Negative outlook for Austria, France and the UK. Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia and Slovenia have ratings cut

Banker bows to pressure from across the political spectrum to decline 3.6m shares offered to him by bank's board

Occupy movement: from local action to a global howl of protest

A month after its launch, more than 900 cities around the world have hosted protests affiliated to the Occupy cause

Esther Addley
Tuesday 18 October 2011

In Madrid, tens of thousands thronged the Puerta del Sol square shouting "Hands up! This is a robbery!" In Santiago, 25,000 Chileans processed through the city, pausing outside the presidential palace to hurl insults at the country's billionaire president. In Frankfurt, more than 5,000 people massed outside the European Central Bank, in scenes echoed in 50 towns and cities across Germany, from Berlin to Stuttgart. Sixty thousand people gathered in Barcelona, 100 in Manila, 3,000 in Auckland, 200 in Kuala Lumpur, 1,000 in Tel Aviv, 4,000 in London.

A month to the day after 1,000 people first turned up in Wall Street to express their outrage at corporate greed and social inequality, campaigners are reflecting on a weekend that saw a relatively modest demonstration in New York swell into a truly global howl of protest.

The Occupy campaign may have hoped, at its launch, to inspire similar action elsewhere, but few can have foreseen that within four weeks, more than 900 cities around the world would host co-ordinated protests directly or loosely affiliated to the Occupy cause.

The exact targets of protesters' anger may differ from city to city and country to country. But while their numbers remain small in many places, activists argue that Saturday's demonstrations, many of which are still ongoing – and are pledged to remain so for the foreseeable future – are evidence of a growing wave of global anger at social and economic injustice.

"This is not a battle by youth or Chilean society," said Camila Vallejo, a Chilean student leader who has become a key figure in that country's protests, and who this week travelled to Europe to forge alliances with protest movements there. "This is a world battle that transcends all frontiers." ...

It would be funny if it were not so terrible. Britain is 30 years into the grand Conservative project that was to transform the nation into a "property-owning democracy". To mark this great anniversary, a government-sponsored organisation, UK Asset Resolution, is about to embark on the highly patronising and paternalistic task of telephoning 30,000 mortgage-holders and telling them to spend less on nights out, Sky television, gym membership and mobile phones, and more on servicing their mortgages. It's safe to say that this is not what Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she promised that her privatisation policies would remove the state from people's personal lives. It hardly chimes with David Cameron's rhetoric either.

UK Asset Resolution. What a name. It sounds like a highly dodgy private company that buys debt, then intimidates people into paying it off at extortionate rates. But it isn't. UK Asset Resolution is the Treasury-owned holding company that was established last October to "support around 800,000 customers with £77bn of loans", customers who initially took out their mortgages with Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. Both of those companies, of course, are now "taxpayer owned", after receiving more than £48.7bn in government loans.

Essentially, all these 800,000 people live in houses that are owned by the government, and have to pay the government every month if they wish to carry on living in them. Some of them – the riskier propositions – will also have to put up with presumptive lectures from strangers about their frivolous failure to understand their financial priorities. And they are not the only vulnerable "home owners" by any means. It is Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, not Northern Rock and B&B, that have the greatest exposure to customers whose mortgages are already larger than the value of their homes.

You'd imagine that the implosion of the "property-owning democracy" project was obvious to all. You'd have imagined that it had become obvious back in 1997, when highly visible homelessness was one of the factors that delivered a landslide election victory to Tony Blair. But no.

Just to underline this historic failure, the National Housing Federation this week predicted that the proportion of the population who own or live with the owner of their home will fall to 63.8% by 2021, about the level it stood at in the 1980s. Of more immediate concern are the observations from homelessness charity Crisis that rough sleeping is up 8% on last year, while the number of people accepted as homeless by local councils and placed in social housing is up by 10%. Since the coalition came to power, the number of families claiming housing benefit has risen by 150,000. There are now five million names on waiting lists for social housing. Many more don't bother to make an application, because they understand that they have absolutely no chance of becoming a council or housing association tenant. ...

First it was Warren Buffett announcing that he and his chums had been "coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress".

Then Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest woman, who was at the centre of a tax scandal last year, signed a letter along with 15 other billionaires begging to make a special contribution to the treasury to help drag France out of the financial crisis.

Even an Italian got in the action, with the boss of Ferrari saying that as he was rich, it was only "right" that he stump up more cash.

Now, as both France and Spain consider introducing a wealth tax, a group of 50 rich Germans have joined the "tax me harder" movement by renewing their open call to Angela Merkel to "stop the gap between rich and poor getting even bigger".

The German group, Vermögende für eine Vermögensabgabe (The Wealthy for a Capital Levy) is the latest manifestation of a feeling among some well-off individuals that the spare cash in their bank accounts might be able to ease, if not solve, the financial crises threatening to cripple their countries. ...

US billionaire tells White House to ‘stop coddling the super-rich’ and raise their taxes to cut America’s debts
By Rachel Helyer Donaldson
AUGUST 15, 2011

The American billionaire investor Warren Buffett has called on the US government to "stop coddling" the super-rich and raise their taxes to help balance the country's books. Writing in the New York Times yesterday Buffett, the world's third richest person, argued that cutting the "extraordinary" tax breaks given to the wealthy would not inhibit investment or job growth.

A long-time critic of the US tax system, Buffett claims in his op-ed that America's wealthiest individuals are not making a fair contribution to fixing the nation's finances. "Our leaders have asked for 'shared sacrifice'. But when they did the asking, they spared me," he wrote. "I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched."

Buffett, the 'Oracle of Omaha' who has previously called the current financial crisis "poetic justice" for greedy bankers, added: "While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks."

His personal fortune may have been estimated at $50bn by Forbes this year but Buffett said that his last tax bill was $6.9 million - just 17.4 per cent of his taxable income. The other 20 people in his office paid around double this percentage - an average of 36 per cent, he said.

"These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species," the 80-year-old industrialist and philanthropist quipped. "It's nice to have friends in high places."

Buffett argues that the new Congress 'super committee' - a bipartisan panel which is currently trying to find $1.5 trillion worth of savings and cuts to reduce the national deficit - should raise the tax rate paid by those earning at least a $1 million a year. Those who make $10 million or more annually should pay an additional tax increase, he adds.

The business news agency Bloomberg said today that Buffett's call to raise taxes for the "mega-rich" could add force to Barack Obama's recent proposal to end tax breaks for "corporate jet owners" as well as oil companies and hedge fund managers. In June the president argued that closing the tax loophole for those who own private planes would put $3 billion into the Treasury over a decade. His comments are also likely to anger the Republican Tea Party movement, which is adamant that the only way to cut America's massive budget deficit is to slash public spending. ...

... Balls responded to figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that the economy had grown by just 0.7% over the 12 months to June by accusing the chancellor of being "in total denial" over the state of the economy and called on Osborne to reverse his decision to raise VAT to 20% at the start of the year.

"People up and down the country will hear that, look at their own lives, their bills, local shops and think he doesn't understand what's going on" Balls said.

"These figures show that last year's recovery has been recklessly choked off by George Osborne's VAT rise and spending review.

"The economy has effectively flatlined for nine months and this is very bad news for jobs, living standards, business investment and for getting the deficit down.

"Just 0.2% growth over the nine months since this government's spending review and VAT rise compares to 2.1% in the previous nine months when the economic recovery was taking hold.

"Every other major economy in the world has faced challenges like high world oil prices but their economies have continued to recover while Britain has barely grown at all over the last nine months."

The Treasury and Downing Street denied reports there were tensions over economic strategy after the ONS said that the UK had so far recouped only 2.5 percentage points of the 6.4% drop in gross domestic product suffered during the UK's worst post-war slump.

David Cameron said: "Unlike previous governments, there is one team at the heart of this government: that is the chancellor and the prime minister working together." ...




...and we can plainly see what your two brilliant minds have achieved.

Don't let the door.....

Talks on resolving the European debt crisis have been plunged into disarray after the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting and attempting to rape a maid in a New York hotel.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, was taken from the first class cabin of a Paris-bound Air France flight at JFK airport by plainclothes officers before Manhattan police formally arrested him on charges of a criminal sexual act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment.

The charges threatened to create a leadership vacuum at the IMF, overseer of the global economy, and threw open next year's French presidential election, ending the hopes of the French Socialist who was favourite to beat Nicolas Sarkozy.

