Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Mr. Beast]

Isn't capitalism dependent on the concept of having perpetual growth? How is it even possible to have perpetual growth? In anything?

 

in a resource based economy based on finite resources, only a civilisation run by psycopaths would still sell the idea.

 

and even who gives a fck about growth if it's not shared. it's a stupid measure. no surprise Robert Kennedy was shot shortly after he started talking about the fallacy of basing a nations success on GDP.

 

great speech this, little excerpt:

 

Remarks of Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum

 

And if we seem powerless to stop this growing division between Americans, who at least confront one another, there are millions more living in the hidden places, whose names and faces are completely unknown - but I have seen these other Americans - I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi - here in the United States - with a gross national product of $800 billion dollars - I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven't developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don't think that's acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change.

 

I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations, with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for the future, so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide.

 

That they end their lives by killing themselves - I don't think that we have to accept that - for the first American, for this minority here in the United States. If young boys and girls are so filled with despair when they are going to high school and feel that their lives are so hopeless and that nobody's going to care for them, nobody's going to be involved with them, and nobody's going to bother with them, that they either hang themselves, shoot themselves or kill themselves - I don't think that's acceptable and I think the United States of America - I think the American people, I think we can do much, much better. And I run for the presidency because of that, I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one - neither industry, nor labor, nor government - has cared enough to help.

 

I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also.

 

I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms - without heat - warding off the cold and warding off the rats.

 

If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America.

 

And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

 

[dennis tooth]

Im pretty sure the banking system is set up that way too.

Thats cos they dont have all our money, something Bernie Madoff was sent down for, his scheme was fine in that it only required an infinite number of investors to continuously prop it up.

Thing is, on top of that we also bailed them out so we pay twice and they get nine lives. Oh no, they cut our services to not even dent the interest on the debt they have piled on our backs so we pay three times.

I stand corrected, said the man in orthapedic shoes.

 

Im sure by the time we pay a fifth time, we will have no government left, just bankers and an army behind them which we pay for.

 

Oh and the occupy london lost their judgement, against the city of london corporation. Bummer. Altho, expected, they need to just move over to the actual financial district proper though, no point being there. work the system properly.

[Strontium]

in a resource based economy based on finite resources, only a civilisation run by psycopaths would still sell the idea.

 

 

Resources are finite but technological advancement isn't.

[dennis tooth]

Pimentel and Giampietro (1994) have warned:

 

Technology cannot substitute for essential natural resources such as food, forests, land, water, energy, and biodiversity...we must be realistic as to what technology can and cannot do to help humans feed themselves and to provide other essential resources.

 

Bartlett (1994) has observed:

 

There will always be popular and persuasive technological optimists who believe that population increases are good, and who believe that the human mind has unlimited capacity to find technological solutions to all problems of crowding, environmental destruction, and resource shortages. These technological optimists are usually not biological or physical scientists. Politicians and business people tend to be eager disciples of the technological optimists.

 

am sayin tho.

 

Might I add that technology can be split into two parts, technology to create and technology to destroy.

How many times over could we destroy ourselves with our current technology?

[Mr. Beast]

am sayin tho.

 

Might I add that technology can be split into two parts, technology to create and technology to destroy.

How many times over could we destroy ourselves with our current technology?

 

that's the crux of it - we have technologies which use 10 calories of energy to put 1 calorie of food on our table - not cause it's efficient, cause it makes more money for the owners of that technological capital that way.

 

for some reason, maybe blind optimism, i personally don't rule out a technological solution/miracle. but living sustainable is just a whole lot more damn sensible/realistic. we're probably in crisis management time now anyway - as the earth slowly dies lets try and make the rest of it's life happier. then if Professor Paul Daniels pulls a free energy machine out of his hat just before the climate collapses, bonus!

[stringvest]

Isn't capitalism dependent on the concept of having perpetual growth? How is it even possible to have perpetual growth? In anything?

 

Only Simon has the answer.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

 

Only Simon has the answer.

 

Damn beat me to it.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Did anyone see that article in the Mirror about Deloitte (Tory donators) who own a 50% in Ingeus Deloitte who won the potential to earn £775.5 Million in payments for the Work Programme?

 

I mentioned it about 400 pages back in response to something SD had said that it all stunk of a jobs for boys exercise and it appears to be that way, because the owner of Deloitte is one of Cameron's buddies and a senior Tory Treasury minister was once a Deloitte employee just prior to the Elections.

 

Who'd have thunk it.

[cochyn]

Banks wanted to brainwash children and lecture them on how to spend their money?

You couldnt make this shit up.

 

Or alternatively, teach people how to be responsible with their cash rather than re mortgaging over and over just so he can have a brand new beemer and keep the wife in Jimmy Choo. Financial planning for life should be a core constituent of the curriculum.

[stringvest]

Or alternatively, teach people how to be responsible with their cash rather than re mortgaging over and over just so he can have a brand new beemer and keep the wife in Jimmy Choo. Financial planning for life should be a core constituent of the curriculum.

