As, personally, a ‘remainer’, we need to speak about wages. It seems that a lot of the original talk that EU immigration had a small – or less – effect on wages was not entirely correct – and let’s be straight about that. It did not actually seem right to me at the time and… Read more
Category:
RentierCapitalism
The inequality of bus travel
A well researched report on that transport of the Common Man – or the man on the Clapham omnibus at least – is here and suggests that all is not well… As only about a third of the poorest 10% of households have access to a car or van, many are, unsurprisingly, highly dependent on… Read more
A sane response to a mad society
Is an idea from the psychologist and doctor, R.D. Laing, which was thought highly radical at the time, but I’d suggest it is now unarguable. We are regularly told that government is increasing the spend on mental health treatment – even when it doesn’t seem to materialise… But the real problem with mental health is… Read more
Raw sewage didn’t usually preclude profit
The news that Southern Water has received a fine of £90m for pumping untreated sewage into the sea was shocking enough in itself. But there is more… It transpires that three Southern Water directors are appointed by JP Morgan; one by UBS and one by Hermes. These directors know much, much more about financial engineering… Read more
Money issuers are in charge
I think this Australian point of view needs to be better known because it is really not Covid related. In fact the government’s supposed lack of debt control has been called out. Now this is in a country with very, very few Covid cases and whose economy has not been ‘destroyed’ by it. So we’re… Read more
The money tree is not magic but real
We used to think, with good reason, that globalization had defanged national governments. Presidents cowered before the bond markets. Prime ministers ignored their country’s poor but never Standard & Poor’s. Finance ministers behaved like Goldman Sachs’s knaves and the International Monetary Fund’s satraps. So commences this excellent piece from Yanis Varousakis (well worth reading in… Read more
Michael Hudson at 80 – reflects on his remarkable life:
This is one hour and five minutes so I must indicate, not a quick listen. But nonetheless, given the connections and career of the economist and polymath, Michael Hudson, it is a very interesting verbal autobiography… He’s both been there and done that and also later researched something else… I think it was Steve Keen… Read more
High street decimation
Complacent ‘market will provide’ government, over-leveraged corporate retailers, and the greed of landlords, seem to have done for the high street. If helped along, but only helped along by covid lockdown. Which actually goes to prove that you have to invest in order to retail properly. A bit of theatre perhaps, but mostly that investment… Read more
Now they are gaslighting business
This is not just that old joke about how many Tories does it take to change a lightbulb? (Answer: none – they prefer gas lighting). This is about the private industry who, they actually tell us, that by paying their taxes create the money to pay for ‘our’ NHS. Mr Gove said on Marr: “Make… Read more
‘Subverted by thuggery’ or are we living in revolutionary times?
How Johnson can realistically hold that chucking a statue of Edward Colston into the water is thuggery I really do not know – and he was, after all, supposed to know a bit about thuggery himself. If he’d pointed out that the South West England especially, had for centuries, been subject to kidnapping and slavery… Read more