The allegation is a major embarrassment to the IMF, which has authorised billions of dollars of lending to troubled countries and played a major role in the eurozone debt crisis. The arrest will cast a cloud over the IMF's role in addressing the rescues and is likely to have a major impact on stock markets as traders react to yet more uncertainty in Europe.

Strauss-Kahn had been flying to Europe to discuss the worsening European debt crisis. He had been scheduled to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Sunday and European financial ministers on Monday and Tuesday. The IMF leader was to have discussed how best to tackle Greece's worsening debt crisis and finalise Portugal's €78bn bailout package.

A senior Greek government official said the arrest would not change the IMF's policy in Greece but could cause delays in the short term. The IMF-led bailout has become increasingly unpopular with other IMF members amid growing doubts about the Greek government's ability and resolve to meet the commitments of the international aid package. ...

Even for the Lincoln Centre it was an unusual show, and an unscheduled one. Several hundred protesters turned up outside the arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side last week for the guerrilla screening of a short film. From a hotel on the other side of the street, a video was projected on to the centre's walls. The unwitting stars of the films were David and Charles Koch, the reclusive rightwing billionaire brothers whose secretive empire and network of influence and funding is emerging as a liberal rallying cause in America.

As bemused theatregoers watched the boisterous crowd, the videos depicted facts and figure showing Koch support for Tea Party groups, global warming sceptics and thinktanks seeking to strip away regulations on the environment, cut social security and oppose healthcare reform. On the David H Koch Theatre in the complex – renamed when one of the brothers donated $100m (£62m) in 2008 – activists climbed a ladder to post a giant sticker above the sign bearing Koch's name. "I am the Tea Party's wallet," it read. When the police vans finally arrived, the activists had gone.

For Koch Industries, one of the largest private businesses in America, it was another attempt by liberal groups to drag it into the public eye over accusations that it is corrupting US politics in pursuit of its business interests. There have been lengthy magazine articles investigating its activities, growing protests and a legion of bloggers scouring the company's every move. ...

Disabled people have faced greater hostility from the public since the government launched its controversial benefits reforms, according to a survey by a leading charity.

A majority said that they experienced hostility, discrimination and even physical attacks from strangers every week and more than a third claimed the position had worsened over the previous 12 months.

Victims blame ministers for portraying all people with disabilities as scroungers as they seek to cut the number of people on the disability living allowance, the benefit now given to 1.9 million people deemed physically unable to work.

The government has presented changes, including the introduction of medical and psychological tests for those claiming the allowance, as a way of getting tough on people who are cheating the system. But Scope, a charity for disabled people, which commissioned the survey, said there was powerful evidence that the "backdrop of negativity" behind the cuts was leading to a rise in hostility and even violence towards some of the most vulnerable in society.

In the survey, 37% of people with disabilities claimed they were increasingly being abused in the streets, erroneously reported to the benefits fraud hotline and accosted when trying to use parking spaces for the disabled. Nearly two- thirds thought others did not believe they were disabled and half of respondents said they felt others presumed they did not work. Around two-thirds of the 676 surveyed said that they expected to experience discrimination when trying to find a job, and more than half expected to be discriminated against in the workplace.

The findings follow last week's protest by several thousand disabled people through London over cuts to services and benefits provided by central and local government. David Gillon, 47, from Chatham, Kent, who suffers from a debilitating back condition, told the Observer he was left distraught when he was recently reported to the Department for Work and Pensions' fraud hotline.

"I spend only about four hours a week outside the house, but I was contacted by the DWP recently because someone had anonymously reported me for cheating," he said. ...

... Julie Fernandez, who played Brenda in The Office, said the government should be doing more to help disabled people who want to work. A wheelchair user, she said: "The government want to get people into employment in principle, but we are living in a recession and the business community don't see disabled people as viable employees.

"They see us as people who are going to be taking time off sick or who aren't intelligent enough. They should stop penalising disabled people and start making the business community and public transport more accessible."Fernandez, 37, from Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, said the film and TV industry was "incredibly discriminatory" as it was still seen as acceptable to have able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. "There are millions of people across the UK with permanent disabilities. They need to be supported – they don't need to be living in fear of having their benefits taken away."

Carrying a black coffin with the words "disability equality" on the side, Mary Carr, 46, accused the government of "demonising disabled people".

Carr said: "I'm fortunate in that I can hold down a job. I have access to work support and the government pays for taxis to take me to work. They haven't cut that, but the warning signs are there.

"A lot of my disabled colleagues have lost their jobs, because in public services they are targeting local offices and disabled people can't travel to get to other places. We signed up to the European convention for people with disabilities, but if you go through the effects of the cuts – transport, education, housing – all the rights I have to take part in society are being eroded. It's the poor and disabled who are more reliant on the public sector." Sheila Gardiner, 62, from Derbyshire, was a book keeper until she had a stroke five years ago. Now unable to walk or transfer from her wheelchair unaided, she lives in a Leonard Cheshire disability care home, and currently gets £49.85 DLA support every week, which is under threat. Gardiner said: "Britain is going backwards towards Victorian times when people were either very rich or very poor."

The Hardest Hit march was organised by the UK Disabled People's Council and the Disability Benefits Consortium, and was supported by organisations including Mind, Mencap RNIB and Sense. ...

The great corporate tax swindle

It's astounding how our politicians have bought in to firms' tax blackmail. But there is an alternative: workplace democracy

Financial Services Authority wants banks to speed up PPI payouts

• Barclays sets aside £1bn to cover compensation
• British Bankers Association drops case
• Payment protection insurance wrongly sold to millions

Britain's wealthiest residents have recouped their losses from the financial crisis and are now just short of the record registered before the 2008 financial crash.

While most of the country struggles through the fallout from recession and government cuts, the UK's 1,000 richest people are now worth £396bn, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List. That figure is just 4% below that recorded at the height of the boom in 2008, before the financial crisis hammered large dents in many fortunes.

There are now 73 sterling billionaires, an increase of 20 on last year's total and just two short of the all-time high. Meanwhile, a fortune of at least £70m is required to feature among the country's 1,000 richest, up from £55m in 2009 and £63m in 2010.

Chuka Umunna, a Labour MP and member of the Treasury select committee, said: "Clearly we are not all in this together. In this time of austerity many independent experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies have found that the impact is falling heavier on lower-income families and middle Britain.

"It is not indulging in the politics of envy to say that you want to find a more fair and equitable society. The challenge is to find a system that doesn't just work for the wealthy but also works for everybody else more effectively." ...

Britain's banks will be forced to re-open thousands of claims over the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) and pay up to £4.5bn in compensation following a high court ruling.

PPI is insurance typically sold to consumers at the point of sale of personal loans, credit cards and other forms of debt, which is designed to meet their repayments in the event of accident, sickness or unemployment. Many customers have discovered after paying for PPI policies that they would never qualify for a payout due to exclusions in the terms and conditions, while others didn't even realise they had signed up to buy the insurance.

In December the Financial Services Authority introduced rules to stop mis-selling, which required providers to talk customers through the key features of a policy rather than assuming they will read any relevant documentation, and make it clear that the cover is optional.

But the banks, represented by trade body the British Bankers' Association, compained that the rules were unfair because they would be applied retrospectively. In January the BBA launched a high court challenge against the FSA and the Financial Ombudsman – but today's ruling found against them. They could now face a bill of up to £4.5bn – £1.3bn for new complaints received during the coming five years and up to £3.2bn as a result of reviewing previous PPI sales.

The high court judgment endorsed the approach taken by the ombudsman and the FSA, and the banks now have 21 days to appeal.

Several banks had put PPI complaints on hold until the outcome of the judicial review was known. However, the FSA made it clear they should still be dealing with complaints, and anyone whose bank has not dealt with their complaint within eight weeks is entitled to take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The ombudsman service said the lack of cooperation from some financial businesses has made it difficult to progress PPI cases over this period. "However, the clear-cut judgment means that banks and other financial businesses should now be in the position to deal promptly, efficiently and fairly with their customers' PPI complaints," a statement said. ...

How much did your pay go up in 2010? How about your friends and family? Working people in America are hurting—that’s for sure. They’re lucky to have jobs at all—and if they have jobs, odds are their pay is pretty much flat, or worse.

Now, consider this: In 2010, the average pay of a CEO at a major American company went up by 23 percent—to $11.4 million.