 

This is bang on. It's crazy that we expect kids who after 10 years of schooling often struggle with the basics to understand how to engage effectively with the world around them.

[Section_31]

Or alternatively, teach people how to be responsible with their cash rather than re mortgaging over and over just so he can have a brand new beemer and keep the wife in Jimmy Choo. Financial planning for life should be a core constituent of the curriculum.

 

Isn't that what drives the economy though? Isn't that the whole problem? The biggest story of the last seven days was Tesco's Christmas trading results and 'what it means for us all' according to ITN.

 

Makes me laugh how the man in the street has now been branded irresponsible for running up debts, when for many it was designed that way from the very top and for some people - myself included during my uni days - debt was the only way they could survive.

[Tyler Durden]

Or alternatively, teach people how to be responsible with their cash rather than re mortgaging over and over just so he can have a brand new beemer and keep the wife in Jimmy Choo. Financial planning for life should be a core constituent of the curriculum.

 

It should, but by the state

[Jose Jones]

How hard is financial planning though really?

"Don't go into shit loads of debt that you can't afford to pay off, particularly on credit cards, debt on something with appreciable value like a house can sometimes be a good thing. Now off you go."

 

It's not the financial understanding that's the problem, it's the self-delusion.

[dennis tooth]

Or alternatively, teach people how to be responsible with their cash rather than re mortgaging over and over just so he can have a brand new beemer and keep the wife in Jimmy Choo. Financial planning for life should be a core constituent of the curriculum.

 

Perhaps but then should they be receiving lessons fro the likes of credit unions and charities who actally have to manage their money rather than banks who manage other peoples via a legalised ponzi scheme and have failed at it. Those same kids will be paying off bank debts for the rest of their lives.

Its like some smackhead coming and burgling you house and lecturing you about morals whilst doing so. Not the best analogy but itll do.

[dennis tooth]

Also if you dont see a conflict of interest their, I congratulate your mental dexterity in performing blinded backflips but I would think that pretty obvious.

But maybe they are doing it out the gud of their hearts and Im a cynical bastard.

Your choice.

[cochyn]

Perhaps but then should they be receiving lessons fro the likes of credit unions and charities who actally have to manage their money rather than banks who manage other peoples via a legalised ponzi scheme and have failed at it. Those same kids will be paying off bank debts for the rest of their lives.

Its like some smackhead coming and burgling you house and lecturing you about morals whilst doing so. Not the best analogy but itll do.

 

That's genuinely a fantastic idea mate. Let's not forget most banks arose out of the old Building Societies which began life as credit unions.

[cochyn]

Isn't that what drives the economy though? Isn't that the whole problem? The biggest story of the last seven days was Tesco's Christmas trading results and 'what it means for us all' according to ITN.

 

To a degree, though every crash has occurred at a spike in property values (16 year cycle I think someone called it). I would say it's a coincidence but it isn't at all.

 

Makes me laugh how the man in the street has now been branded irresponsible for running up debts, when for many it was designed that way from the very top and for some people - myself included during my uni days - debt was the only way they could survive.

 

Absolutely - it's sickening really and the media need showing up for their hypocrisy and cowardice in perpetuating this myth: My (our) generation were bought up in an environment where money was hard to come by and the cost of getting a bit more to 'speculate to accumulate' was prohibitive. All of a sudden the banks are chucking 'cheap' money at anyone with a pulse as if they were Rockerfeller so of course, people naturally filled their boots like starved kids in a cake factory.

 

I hated being in debt after uni. when I finally cleard them I promised myself to never be in that hole again. I save these days, but that's not good for the econnomy, apparently...

[dennis tooth]

I heard milliband trying to be angry about the employment figures in parlee mint today.

But nar, I just was repressing my giggles. Its the lisp, an angry man with a lisp is a funny and unthreatening thing.

They must have slapped him about the face screaming 'git mad' before pushing him onto the podium.

I wanted him to get mad but even with very serious points on a serious matter, I was begging him to stop so I cud at least breathe again.

Thats some funny shit hermanos.

If u get a chance have a listen. He could be on monty python.

Tragecomedy.

[brucespanner]

Zoe Williams in todays Gruniad.

 

Not sure the blame can be laid fully at 'Call Me Dave' but fantastice article nonetheless.

 

The first time I heard the phrase "state-subsidised corporate super-profits" was last June, at a conference of the pressure group Compass, in a discussion about meeting child poverty targets by 2020 (the title was intended as a bleak joke, I think). Someone in the audience said that the very existence of "in-work benefits" was evidence of the government subsidising the bloated profits of huge corporations.

 

This was underlined by the arcane terminology – a "working family tax credit". Why a "tax credit" and not a "benefit"? Clearly, because otherwise some smart-Alec might have said that if a company is paying a worker less than it takes to break through the breadline, and that's legal, then there's something wrong with the minimum wage. However, this was a lefty conference, full of lefties, and this is the sort of thing they say.

