I haven’t posted for a while, but this article is well worth reading.
https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bapstatements/
Note article from May 29th 2018.
Category Archives: Economics
Economics
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan & Syria
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan & Syria. What do they all have in common? predominantly they are Muslim countries, all in the Middle East, and they all have natural wealth and resources. However, there is something tragic and unjust that all these countries share, that is that they are in the middle of the power games between The Western Word and Russia and China, two sides of a conflict that has to manufacture discord and disunity in order to maintain the existence of those societies, their values, their economies and their sense of who they are.
In the current time America, that nation which countries in The Western World seems to follow like blind sheep, could have come to an agreement with Russia at the UN to let chemical weapons inspectors into Syria to assess the source of chemical weapons. In like manner, Russia could have agreed to the Americans demands to achieve the same end. But unfortunately the main issue for these nations isn’t the death of innocent people, or the use of chemical weapons, especially when you consider the utter hypocrisy of nations who in their warmongering have slain many thousands of people as “collateral damage” on many occasions, by dropping bombs, even nuclear bombs which killed many more people in an instant. No, their main concern is their own pride, and their pride creates a bridge between them which will never join in the middle, and because of this, they can will never work together on issues like this, and there always will be a stand-off with one side blaming the other. As a result of this the truth will never be known until it is too late, just like Iraq, just like the many other times these when the ineffective diplomats fail in their discussions and the unverified and untested suspicions pushed out by these nations via the media become as good as fact. It will only be after many more innocent people are killed in futile strikes aimed at people who are rarely caught by them, and at chemical or nuclear resources that are often simply rebuilt, after more families are made homeless, and more refugees are created, that we will find that those very same nations that held up the investigations ALL played their parts in supplying and training people in that region to be their puppets in their power games.
On and on it goes, and each time it seems like it’s the first time. “Lessons will be learned”, and they always say, we will put in place measures to see this can never happen again. Yet the damage these nations do every time, destroys people lives, and not only that, shows contempt for life, as we vdebate about whether we allow entry to our nations those very same refugees that we cause to become refugees by our reckless “foreign policy”, greed and warmongering, pampering our self-interest under the guise of world security.
It utterly disgusts me that nations who can put people on the moon, orbit space with amazing technology for communication, create new land and hold back the sea, formulate infinitely complex agreements for making money, and even at the level of the everyday person on the street, achieve so much both individually and collectively; can achieve so little when it comes to creating peace, and seem so powerless when it comes to saving people’s lives, and ensuring justice.
In a world where our leaders have given up – if they even truly cared in the first place – and feel it is easier to see people die meaningless and senseless deaths, than to stand up for their rights, life itself has no worth. If we are entrusting the governance of our societies to people who act with such contempt, perhaps this situation is what we all deserve.
Stopping migration from Africa?
This is a radical solution, one that would definitely solve the problem but one that I fear wont be adopted quickly, if at all.
Al Jazeera’s Lorenzo Kamel writes this insightful article.
The problem is some nations like the profits of colonialism and economic exploitation, they like to look like they are benevolent in their treatment of migrants, keeping the dissenting voices in their midst at bay, when actually the benevolence and tolerance or even intolerance of actors in this situation only exists because of injustice.
Globalism comes home to roost?
I find it truly amazing, the conceited, hypocritical babblings of nationalists and “anti-globalists”. They seem to have lost the ability to reason, lost the ability to see the world from anything other than a distorted perspective. We can see them in many European countries, France, Germany and Greece to name a few, and then there is the USA. What these mentally deficient people don’t realise is that globalism didn’t start in the year 2000, 2010 or 2018, but in fact a long time before that with colonialism giving birth to global capitalism and the systems of interconnectedness of trade and communications that once were stacked so heavily in favour of colonisers that they were far enough removed from the ill effects of their dominance over other countries, they just reaped the rewards in an endless and rather one way stream ox exploitation.
In this system people are capital, people are tradable and indeed people sell their skills for the best price they can to assure a future for themselves and their families. It has been this way for a long time. America has vibrant communities of Hispanic and Irish settlers, England has many black settlers from the West Indies that migrated to England after WW2, and many other countries have established communities of migrant workers.
What seems to be happening now, is that with freedom of movement, the intake of new communities into many countries is accelerated. For some people this is alarming, for some people it is an opportunity on both sides of the equation, and it can be relished and celebrated, IF people treat each other with respect.