Despite the collapse of the financial markets at the hands of many of these same executives less than three years ago, the disparity between CEO and workers’ pay has continued to grow to levels that are simply stunning.

Take a look at 2011 Executive PayWatch, released this morning, to find out just how outrageous things have gotten.

Instead of investing to create good middle-class jobs and grow the economy, corporate CEOs are hoarding $2 trillion in cash.

Except, of course, when it comes to their own paychecks.

Go to the site, www.PayWatch.org, to see some of the worst examples of CEO pay.

Although pay is more out of balance than it has been during most of our lifetimes, for the first time there is hope that things are changing.

That’s because of a new law—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2011. It’s a law that’s working today.

This year, for the first time ever, every public company is giving its shareholders an advisory vote on CEO pay. And soon, companies will be required to disclose the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay for their median employee—which will publicize just how inequitable things are at individual corporations.

These powerful new rules already are under attack—congressional Republicans have announced their intention to repeal Wall Street reform.

Go to www.PayWatch.org to urge Congress to keep tools for reining in CEO pay, share ridiculous pay disparities with your friends on Facebook, and help us build a movement to keep Wall Street in check.

In 2010, while most Americans were learning the hard way how to make do with less, and small businesses all across the country were shutting their doors, CEOs at our largest companies and Wall Street executives still found a way to make out like bandits. That’s something that’s got to change.

Of course, corporate CEOs would prefer to keep the public in the dark about the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay at their company. And it’s no surprise they wish shareholders didn’t have a “say on pay” vote.

But it shocks me they have the nerve to argue for these policies in public—and lobby for them—after their companies drove our country off an economic cliff. As if this is an argument they actually can win. ...

Senior officers policing protests in London last month focused too heavily on kettling to contain activists, Liberty says. The rights group, which had 120 observers, including two inside Scotland Yard's special operations room (SOR), for the TUC march on 26 March, said the tactic was "under near constant consideration" when potential trouble emerged.

"In the SOR, there seemed to be a continual expectation that a containment would be imposed at some point," Liberty's report said, adding that the tactic "does appear seriously to undermine the relationship of trust and confidence between peaceful protesters and the police".

The report added: "The possibility of mass containment of peaceful protesters has undoubtedly had a chilling effect on many people's rights to freedom of expression and assembly." ...

A UK subsidiary of the world's largest commodities broker helped one of its African mining operations avoid paying tens of millions of pounds in tax, according to charities who have analysed a leaked review of its accounts.

The findings of a draft report into internal controls at Zambia's Mopani Copper Mines plc have been categorically rejected by its owner, Glencore, the giant fuel, metals and cereals trader based in the Swiss tax haven of Zug. The report, seen by the Observer, was carried out in 2009 by a Norwegian subsidiary of Grant Thornton, one of the world's largest accountancy firms, at the request of the previous Zambian government.

Its authors alleged the mine's owners "resisted the pilot audit at every stage", a claim denied by a spokesman for Glencore, which owns a 73% stake in Mopani through a company based in the British Virgin Islands, another tax haven.

The report claimed there had been an "unexplainable" increase in Mopani's costs between 2006 and 2008 that allowed it to minimise its stated profits and lower its tax bill. "We suggest the ZRA [Zambian Revenue Authority] does a new tax assessment based on the results of the audit," the report claims.

Glencore, which is preparing a £37bn listing on the London stock market, the capital's biggest ever flotation, said the auditors had failed to factor in rising fuel and labour costs over the period. The audit also suggested Mopani sold copper at artificially low prices to Glencore in Switzerland under a deal struck with the firm's UK subsidiary in 2000. The metal was then sold on, allowing Glencore to take advantage of Switzerland's ultra-low tax regime. ...

... This factory — “the architecture of 13,000,000 pounds of opium production,” as Ptak Science Books calls it — is part of a larger British colonial landgrab fueled, at least in part, by pursuit of the immense profits to be earned from an unrestricted drug trade. As Amitav Ghosh, in an interview about his novel, Sea of Poppies, explains, “The Ghazipur and Patna opium factories between them produced the wealth of Britain. It is astonishing to think of it but the Empire was really founded on opium.”

While the buildings at Patna now house a government printing press, the Ghazipur opium factory to which Ghosh refers both was and still is the largest opium factory in the world. It has remained pretty much unchanged since Rudyard Kipling described it in 1888, according to a report in the Bihar Times, and has generated a profit every year since it was founded in 1820. The USA and Japan are the largest opium importers, apparently, having inherited the crown from the Soviet Union following its collapse.

In any case, both factories, as well as the fields of poppies that surrounded them, and even the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, form a living archaeology of the incredible economic influence, infrastructural legacy, and spatial impact of the opium trade. Curiously, in Afghanistan today, one of the reasons why opium is more economically attractive to farmers is infrastructural and architectural: drug traffickers pick up the poppies at the farms, whereas growing a food crop would require farmers to build storage facilities and transport their produce to market.

It’s also interesting to consider these grand, temple-like opium factories alongside contemporary spaces of drug production: the foreclosed tract homes that house America’s meth labs, or the tunnels carved out as part of the U.S.-Mexico border smuggling wars. Perhaps a more accurate analogy is Jeff Wilcox’s “vision” for an industrial-scale marijuana farm and processing facility on a 7.4 acre business park in Oakland (already rewired by PG & E to supply banks of power-hungry grow lamps), as opposed to the unregulated encampments of barbed wire, plastic tubing, and leaky generators currently hidden in Mendocino and Humboldt County’s redwood forests.

A government commission is to unveil measures aimed at ensuring taxpayers will never again need to bail out Britain's banks, with recommendations that risk splitting the coalition and infuriating the banking sector.

Amid warnings from large banks such as Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered that they will leave London if the proposals by Sir John Vickers are too radical, the commission will seek to ringfence savers from riskier banking operations.

The commission has considered the potential impact of its proposals on the City and is expected to counter suggestions that they would encourage banks to move to New York or Hong Kong.

The report, thought to run to 200 pages, was handed to ministers late on Friday to be presented to the banks at 6am on Monday – an hour before its official release. It is expected to back away from proposals such as "narrow banks", which only take savings, and splitting high street banks from their investment banking divisions, which Vince Cable, the business secretary, previously alluded to as "casinos". ...

Britain needs to end its love affair with the world stage

While we pull in our belts at home, our leaders get carried away abroad. It's time we turned our backs on our imperial past

NHS chiefs ration healthcare to meet cuts target

Royal College of Nursing study reveals that most job losses involve frontline staff as patient services are withdrawn

JP Morgan head Jamie Dimon pockets 51% pay rise

Wall Street firm gives chief executive a $5m cash bonus and pays for family's move from Chicago

Portugal has joined Greece and Ireland on the casualty list of Europe's sovereign debtors after its prime minister, José Sócrates, requested a European Union bailout.

The dramatic decision came in the middle of a political crisis that has left the country in limbo and with spiralling interest rates on its debt.

"I want to inform the Portuguese that the government decided today to ask ... for financial help, to ensure financing for our country, for our financial system and for our economy," Sócrates said in a televised address. "This is an especially grave moment for our country," he added. "Things will only get worse if nothing's done."

Sócrates said that the bailout, which analysts said could be between €70bn (£61bn) and €80bn was "the last resort".

The move was immediately welcomed in Brussels. "This is a responsible move by the Portuguese government for the sake of economic stability in the country and in Europe," the European commission's economic and monetary affairs commissioner, Olli Rehn, told Reuters.

Sócrates did not say how much aid Portugal had asked for, but promised to negotiate the best possible conditions.

Analysts said Portugal was expected to need up to €80bn, an amount the EU's bailout fund, the European financial stability facility, can easily cover. The European commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, promised a swift response. ...

Jobcentres tricking people out of benefits to cut costs, says whistleblower

Soaring number of sanctions against unemployed amid claims that DWP staff are being told to trip people up with paperwork

John Domokos
Friday 1 April 2011

The Guardian has been told that unemployed people are being tricked into breaching the rules so that benefits can be held back

Rising numbers of vulnerable jobseekers are being tricked into losing benefits amid growing pressure to meet welfare targets, a Jobcentre Plus adviser has told the Guardian.

A whistleblower said staff at his jobcentre were given targets of three people a week to refer for sanctions, where benefits are removed for up to six months. He said it was part of a "culture change" since last summer that had led to competition between advisers, teams and regional offices.

