this is Clapham – the new front line between the classes! Read the rest of this entry »
This is quick post on an issue that has been with us since telecoms companies and other major utilities first gained then maneuvered to retain their cozy oligopolies. The story so far in recent web history Read the rest of this entry »
If the FSA now has such a plan then it is possible to let banks fail without the economy collapsing. If so then why didn’t we have that plan in place before? Read the rest of this entry »
Write to your MP or anyone in Government and ask them for the amount that Public Sector pensions represent of total expenditure relative to the Private Sector? Will they tell you? Well your MP doesn’t actually know and can’t find out – the Treasury don’t report their figures like that sorry. They will tell you what Defense spending is but not what amount of Defense spending is related to pensions. Who asks the difficult questions of Government I wonder?
Typically a Public Sector worker will accumulate 1/60th of their final salary for each year worked. If they contribute 5%, i.e. 1/20th each year, so 1/20th of their average salary, and let’s say that their salary doesn’t increase, then for 10 years of work and a total contribution of 50% of their annual salary ONCE they receive circa 17% of their salary from the age of 60 EVERY YEAR!
Total madness whoever thought up this scheme – this is a bigger Ponzi scheme than Madoff’s!
The virtual world mirrors the real world. It’s coming.
http://www.economist.com/node/17388368
Finally someone from the mainstream, Dan Baker – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/20/tarp-bailout-banks-wall-street has been published stating what many of us knew to be a reality – the banking system was not in crisis, the bankers were!
There is a very strong case for splitting up the casino-type activities of the banks from the commercial activities. The case rests on two key points:
There is only one argument against that I give any credibility
Over the last 30 years there has been such a brain drain into financial activities that add no value at all to the society that I would have no fear for its future if the financial sector shrank considerably. I long for the day that an engineering graduate or a maths graduate actually have a wider choice of potential careers. one thing is for sure, they would have more of chance of adding value to society if many of the casino-like activities of the financial sector disappeared.
Obama is a big disappointment. Never has someone offered such hope and disappointed more. As a master of politics he is becoming rather transparent. Two examples, first a call for a world without nuclear weapons for which he won the Nobel peace Prize (while continuing two wars perpetrated by the Bush regime). Second a call for a total freeze on all settlement growth in Palestinian occupied territories including what is termed as “natural growth”. Both these statements were clearly ridiculous.
Most recently we have “break up the banks!” It won’t happen. If I had the cash I would be long in banking shares and would have been for at least 6 months. Politicians don’t depend upon people’s votes but on the support of business and in particular the bankers. What is wonderful about this statement is that the breaking up the banks if not easy – there is a huge grey area between taking deposits and simple lending and the more exotic activities such as securitisation. This gives Obama a lot of room to negotiate with the inevitable opposition yet still come out with a win or at least what can, in time for the next election be termed one.
In my view banks that take deposits should not be able to carry out any activities apart from lending to individuals and businesses. I would exclude proprietary trading of course and any equity investments. In addition I would exclude any commission-based activities such as underwriting, broking and M&A. The later are best practiced by independent operations with no conflict of interest as it most often described (what I would describe as “unfair advantage or even insider trading”).
Who is going to support that? The people yes but politicians….? You just be joking. Viva la revolucion!
At least 12 months before they have to declare its existence (IAEA obliges members to inform them 6 months before nuclear materials are in use) Iran announced on 21st September to the IAEA that it is building a new plant for the production of LEU uranium for use in nuclear reactors and that it is open for inspection.
Why then does the UK press, Obama and others suggest that it was secret? They even knew of its existence before the announcement?
Israel is playing a smart game and the US and its poodles are toeing the line. What better way to distract from continual settlement growth and the damning report of the UN with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza.
The UK and US press is being completely disingenuous in suggesting that Iran has been caught red-handed and equally is being irresponsible in fueling our fears about Iran. Nuclear materials for a bomb require 80% pure Uranium, Iran produces small amounts of 5% pure Uranium. The difference is enormous and there has been NO evidence of any attempts to increase purity above 5%.
I doubt whether anyone will but I do advise those who are least interested in this issue to listen to Ahmadinejad’s UN speech that so may so disgracefully walked of.
Unlike Obama’s carefully trained delivery this is an impassioned speech that talks clearly and intelligently about what he perceives to be the problems of the world.
Disagree if you wish with his speech but at least sit through it! Certainly don’t bother me with your opinions if you haven’t.
I do object to Google’s position in the world of web search. Acknowledging and respecting their brilliance is one thing, accepting poor search results hijacked by advertising is another.
Google came to world of the techies and excelled in very quick clutter free quality searches. Adding advertising supposedly created a virtuous circle. I dispute this. The overall quality fo they search led them to dominate the search space. This is turn now obliges anyone selling on the web to use Google Adwords – still over 95% of Google’s revenues. This is where the circle ends. There is no benefit to the search of having advertising on the search page especially if the higher ranked results are there predominantly because they paid the most to be there.
Google’s search results are increasingly irrelevant except to find only the most obvious sites. Increasingly a user needs to tweak the search terms or sift through to page 2 or 3 or beyond. I sometimes find myself going straight to page 10 in the vain hope of finding something relevant away from the clutter.
My suggestion is simple in its philosophy and no doubt tricky in terms of execution. Use people to recommend search results. In other words, if a user finds a particular site that corresponds to the search results entered then this is useful information and of much higher quality than some algorithm based on keywords in websites and links between websites (Google’s current methodology).
What I would like to see is people power bringing the ownership of the search back to the people – high quality search based on peoples judgment of the quality of the results.
This idea is not entirely new although the emphasis is different. Digg and other such sites do store peoples recommendations and you can use Digg to search. This however is an after-thought – the main emphasis being on online bookmarking or in the case of Stumble Upon discovery of new sites based on your overall subject preferences.
Let’s get back to quality search and no advertising.
Iran has developed over the last 4000 years and is the oldest civilisation in the world. 30 years of sanctions have inhibited its development economically but it remains a highly educated and modern society with a great cultural history.
For those that may be interested in the case for Iran, start with the following article:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-must-back-down-on-iranian-uranium-enrichment/
As mentioned in a previous post, the Fed decided in early 2006 to kill the M3 measure of the money supply. It is difficult to measure money and costly however scrapping broad money measures is tantamount to saying that money supply growth doesn’t matter.
The monetarist view of economics says that Read the rest of this entry »
Top graduates have flocked to the financial services sector for decades. Employment in this sector has ballooned. These jobs have not been created to support the two key roles of the financial sector – allowing money to be used efficiently as a method of payment and lending to solvent borrowers – but to play at the casino table that was created by ever more lax regulation in the face of global competition for the provision of financial services.
The financial sector will massively Read the rest of this entry »