However, what these fascist “anti-globalists” don’t realise, and I really wish I could kick them right up the arse and make them understand, is, they are cherry picking what they are “anti-globalist” about. They are blind to the hundreds if not thousands of years of globalisation that has left large chunks or other countries infrastructure and business in the hands of their very own countrymen, destabilising the nations in their grip – and causing the very influx of migrants they want to stop, as people in countries under the yoke of globalism want to escape to live; they need to escape political and religious persecution, civil unrest, conflict, economic distress, hunger and disease.
The privileges that we enjoy, from reasonably priced food (lots of stuff we can’t grow in our countries, or can’t grow enough of), to fuels, the raw materials that go into components for electronics, right the way through to gemstones and precious metals. Globalism secures them for us, all too often at the expense of the countries that we exploit to get them. But it seems now, that because the effects of what we do in our exploitation of other countries is all to visible, we not hate it and claim to be victims of the very system we control. Indeed, has globalism come home to roost!
Pulling in a scripture that captures this perfectly “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.” (Proverbs 29:7 NIV) Knowing God means caring for other people, and even if you are not religious surely caring for other people is an integral part of what makes us human, and all citizens of a planet that we have to care for and manage for the benefit of us all.
Have no pity – for The City
Erm, so it isn’t really a myth, The City Of London – a small area within London containing banks and financial services is its own state and not officially part of the UK.
I just wonder then, when the banking crisis occurred, why UK taxpayers money had to bail those banks out. It seems like us giving cash to a foreign country who has messed up! And then they pay themselves huge bonuses and avoid paying tax, and then cause the economy to go bankrupt, so we bail them out and the cycle repeats…
https://www.ft.com/content/41dba03e-5d29-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2
Brexit, polarisation and sleepwalking into disaster
I watched some of BBC Parliament recently, by chance, and the MP’s were speaking about the Brexit impact assessment, redacted findings, the autonomy of the Select Committee and the danger of leaks. BBC News has a good summary of the current debate here.
I find it fascinating, that with probably the most important political event that will happen in my lifetime, and the lifetimes of many MP’s involved, that instead of working together, the political parties are engaged in the same old polarised debates; “I’m right, you’re wrong” – “This side of the house, that side of the house”. It’s like watching some kind of opinion tennis spectacle. These people are paid a lot of money, but they don’t seem to realise that they are wasting time and destroying the path to collaborative progress. Maybe the real work just doesn’t go on in The House of Commons.
The Queen should step in and bang these people’s heads together, as they apparently act on her behalf. Or maybe she is just content to remain a figurehead bringing in revenues to the country, however, whether you consider those revenues to be 2bn or 5bn, you have to weigh that up with the cost of a potential lost opportunity for The Queen to step in and stop Parliament from aimlessly arguing about this issue, defending their political pride, perhaps bolstering a woefully weak Prime Minister, so that we don’t find ourselves doing too little, too late.
Modern Money Mechanics
It’s really strange when you take a step back and think about money, it seems so important to many people, but in fact it is of no intrinsic value, the paper and coins we view as money, are most of the time worth less than the face value of the money it represents.
Money is a system based on trust, we rely on the fact that we can redeem our money for goods and services worth its face value. But some of the problems we face in this respect are, poor goods and services, and in some circumstances a poor legal framework to remedy such situations. Some examples are:
- Buying a house and find out out some of the building work is sub standard after a defect period has ended.
- Buying a car and finding out not all the features are as you had been led to believe.
- Investing in a pension that falls flat and doesn’t pay out
Before money existed, and even while it existed people traded on the basis of establishing their own views of the worth of their goods and services they wanted to trade by swapping or barter. It’s not a system without risk, but the trust relationship is between you and generally one individual, without “markets”, cartels, minimum prices, recommended prices etc. It seems there are many more variables present in today’s style of trading, which introduce risk and lessen trust.
The strange thing is that the people who run the system and the big players in it are anything but trustworthy, and that is at the root of the problems for a system that needs you to trust in it. The real wealth in society lies with the people at the bottom of it, not those at the top. It is the workers who put in the hours and labour at the thick end of the goods and services provided into society. Yet the system feeds of their wealth and pushes it further up the chain, investing in pension schemes that crash, a huge tax burden, wars and weapons we may have no interest in supporting, charging us more interest than the people at the top of society, and thus perpetuating inequality in wealth. For a system that relies on trust, there is a lot to be distrustful about.