"Suddenly you're not helping somebody into sustainable employment, which is what you're employed to do," he said. "You're looking for ways to trick your customers into 'not looking for work'. You come up with many ways. I've seen dyslexic customers given written job searches, and when they don't produce them – what a surprise – they're sanctioned. The only target that anyone seems to care about is stopping people's money.

"'Saving the public purse' is the catchphrase that is used in our office … It is drummed home all the time – you're saving the public purse. Feel good about stopping someone's money, you've just saved your own pocket. Its a joke."

The claims came as the big businesses handed contracts to get the long term jobless into worktoday said the government should privatise jobcentres so that their firms could work with people who have been jobless for less than a year.

Statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show the total number of cases where people have lost their benefits has soared since the beginning of 2010 to 75,000 in October, the latest month available. The figures also reveal the number of claimants with registered disabilities being cut off has more than doubled to almost 20,000 over the same period. ...

More than 2,000 of the most experienced police officers will be made to retire by 2015 as forces across England and Wales try to find 20% budget cuts, a Labour survey has claimed.

A series of Freedom of Information Act requests by the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has disclosed that over the next four years 13 of the 43 forces intend to use an obscure regulation to compulsorily retire 1,138 officers who have more than 30 years of service.

Labour estimates that a further 986 officers could be affected if some of the remaining 30 forces also decide to use the same regulation to find budget savings.

Cooper said that it was "deeply worrying" that 13 forces had already decided to use the A19 regulation to compulsorily retire some of the most experienced officers in the force.

"Some of these officers are experts in their fields and internationally respected for what they do in the fight against crime," she said.

"The home secretary must realise that you cannot make 20% front-loaded cuts to the police without losing the very crime fighters we need. The home secretary is taking unacceptable risks with public safety and the continued fight against crime."

As fully sworn officers of the crown rather than employees, policemen and women cannot be made redundant under existing rules. However, the A19 regulation can forcibly retire officers with more than 30 years' service on not less than two-thirds pension on the grounds of the efficiency of the force.

The experienced officers who have already left or are leaving the police this week include:

•  An inspector with 33 years' service who is the longest serving specialist in crime reduction and crime prevention in England and Wales. He advises architects and builders on "designing out" crime in new buildings, especially on council estates.

• A neighbourhood sergeant who, at 48, is one of the youngest to be forcibly retired. He manages a team of officers and liaises with the local community on anti-social behaviour.

• A 55-year-old frontline roads policing officer who has spent the last 20 years responding to motorway incidents.

The latest Labour survey of police authority current plans shows that the jobs of 12,500 officers are to be lost over the next four years in addition to a further 15,000 police staff jobs, confirming the estimate of 28,000 jobs made by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

The Home Office estimated in November that 3,200 officers in England and Wales could be affected if all the 43 forces decided to enforce the compulsorily retirement rule. ...

... The facts I've mentioned above help to explain why it does not hurt the economy when the government taxes the excess savings of the richest Americans. When can we know that there are excess savings in the economy? It's fairly simple, actually. Whenever there is any level of unemployment, like during a recession, it is because the economy is suffering from excess savings. How do we know that is true? Simple logic.

Fact 1: Virtually all jobs in the economy are ultimately dependent upon SPENDING. Almost all of the money that ends up in paychecks or profit margins can be ultimately traced to the expenditure decisions of consumers, firms, or governments. When aggregate spending drops, jobs disappear. That's what a recession is: a drop in spending (GDP).

Fact 2: By definition, all money-income that is NOT SPENT, is money SAVED.

Fact 3: Combining Fact 1 and Fact 2, whenever there is any level of unemployment, it is because aggregate spending has dropped, and when aggregate spending has dropped, by definition, savings are at excessive levels.

Some of the money that has been saved needs to be spent to keep the excessive savings from hurting the entire economy. One way to do that is to borrow the savings; another way is to increase the tax obligations of the wealthy. It is simply not true that there is no limit to the amount of savings an economy can safely tolerate.

When there is too much saving in the economy, this does not mean that everyone is saving too much money. The problem is that some people are saving too much money; even while others are not saving enough. In effect, these Super Savers (generally, the Uber-Rich) are ‘hogging all of the available savings’ that the economy can safely tolerate (without creating or worsening an unemployment problem).

Two things happen if we tax the incomes of the Uber-Rich at steeply progressive marginal rates: (1) the government has all the money it needs to finance increased spending on public ECONOMIC INVESTMENTS, and (2) all the rich people who are paying higher tax rates do not end up losing any of the purchasing power of their incomes.

(Since they are all paying the same extra percentage in taxes, none of them loses his/her 'ranking' within the hierarchy of all disposable incomes. Since they still have more disposable dollars than everyone else, they still get to consume the scarcest goods/services/experiences that the economy is able to produce. There aren't any fewer luxuries or miles of beach front property when rich people start paying higher taxes; the prices of all luxuries simply drop to a level that the now-poorer rich folks can afford with their reduced disposable incomes. In real terms, the rich give up nothing** when they pay significantly-higher marginal tax rates.)

**Nothing, in terms of lost purchasing power, in terms of material possessions and lifestyle.

The problem with the current recession is that a major source of aggregate spending has disappeared, perhaps forever: the reckless lending practices that banks became accustomed to when they owned the Bush administration. When the Republicans slashed the taxes of the wealthy under Bush, most of those extra disposable dollars ended up in the financial markets and the banks were awash with cash to lend. ...


Ta much, dear MSiegel

An influential group of MPs is to investigate corporate tax avoidance as the clamour grows for action on companies seen as paying less than their fair share.

The inquiry, by the Treasury select committee, will raise the political temperature around the issue – already under scrutiny after questions over the tax bills of multinationals such as Vodafone and Barclays – and senior executives face the prospect of explaining their companies' tax structures to the committee.

George Mudie, the Labour MP for Leeds East and the chairman of the Commons Treasury sub-committee, told the Guardian that there was growing public interest. "When people see their standards of living fall and are paying their tax, and see huge salaries and questions over tax avoidance, then quite rightly they are interested in the issue," he said. ...

... The leak comes as a second survey of police authority intentions carried out by Labour confirms that the police are heading for 27,500 job losses, including 12,500 police officers, over the next four years. Ministers have vowed to protect frontline policing from the impact of the cuts and a report by Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary to be published on Wednesday is expected to clear up the confusion over where the "frontline" can be drawn in the battle against crime.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the Warwickshire situation showed that chief constables had been put in an impossible position: "It is now clear that when there is not the staff to help plan, co-ordinate or forensically investigate the fight against crime, then police officers will have to be taken off the streets to do this work.

"The government needs to take responsibility and recognise that the loss of 12,500 police officers and 15,000 police staff across the country is taking risks with public safety and the progress on crime and antisocial behaviour that was made over the last decade."

The decision by Warwickshire to redeploy frontline officers to roles such as staffing inquiry offices and control rooms and conducting routine visits to crime scenes was disclosed in a leaked memo by Richard Elkin, the force's human resources director.

He has written to all 860 back-office staff inviting those with more than two years' service to apply for voluntary redundancy: "Whilst the force manages the required reductions in the number of police officers, it has been agreed that some will be temporarily posted into police staff posts which are currently vacant, or which will become vacant following voluntary redundancy," says the memo.

The Warwickshire force faces losing 450 jobs out of its 1,800 strength to find savings of £23m in its £100m budget by 2015. The home secretary, Theresa May, and the police minister, Nick Herbert, have repeatedly said it is possible for savings to be found through cutting bureaucracy and back-office functions without hitting the frontline.

Ian Francis, chairman of Warwickshire police authority, has said that there are too many police officers in the county force for the new model of policing which is being implemented. "We don't like it, they [Warwickshire police federation] don't like it, I don't think the public like it, but at the end of the day we have no option," Francis has said.

Francis has predicted that other forces are also likely to draft frontline officers into support roles: "The simple matter is yes, we are going to lose policemen from the front line." ...

... Their disappearance may not be noticed by anyone with a good income, in secure employment, in sound health, without caring responsibilities – anyone who does not look to the state for support with life's problems. For the more vulnerable, the decision to close these bodies and cut these jobs will be sharply felt. They will be more acutely obvious beyond the south-east, in areas that are more dependent on government grants. Women, parents, carers, disabled people, teenagers and elderly people are likely to be the most affected.