 

The next time I heard it, it was July and a reported observation, specifically about pay in supermarkets, from the editor of MoneyWeek, Merryn Somerset Webb. I don't know her politics, but she was previously a broker at SBC Warburg, she writes for the Spectator, and she is a non-executive director of two investment trusts. You don't meet many people like her at a Compass conference.

 

Tomorrow, the Fair Pay Network publishes a report on the impact of low pay in national supermarket chains. It looks at the big four supermarkets: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons – the largest employer block in the country outside of the NHS. The report finds that the working poor now dominate poverty equations, with nearly two-thirds of children in poverty living in working families. It gives case studies for individual members of the 900,000-strong supermarket workforce: workers such as the mother who has to hold down two part-time jobs, never sees her kids, and still can't afford to use the tube – so they probably end up blowing what quality "me-time" they have schlepping across town on a bus. Life would be untenable for many families without in-work benefits, and even with them it is back-breakingly hard.

 

Who wins, when the government makes up the shortfall, between the poverty pay a shelf-packer earns and what he or she needs to live on? Not the worker, evidently; not the taxpayer, who may get a certain empathy boost from the fact that nobody's starving, but reaps no economic advantage from this bizarre system; not the supplier to the supermarket, who often has his or her own case to make about deals so bad they often amount to a mugging.

 

The only winners are the chains themselves: Justin King, the CEO of Sainsbury's, receives £3.2m a year; Philip Clarke of Tesco, £6.9m; Dalton Philips, of Morrisons, £4m; Andy Clarke of Asda's pay is not in the public domain. What justifies these amounts? Their profits, of course: well done, guys. You don't pay the London living wage, or the UK living wage (a non-binding rate set by the Centre for Social Policy Research) to your lowest-paid employees. You were abetted in this by the last government, and now have this government, with its soaring unemployment, over a barrel.

 

You reaped greater profits as a result, which you must now feel free to skim off. To grab so much in excess of what you could ever spend or need, at a cost of so much hardship, to so many people, defies comprehension. It can't be because they want the money; it can only be an urge to compete with their CEO peers. What would be good is if they could divert some of this myopic energy into a more innocuous pastime, like a FTSE 100 squash tournament.

 

However, CEOs are hard to influence, especially on the matter of their own salaries; a better place to start would be the government. Part of the problem here is that it is typically leftwing to agree with benefits, both from a political, redistributive agenda and as part of a semi-Keynesian programme that it's good for GDP for the poorest to have more money, because they spend a larger proportion of their income, thence pumping it back into the economy.

 

Meanwhile, on the right, it is typical to disagree with benefits, both from an ideological faith in the individual as master of his own destiny, and from the monetarist position that government spending strangles private enterprise. Clem Chambers espoused this so succinctly in Forbes this week that I almost bought it and had to change my whole identity: "If you subtract state spending from total GDP, then subtract the tax take from what's left and then deduct government borrowings, what remains in most developed countries approaches zero. There is little or no GDP left for the private sector. No wonder there isn't any economic growth."

 

However, this is a simple chicken-or-egg question: does the size of the public sector suffocate the private sector? Or does the public sector only look big because the private sector is so rubbish?

 

What nobody in any of these corners would ever advocate is state spending as an alternative to fair wage settlements. The left would say: set a minimum living wage, make it decent, enforce it, unionise. The right would say: let the market determine wages; if people aren't paid enough, they'll stop spending and the supermarkets themselves will realise that boosting pay packets in the middle will yield better profits than one huge pay packet at the top.

 

Nobody would say: let the supermarkets pay what they like, and so that they never have to deal with the economic consequences of that, let the state make up the difference. Nobody would say that, because it's senseless. And yet, here we are.

 

Well thought out and erudite, but frankly disturbing!

 

Is this the future, a dystopian nightmare, where we all work in tescos, shop in tescos, socialise in tescos and the get buried in tesco coffins?

[Mr. Beast]

 

Is this the future, a dystopian nightmare, where we all work in tescos, shop in tescos, socialise in tescos and the get buried in tesco coffins?

 

get taught in a free school sponsored by tesco. get paid in tesco clubcard points...not too far off..

[VladimirIlyich]

Zoe Williams in todays Gruniad.

 

Not sure the blame can be laid fully at 'Call Me Dave' but fantastice article nonetheless.

 

 

 

Well thought out and erudite, but frankly disturbing!

 

Is this the future, a dystopian nightmare, where we all work in tescos, shop in tescos, socialise in tescos and the get buried in tesco coffins?

 

This is already the future.

[VladimirIlyich]

'During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?'

[Liverpool lad]

'During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?'

 

I first heard this tale when I was about 17 from a Sociology teacher, years after through reading Hall, Habermas etc it all became clear.

[dennis tooth]

Labour coming out in support of welfare 'reform'.

Id say its a disgrace etc but like I say, they all the same.

One day I will go through both their policies like for like, tory and labour and well play spot the difference

[Red_or_Dead]

'During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?'

 

Call me thick, but I don't get that...