Modern Money Mechanics details this with some rigour and is well worth a read to discover some fascinating truths about the money system that affects us all.
UPDATE: A few hours after I published this post, I came across an article which shows even The Queen’s money is held off-shore to avoid paying tax! So the HMRC who will prosecute in certain circumstances for non payment of tax and tax evasion, and the general public which is concerned about multinational companies schemes relating to taxtax avoidance, may find that The Monarch herself is involved, to some degree, in activity which dodges the declaration of funds due to the public purse.
So it seems the rich who have plenty of money, avoid paying tax and have lawyers who can dispute their liability, but the regular worker, who has to carefully manage their money will never get away with avoiding paying a single penny of tax! Again, this shows how the money system breeds inequality, and is a system based on exploitation and a value system that is detached from reality, and further distorted by an inherent lack of trustworthiness often displayed by those who benefit most from it.
The American Dream, or the American Illusion?
The American Dream is a construct which many people the world over believe is true. Refugees flee to America in search of a better life, and, given some of the countries where refugees come from, America can offer a vastly improved way of life, but not a dream. The reality is that a lot of American people never find that dream, and end up falling into the dissonance created by the reality of the construction of American society, a society built on exploitation, imperialism, and arguably injustice. People feel short-changed by the society they felt would be a new world for them, and this breeds its own malaise that feeds into the tensions already present in American Society.
Al Jazeera has a great overview of The American Dream in the 20th Century, video excerpt courtesy Al Jazeera.
Globalisation = Neo-Colonialism
Colonial powers have for the large part removed their overt intrusion into lands far from their home shores (obviously apart from where they have just over-run the indigenous inhabitants and no one really remembers who owned that country in the first place). However, what we see today with globalisation, really is just a new form of colonialism, economic colonialism, as Neil Clark writes, Neo-Colonialism. Read his great article “The Empire Strikes Back: with destructive and dishonest neocolonialism“.
Our societies are built on injustice, racism and exploitation. It’s no surprise to me to see neo-colonialist and neo-fascist forces on the rise.
The City of London and the UK Banking System
The City of London, actually a small part of what is commonly thought of as London, precisely 1.12 square miles containing financial services companies, with its own police force, laws, and apparently The Queen must ask permission to enter it. It’s been suggested that The City of London is not part of the UK and is its own sovereign state!
Information for re-education:
Frank Schaeffer’s View on Donald Trump
I don’t disagree with everything Athiests have to say!
The tragedy of neglect
Grenfell Tower has become a symbol of the times in the U.K. The public sector and the services the working class man relies on has been subject to years of neglect, even before the so-called harsher measures of austerity kicked in.
Unless there are protests, cuts to government funding, and in the private sector cutting costs in construction and service provision have an almost invisible presence beyond the murmurs of discontent.
What the disaster at Grenfell Tower has done is make the invisible presence of cuts and cost cutting a horrific and nightmaric vision etched on people’s minds. As we grieve for people who have lost family members if not whole families, friends, and possessions – we can’t help but question how such a thing can happen in the 21st Century in the UK, let alone in one of the captivating city’s richest boroughs.
here you can clearly see the contrast between those who can afford to pay and maybe buy anything they want, and those who in part rely on the system to help them get through life.
Poor housing is a trap, not just in terms of the safety implications that Grenfell has highlighted, but there are health concerns for people who. Live in squalid, unkept buildings in need of renovation and repair. There is the economic and social exclusion that happens on some estates which creates that micro environment, or pockets of society which seems closed of from the progress more affluent, socially mobile sections of society are able to achieve.
People in such situations are trapped in a variety of ways, and the way our society is structured, the impetus of government and business, seems likely to little by little take away the hopes such people have.
If we all pay into a system that is des ingest to protect all in society, why is it that some people are getting such a rough deal? Why is it that we systemically create a society that seems prone to limit the opportunity afforded to some people and keep them penned up in a stratum of society that further serves to both define and reinforce their status and self vision of those as being seen in need, wanting and dependent.
what I think is becoming more self-evident, is that the people who we define as poor will always be so if we as a society keep failing them and ignoring them, by pandering to those who have more money and influence. What we need is a society with justice at its core, and that doesn’t mean punishing the people who take shortcuts and ruin people’s lives as in the sad case of Grenfell. It means making sure, through the public services and regulation of private companies, that tragedies like this never happen in the first place.