From a Westminster perspective, they may be easy to ignore. These are not dramatic closures of maternity wards, big events that would inspire fury and noisy protest; instead the process is much smaller, more fragmented in scale, and hardest felt by people who tend not to be particularly powerful or vocal. Mostly, ministers are able to wash their hands of responsibility, dismissing these cuts as local decisions (despite the fact that they originate in central government funding reductions).

Viewed from Downing Street, they probably seem a fractured collection of regrettable but relatively insignificant services, located (conveniently) in greater concentration the further you move from Westminster. But from the service users' perspective, their disappearance will often be catastrophic. ...

Detroit

• Between 2000 and 2010, 1 in 4 residents left the city.

• At 713,777, city's population is lowest since 1910.

• It's as if one person moved out every 22 minutes.

• More black Michiganders now live outside Detroit -- 810,136 -- than inside -- 590,226.

• Hispanic population grew by about 1,500. ...

Metro Detroit's population saw a 4.4% decline during the last decade, driven largely by a double-digit decrease in Wayne County, U.S. Census figures released Tuesday show.

Much of the population shift appears to be moving from Detroit to Macomb County, which saw a 6.7% rise in its population. More residents now live in Macomb County -- which totals 840,978 -- than in the city of Detroit.

Oakland County, the state's second-most populous county, topped the 1.2 million mark as it saw a 0.7% increase.

Meanwhile, Wayne County lost 11.7% of its population, dropping to 1,820,584 residents. ...

Crime, poor schools and a lack of employment are reasons Detroiters give for why more than 200,000 people have left the city in the past 10 years. U.S. Census figures from the 2010 count show the city lost nearly 25% of its population, bringing the number of residents to 713,777. ...

The Census reported today that 79,725 of Detroit’s housing units were vacant, or 22.8% of the city’s total housing stock.

That’s a big increase in the city’s housing vacancy rate from 10 years ago, when the Census reported a 10.3% vacancy rate in Detroit. ...

Detroit's loss in population in the last decade was the suburbs' gain, at least in terms of diversity.

While many inner-ring suburbs saw their own population decline as the automobile industry struggled, African Americans and Hispanics moved in, seeing a chance to get out of the city and away from its well-documented struggles.

Southfield's white population fell 12,500 since 2000, and its black population increased 8,000 -- to 7 of every 10 people in the city. Warren, a decade ago home to fewer than 4,000 blacks who made up less than 3% of the population, now has more than 18,000 -- or nearly 14% of the city's racial makeup. ...

For Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the magic number is 40,000.

The city needs to identify at least 40,000 people who live in Detroit but were not counted in the 2010 census. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Bing said the city's population needs to be at least 750,000 to bring in much-needed dollars from the state and federal governments.

U.S. census figures released Tuesday show Detroit's population dropped 25% to 713,777 residents, the lowest number since 1910. ...

Barclays has made it clear to the Treasury that if the government insists on forcing UK banks to split their high street retail operation from their investment banking work, then it could move its headquarters out of London to the United States.

The claim was made by the Sunday Times which said the bank's former chief executive, John Varley, made the "thinly veiled threat" in a private meeting last week with the Treasury.

Varley was one of several senior bankers called in to discuss the work of the Independent Commission on Banking, chaired by Sir John Vickers, which is expected to outline a break-up scheme of some kind when it reports on April 11.

It is believed that Varley stopped short of making an explicit threat to pull out of the UK - but that he made Barclays' feelings very clear. ...

Business digest: Bailed-out bank’s key staff paid £1.1m on average
MARCH 18, 2011

The Royal Bank of Scotland's top five bankers, none of whom are on the board, earned more than £20m in 2010, it was revealed yesterday. RBS was bailed out by the government during the financial crisis.

The news was a result of Project Merlin, an agreement to increase transparency, which was signed by the UK's four biggest banks and announced by the chancellor last month. HSBC had been the first to comply with the agreement by revealing that five of their bankers took home between £2.1m and £2.7m in 2010.

In line with new FSA regulations, RBS also revealed how much their 'code staff' – those deemed crucial to business operations – were paid. The 232 staff members deemed to fit these criteria were paid £1.1m on average in 2010, costing the bank a total of £375m. ...

Ministers have been accused of "burying good news" about the NHS because it will undermine their case for sweeping reforms, after it emerged that they are withholding unpublished polling data that shows record levels of satisfaction with healthcare.

The Observer has learned that the polling organisation Ipsos MORI submitted the results last autumn to the Department of Health for inclusion in a government survey of public perceptions of the NHS. The data, commissioned by the department, shows that more members of the public than ever believe the NHS is doing a good job – a finding contrary to health secretary Andrew Lansley's insistence that it is falling short and needs urgent change.

The department has had the findings for six months, but has yet to make them public – the most recent information on its website relates to 2007. The decision to "sit on" the positive information has fuelled a row over the way in which the government is rooting out negative statistics about the NHS to justify reforms. Under the plans – rejected by the Liberal Democrats at their spring conference last weekend and opposed by a small band of Tory MPs, as well as by the Labour party – GPs will be handed control of £80bn of the NHS budget, tiers of management will be swept away and the private sector will play a greater role. The department was unable to say yesterday when it would publish the new data, but sources confirmed that the information shows public satisfaction at a record level.

In January, John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund thinktank, questioned the way in which ministers were unfavourably comparing the NHS with France. Appleby's article for the British Medical Journal attracted support from several academics and doctors. Professor Raj Bhopal, of the University of Edinburgh, said: "Justifying NHS reforms by picking a few statistics that cast doubts on the UK's renowned healthcare system is worrying, but choosing statistics that are widely questioned reminds me of previous government briefings that led to dodgy dossiers." ...

The controversial former bank chief Sir Fred Goodwin is the latest high profile figure to obtain a superinjunction, it has emerged.

The existence of the measure – which bans the press from reporting that an injunction has been obtained – can be revealed after a backbench Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, raised the issue in the Commons.

"In a secret hearing this week Fred Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker," said Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

Hemming, who used parliamentary privilege to avoid the legal ban on reporting the use of superinjunctions, asked: "Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there's one rule for the rich like Fred Goodwin and one rule for the poor?"

Goodwin, who presided over the near collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was reported to have been angered by press coverage after he became popularly known as "Fred the Shred".

He attracted widespread media attention after he was forced to step down in 2008 as a non-negotiable condition of the bank's £20bn bailout by the taxpayer. Goodwin initially left RBS with a pension of £700,000 a year and a lump sum of nearly £3m. He agreed to reduce the payout following public outcry.

News that Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction – over issues that cannot be reported – has raised further questions about the use of the measures. ...

Trade unions representing a million state employees are drawing up plans for strikes that could bring Britain's schools, universities, courts and Whitehall to a standstill as early as June in protest over government plans to end so-called "gold-plated" public sector pensions, the Guardian has learned.

Lord Hutton, the Labour former work and pensions secretary charged by the coalition with reviewing public sector pensions, will publish his final report on Thursday, and it now looks likely to act as a starting gun for extended industrial action against the government's austerity programme.

The report will recommend that 6 million nurses, teachers, local government and other public sector workers should pay more into their pension pots, retire later and receive less when they do. All state employees will be affected, and it will create the first legal basis for simultaneous strikes across the public service unions. ...

... In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and allies like Walker.

Speaking at CPAC's "Panel for Labor Policy," Hagerstrom said that even more than cutting taxes and regulations, AFP really wants to "take the unions out at the knees ." Knee-capping free labor has long been a goal of the Koch brothers and their many front groups. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Kochs worked with other anti-labor billionaires, corporations and activists to fund conservative candidates and groups across the country.

Now after viciously opposing pro-middle class policies for years, Koch Industries is trying to eliminate the only organizations which serve as a counterweight to its well-oiled corporate machine. Believing he was talking with David Koch, Walker told a prankster his plans to crush the unions. Koch's AFP operatives are now working with "state officials in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to urge them to duplicate Walker's crusade in Wisconsin." ...

... According to EPA databases, Koch businesses are huge polluters, emitting thousands of pounds of toxic pollutants. As soon as he got into office, Walker started cutting environmental regulations and appointed a Republican known for her disregard for environmental regulations to lead the Department of Natural Resources. In addition, Walker has stated his opposition to clean energy jobs policies that might draw workers away from Koch-owned interests. ...




I don't give a fuck how they pronounce it - they're cocks.

Ta much, dear Anneliese

There is still a way to win this Murdoch media war

Vince Cable may have lost out over the BSkyB decision, but by fighting from the backbenches he could yet achieve victory

Polly Toynbee
Friday 4 March 2011

As certain as the sun rises in the sky was it that the owner of the Sun would be granted ownership of Sky outright. Few are surprised – but that doesn't stop most being shocked. Rupert Murdoch did what he has always done – defied regulators, governments and tax authorities to carve himself an anti-competitive market dominance with an unmatched global concentration of media power. Think how tightly he grips US politics between his Fox News foghorn and the Wall Street Journal.

In the next four years BSkyB will earn half of all UK television revenues – rising thereafter. Sky's turnover is nearly twice that of the BBC's, whose licence fee has been cut – as urged almost daily by Murdoch's papers. Watch his empire's earnings multiply as packages bundle together monopolistic sports, TV archive and film rights, combining advertising and sales offers across newspapers, their websites and all digital platforms, and making it impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Britain has the weakest media laws, weaker by far than America's.

Desperately needing growth in a stricken economy over-dependent on finance, the government praises Britain's successful creative industries. But News Corp is a dead hand, fostering little new UK talent or creative risk-taking, relying on ready-made successes from elsewhere. This is no way to nurture that industry.

The man who pretends to be a great free marketeer has built an empire almost entirely out of circumventing competition to throttle free markets. That is what Adam Smith warned businesses will do unless commerce is well-regulated by governments to keep healthy markets open. The paradox ignored by this government is that entrepreneurial capitalism needs a strong state to thrive: once markets ossify into monopolies, cartels, corruptions, briberies and intimidation of law-makers, they stagnate. That's why third world dictatorships fail economically. ...

Over the last half century, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. The three convenient and accurate Wikipedia graphs below show the details. The first graph compares the official tax rates paid by the top and bottom income earners. Note especially that from the end of the second world war into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. Note also how the gap between the rates paid by the richest and the poorest has narrowed. If we take into account the many loopholes the rich can and do use far more than the poor, the gap narrows even more.

One conclusion is clear and obvious: the richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of the middle income groups and the poor.

...if the highest income earners today were required to pay the same rate that they paid for many years after 1945, the federal government would need far lower deficits to support the private economy through its current crisis; and second, those tax-the-rich years after 1945 experienced far lower unemployment and far faster economic growth than we have had for years.

The lower taxes the rich got for themselves are one reason why they have become so much richer over the last half century. Just as their tax rates started to come down from their 1960s heights, so their shares of the total national income began their rise. As the two other Wikipedia graphs below show, we have now returned to the extreme inequality of income that characterised the US a century ago. ...

Mervyn King has risked reopening the bitter argument over blame for the financial crisis by saying that government spending cuts are the fault of the City and expressing surprise there has not been more public anger.

The governor of the Bank of England said that people made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason to be resentful and voice their protest. He told the Treasury select committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.

"The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it," he said. "Now is the period when the cost is being paid, I'm surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has."

King has repeatedly pointed the finger at the City since the crisis erupted in 2007, but this was the first time he blamed bankers for the coalition's spending cuts.

It became clear during the hearing that King and his fellow members of the Bank's monetary policy committee, which sets interest rates, believe the crisis will have a lasting impact on the economy.

Asked when living standards enjoyed before the crisis would return, King said: "The research makes it clear that the impact of these crises lasts for many years. It is not like an ordinary recession, where you lose output and get it back quickly. We may not get the lost output back for very many years, if ever." ...

As people elsewhere are killed for their belief in democracy and the rule of law, the supposed controversies of British politics inevitably rather fade. By comparison, we live in an Eden of stability, and argue over mere increments: to be getting in a lather about Cameron and Clegg can easily feel not just indulgent, but indecent.

Still, in the broadest terms, there is a tale to be told that includes Westminster as well as Tripoli and Cairo, and underlines what watershed times these are. Much of the world's current tumult is traceable to the long and tangled fall-out from the crash of 2008 (note the role of rising food prices in Middle Eastern unrest). And though most commentators seem either too polite or deluded to recognise it, the British side of this story is rapidly being revealed: not just cuts, but the most far-reaching attempt to remodel British society in 60 years, undertaken at speed, and with a breathtaking disregard for what was offered to the country only months ago. Last week, Labour MP John McDonnell wrote to the Guardian arguing that the increasing gap between claims of fiscal necessity and a transparently ideological project merited another election. It won't happen, but he has a point.

The other day, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein's underrated book The Shock Doctrine, and was reminded of a celebrated quotation from Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

The Klein book, published in 2007, examines how Friedman's instructions were followed, and free-market "disaster capitalism" forced on Iraq, eastern Europe, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, in the wake of wars, natural disasters and revolutions (watch out Libya and Egypt). Four years after it came out, I was struck by a simple and mind-boggling fact. Here, as the coalition sets about the benefits system, marketises the NHS, threatens to do the same to schools and now apparently plans to put the entire public sector out to tender, what crisis was it that set the stage? Answer: that of the very economic model that is being pursued as never before. Welcome, then, to a new phase of history, when a crisis of laissez-faire capitalism begets that same system triumphant, something which brings to mind not so much Friedman, as Marshal Foch: "My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking." ...

The governor said he had “thought about” hiring outside agitators to disrupt demonstrations by thousands of union workers against a bill that would remove their collective bargaining rights.

His remarks are only likely to stiffen opposition to his proposals. On the call, Mr Walker joked about bringing a baseball bat to a meeting with Democratic leaders, and said it would "be outstanding" to be flown out to California by businessman David Koch for a good time after the battle was over.

Mr Koch donated $43,000 to the governor’s 2010 campaign and with his brother Charles own Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-owned company in America which has significant operations in Wisconsin.

The conversation was posted on the Buffalo Beast, a left-leaning website based in New York. The governor also said he would tell 14 Democrat state senators, whose absence denied the Senate a quorum needed for a vote on his proposal, that he was "willing to sit down and talk" with them but "only ... if they came back to the Capitol with all 14 of them".

Mr Walker said on the call that his legal advisers believed the presence of the 14 in the Capitol building alone, but not the Senate chamber, would allow the Republicans to declare a quorum in the chamber and pass the measure. ...

Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel prizewinning economist and so-called father of microfinance, faces being ousted from the bank that he founded to help poor people in Bangladesh and across the developing world.

Yunus, the managing director of the Grameen Bank, which has lent small sums to millions of deprived people to help them start or run their own businesses as a first step out of poverty since being created in 1983, has been caught in a bitter political battle in his homeland of Bangladesh.

The campaign to remove Yunus, mounted mainly by politicians, is to intensify this week ahead of a key board meeting next Monday, which his supporters believe will involve an attempt to force the 70-year-old to quit as managing director.

Last week, Bangladesh's finance minister said Yunus should stand down following alleged irregularities in operations.

Abul Maal Abdul Muhith called Yunus a "man of high standing and respect" but "now old". The minister, who is 77, said: "We need to redefine the bank's role and bring it under closer regulation."

Supporters of Yunus fear politicians want to bring Grameen under government control. Yunus did not respond directly to the minister's comments but told reporters: "Any transition [would] essentially require a friendly environment and support from the inside and outside stakeholders of the bank to ensure that we continue to be totally committed to our mission for and with the poor."

Other government comments have been less polite. In December, the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, accused Yunus of treating Grameen as his personal property and claimed the group was "sucking blood from the poor".

Supporters have branded the claim as grotesque, especially as Yunus has won a Nobel prize for his work on reducing poverty. ...

... The attacks on Yunus come at a time when microlending – once hailed as a model that would change the lives of hundreds of millions in the developing roads – faces increasing political hostility.

In India, politicians have accused bankers of profiteering from the poor and, in some places, banned further lending or recovery of debts. ...

Confusion caused by wording in a popular mortgage deal is costing Lloyds £500m as the bank is being forced to write to 600,000 customers and repay up to 300,000 of them.

Payments will range from a few to potentially thousands of pounds per customer.

Just days before it publishes 2010 figures expected to show £2bn of profits, the bank admitted it had reached a voluntary agreement with the Financial Services Authority about the mortgages, which were sold under the Halifax brand.

Lloyds rescued Halifax's parent company, HBOS, at the height of the banking crisis in September 2008 and has already been saddled with billions of pounds of bad debts caused by poor lending decisions in HBOS's corporate banking arm. Lloyds shares were among the largest fallers in the FTSE 100 on Monday.

The latest problem related to 600,000 Halifax customers who were sent a mortgage offer between 20 September 2004 and 16 September 2007 which contained information about the bank's standard variable rate (SVR).

Halifax, the country's biggest mortgage lender, was capping the SVR to customers who were also being locked into the mortgages through early repayment charges. The cap was originally set at 2% above the Bank of England base rate but in October 2008 this was lifted to 3%.

However, the bank did not write to all its customers at the time to tell them of the change, only contacting those who were locked in on mortgage deals.

Halifax hit a problem in January 2009 when the Bank of England cut interest rates by half a percentage point to 1.5% – at the time their lowest level – although they have since been reduced to 0.5%.

As a result of this interest rate cut, Halifax's SVR was more than 2% above the Bank of England's rate – leaving some customers confused, as they believed the rate was capped at 2% not 3%. In reality, the cap may not have applied to them at all if they were locked in through one of the bank's early redemption changes.

Lloyds is now agreeing to made a "goodwill payment" to some 300,000 customers, regardless of whether or not the deal had applied to them. Those who were warned of the change in the cap – customers facing redemption changes – will receive a flat payment of £250, while the others will receive payments based on the difference in repayments caused by the change in the rate. ...

Protesters have targeted more than 35 branches of Barclays bank, with pickets, poetry readings and even colouring competitions, in another of a series of days of direct action organised by the UK Uncut group.

They were highlighting Barclays' admission that it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn in profits.

Several branches were closed to the public as protesters staged peaceful sit-ins, impromptu reading groups and creches in dozens of cities and towns across Britain, including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool and Lewes.

At Tottenham Court Road, one of eight branches of Barclays in London to be targeted, some 40 to 50 people heard comedian Josie Lawrence pledge her support, before a group of people held a two-hour sit-in in the bank.

Supporters of UK Uncut said the plan was not to shut the banks down but to "open them up", occupy them and transform them into "something people need but will be cut".

Ruth Griffiths, 36, a UK Uncut supporter, said: "Today we are transforming the banks into schools, leisure centres, and libraries and forests, because it's society that's too big to fail, not a broken banking system."

The group staged "debate" points outside several of the branches and invited passersby to discuss the cuts and the banks. Most of the gathered volunteers said people were angry at Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, saying publicly that the time for banks to apologise was over. ...

Ta much, dear Ar0cketman

On 1 February, Issan Nadir tipped petrol on his clothes and set fire to himself outside the education ministry in the Moroccan capital of Rabat. It was yet another desperate act of self-immolation in a region where the example set by Muhammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit seller who sparked a wave of revolution, has been imitated from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia.

The flames were doused before Nadir, a 27-year-old volunteer teacher demanding a paid job, could do as much damage to himself as Bouazizi. Video footage seen by the Guardian shows firefighters frantically putting out flames in front of the ministry.

After a week in Rabat's Ibn Sina hospital, Nadir is recovering in his home town of Safi. "He doesn't want to see anyone," says his friend and fellow protester Hafid Libi."If they don't do anything, there may be more of the same."

Nadir is not the only protester to have set fire to himself. Last week 26-year-old Mourad Raho died in Benguerir, 36 miles north of Marrakech. Five similar attempts have been reported in recent weeks.

Popular demonstrations called for this Sunday will be a test of both public upset with the regime led by King Mohammed VI and how far Morocco – which claims to be more liberal than its north African neighbours – is prepared to tolerate protest. ...

Barclays Bank has been forced to admit it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn of profits.

The admission stunned politicians and tax campaigners. It was revealed on the eve of a day of protests planned against the high street banks by activists from UK Uncut, a group set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who lobbied Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, to reveal the tax paid by the bank, described the figure – just 1% of its 2009 profits – as "shocking".

The current rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%, although global banks such as Barclays – which has hundreds of overseas subsidiaries, including many in tax havens – do not generate all of their profits in their domestic market.

Max Lawson, of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, said: "This is proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us, paying billions in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax.

"If banks paid their fair share we could avoid the worst of the cuts and help those hit hardest by the financial crisis they did nothing to cause."

UK Uncut, which has also campaigned against Vodafone, Boots and Top Shop, intends to take its first national day of action against the banks on Saturday with protesters expected to bring more than 30 high street branches of Barclays to a standstill.

On Tuesday – when Barclays announced 2010 profits of £6.1bn and a 23% rise in average pay in its investment banking arm, Barclays Capital – the tax campaigners turned a London branch of the bank into a library.

The disclosure of the size of Barclays' corporation tax bill was made in a letter by Diamond to Umunna, who had asked the Barclays boss about the tax paid by the bank when he appeared before the Treasury select committee of MPs last month. ...

More than 180 miles west of Barclays Bank's glistening skyscraper in the heart of Canary Wharf, a small group of tax protesters will gather outside one of its lesser-known branches.

At 10am on Saturday in Guildhall Square in Carmarthen, south-west Wales, a handful of campaigners will enter their local Barclays branch and unfurl their banner in protest against tax avoidance.

It will be one of 35 Barclays branches across the UK being occupied as part of UK Uncut, a viral protest collective set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

The co-ordinated occupations of Barclays branches will mark the first national day of action against banks by UK Uncut, which has already forced the temporary closure of more than 100 high street stores.

The group has previously targeted companies such as Boots and Vodafone accused of avoiding millions of pounds in tax. Targeting Barclays has proved particularly popular, with more protests planned in large cities as well as smaller towns such as Grimsby, Hastings and Shrewsbury.

And as campaigners turn their attention to banks, and Barclays in particular, it emerged their Twitter-driven campaign has spread to the United States, where similar protests are being organised under the banner US Uncut.

"The folks in the UK who decided to stand up, organise and speak out are a daily inspiration to me and the rest of the movement in the States," said Carl Gibson, 23, one of the founders of the first US Uncut group in Jackson, Mississippi.

"The message is simple – before you sacrifice hard-working public-sector employees' jobs and necessary public programmes, why not first make the richest of the rich pay their fair share in taxes?"

Gibson, who started the first US group a week ago after reading an article in the Nation, said there were already US Uncut "chapters" in 20 states and at least 10 demonstrations planned for 26 February – the date of UK Uncut's second "day of action" against the banks. ...

An attempt by Barclays to suppress details of its allegedly massive tax avoidance schemes two years ago ended in farce. The high street bank went to court in the middle of the night to gag the Guardian but was outmanoeuvred by free-spirited souls on the internet.

It showed the legal system struggling to keep documents secret even after they were freely available on the web.

The story emerged in March 2009 when a whistleblower leaked internal Barclays memos to the Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable.

The memos – passed on to the newspaper – described how a 2007 scheme called Project Knight proposed to save tax by manipulating loans totalling more than $16bn (£9.8bn), through a web of firms in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and the United States.

The memos also quoted advice from lawyers on how to blunt any challenges from HM Revenue & Customs. The whistleblower alleged: "It is a commonly held view that no agency in the US or the UK has the resources or the commitment to challenge [Barclays]."

Freshfields, Barclays' lawyers, toiled into the night to compel the Guardian to remove the documents from the website. Geraldine Proudler, a solicitor acting for the Guardian, was woken by a high court judge telephoning at 2am and asked to justify their publication. At 2.31am, Mr Justice Ouseley, over the phone, ordered that the documents be removed from the website, by which time 127 people had read them. ...

Attack is the best defence and this government is pretty good at it. But holding the line on cuts gets harder as 90 Lib Dem councillors and council leaders break silence in a letter of protest to the Times warning of the damage to the economy and the most vulnerable. Now some Tory councils are joining in. All this is before the great cull of jobs and services begins in earnest in April, when notice periods end and the redundant start to join the unemployment register.

Esoteric ideological debates over "localism" have become pretty meaningless – though the right find it a useful distraction from the brutality of the cuts. The coalition brand of localism means the axe is devolved, along with the blame. Brazen denial, outrageous abuse of figures, and accusations of (Labour) council profligacy are their weapons of choice.

It's easy to bamboozle voters in the impenetrable thickets of local authority funding formulae. Once a minister sinks a Newsnight debate into a row over whether a council is losing 8% or 25%, the hope is viewers give up. How can they know who's right? Side-swiping at extravagance, from chocolate biscuits to chief executive's pay, is a cunning diversionary counter-attack. Some top pay is excessive, and the local government secretary Eric Pickles forcing councils to publish managerial pay is no bad thing. But if chief executives were cut to the minimum wage, the saving would still be a drop in the ocean of these cuts.

There is just one extraordinary fact everyone needs to know. The cuts have fallen hardest on the most deprived councils, while the richest areas have suffered least. Whichever way the figures are construed, the highest percentage of cuts hit the poorest places hardest: Liverpool worst, followed by Manchester; Knowsley; Blackburn with Darwen; South Tyneside; Hackney; Newham; Hartlepool; Tower Hamlets and so on.

Now look up at the top and some councils actually gain – such as Oliver Letwin's Dorset. Among the least affected in spending power are such places as Vince Cable's Richmond upon Thames, Windsor and Maidenhead, Wokingham, and Michael Gove's Surrey. ...

A high court judge has ordered the education secretary, Michael Gove, to reconsider his decision to cancel scores of multimillion-pound school rebuilding projects.

Mr Justice Holman said Gove's actions over the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative last year had been "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power".

Under the £55bn scheme introduced by Labour, every secondary school in England was to be either rebuilt or refurbished. More than 700 schools' building projects were cancelled when the scheme was scrapped in July.

Justice Holman told the high court in London that the education secretary had acted unlawfully in failing to consult local authorities over the decision and had broken the law by failing to give "due regard" to equality legislation.

The result is a major embarrassment for Gove and may result in the government paying compensation costs to six councils who had taken the case to the high court claiming that the cancellation of the school building projects had been "arbitrary and legally flawed". ...

Britain's fastest-growing protest movement is to target scores of high street banks in the next stage of its campaign against government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

Activists from UK Uncut have, over the past five months, caused the temporary closure of more than 100 branches of high street stores accused of avoiding millions of pounds in tax.

The group will stage its first national day of action against UK banks on 19 February.

"The idea this time is not to shut these places down but to open up high street banks, occupying them and using them for things that may be more useful for the community," said Daniel Garvin from the group.

He and other protesters have mobilised thousands of activists using the Twitter hashtag #UKuncut since the group was formed in October.

The protests, which come as banks reveal multimillion-pound bonus packages over the next few weeks, will involve a range of peaceful – and creative – direct actions.

"If libraries are being closed in their area, people may decide to stage a read-in in the bank," said Garvin.

"The housing benefit cap means people are losing their homes, so some groups may opt for a sleep-in. Theatres are being shut, so others have talked about staging a play.

"Health provision is being cut, so what about setting up a walk-in clinic? Education funding is being savaged so how about holding a lecture series?" ...

George Osborne's efforts to end the war on bankers were crumbling as Vince Cable, the business secretary, said he was still determined to end "unjustified and outrageous" salaries in the sector and his Liberal Democrat ally Lord Oakeshott left his party's frontbench after damning the government's attempts to curb bonuses.

Oakeshott, who was not in the government but spoke for the junior coalition partner on Treasury matters in the Lords, stood down shortly after he criticised officials working on the government's deal with the bankers and said: "If this is robust action on bank bonuses, my name's Bob Diamond."

Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, said Oakeshott had stood down by mutual consent.

Osborne hailed his deal as the moment to move beyond retribution to economic recovery. ...

Senior managers at Oxford and Cambridge universities are intent on charging £9,000 a year in tuition fees, the maximum allowed, it has emerged.

A consultation paper shows Cambridge wants to almost triple fees to £9,000 as soon as it can in autumn next year. The university will charge the maximum of £3,375 for this autumn.

Students whose family income is below £25,000 would pay £6,000 and receive a maintenance bursary of up to £1,625, under plans from Cambridge's working group on fees, published internally for consultation. Means testing will taper this £3,000 reduction to zero when family income exceeds £42,000.

Oxford's pro-vice-chancellor, Tony Monaco, has said fees of less than £8,000 would lose the university money because of national cuts to teaching and other grants. Hhe told a Congregation, a formal meeting of senior members of the university, that Oxford subsidised undergraduates by £80m.

"That is already straining research and infrastructure ... Were we to charge £9,000, the additional income would be £14m a year." This would be used to improve outreach activities and waive fees for the poorest students.

The university calculates that to waivefees for the poorest by £3,000, would be the equivalent of charging all undergraduates £8,500. Oxford will make its decision on fees in March. ...

Number 10 considered proposals to protect David Cameron's flagship "big society" project from the harshest of the council spending cuts but the high-level moves were blocked by the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, the Guardian has learned.

The voluntary sector faces an estimated £1.14bn cut in its local government grants this year, triggering warnings this week that Britain's volunteer army will be destroyed. Liverpool has abandoned a big society pilot project because the cuts have hit the voluntary groups who are supposed to take over some services under the programme.

The Guardian has established that ministers and No 10 formulated plans to reward councils for their contribution to the big society or force them to show they were cutting their own costs as much as their contracts with charities. But Pickles rejected the proposals.

A senior Whitehall source said Pickles had opposed the plans formulated by Steve Hilton, the No 10 strategy chief, the Cabinet Office ministers Oliver Letwin and Francis Maude and the big society "tsar", Nat Wei. Pickles instead agreed to hold one-to-one conversations with the worst-offending councils that were "gung-ho" about the cuts.

"He [Pickles] talks a lot about a radical decentralisation and big society, but it's still very municipalist. He won't go the full whack," the source said.

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, executive director of Community Service Volunteers (CSV), warned that "draconian" cuts were threatening to undermine the big society and that the government had failed to sell the policy to the public. ...

Protests against the planned closure of more than 450 library services were staged today. Library users, authors, parents and children took part in "read-ins" and demonstrations at libraries in south Yorkshire, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Dorset and Oxfordshire, where 20 of the 43 libraries still running are earmarked for withdrawal of funds.

TV presenter Kirsty Young, musician Billy Bragg and literary stars such as Philip Pullman, Colin Dexter, Mark Haddon, Kate Mosse and Julia Donaldson were involved in Save Our Libraries events.

At Sheffield central library a mass "shhh-in" was organised by Library Workers for a Brighter Future. On the stroke of 11am, protesters joined in a chorus of "shhh" then cheered for their library, before taking out the maximum 15 books each on their tickets – the theory being that you cannot close down a library while most books are on loan. In Dorset, Bragg attended an event where library users also attempted to empty its shelves. A rally was staged outside Bolton's central library, and in Cambridge a "flashmob book reading" surprised the public outside the city's main library.

For Pullman and Dexter the planned closures around Oxford have a particular irony. In September they were at the forefront of the city's bid to become Unesco's World Book Capital in 2014. "At the time we had the meetings I said we would have a wonderful chance," said Dexter. "But if the committee come along to Somertown in North Oxford we would have to take them and show them a library building with boarded-up windows. It is a sad commentary and what makes a lot of us very cross is that the argument deployed in defence is simply to ask us what we would cut. We are here to say that this is a terrible, shameful business."

Oxfordshire County Council believes the library cuts could save £2m over four years and is offering an option for local groups to bid for grants and then run libraries voluntarily. ...

The coalition was accused of leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of loan sharks after deciding that it would not provide fresh funding for a series of schemes aimed at helping households stay out of debt.

Ministers have said there will be no money for the Financial Inclusion Fund, which bankrolled debt advice services, when funding ends this year. The government is also refusing to guarantee the future of the Growth Fund – which dispensed low-interest loans. The Saving Gateway fund, which encouraged those on tax credits and benefits to save, has also been axed.

Between them, the three funds had received £200m of taxpayers' money since they were created by the previous government.But the timing of the decision to discontinue funding has dismayed debt experts. Last Friday, it emerged that 135,000 people were declared insolvent in England and Wales last year, the highest figure since 1960.

Doubts about the future of the Growth Fund, which aims to increase the availability of affordable credit by working with not-for-profit lenders, have particularly alarmed debt experts.

The Department for Work and Pensions said that "no decisions have yet been made regarding future funding options for the Growth Fund".

More than 430,000 applications for loans were made to the fund from July 2006 to December 2010. Of these, more than 370,000 loans totalling almost £161m were approved.

"If these services disappear, there's a very real danger that loan sharks and doorstep lenders will fill the void and suck people into chronic levels of debt and hardship," said David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, which represents England's housing associations and runs a scheme, My Home Finance, providing low-cost loans for borrowers using money from the Growth Fund. ...

The UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was warned about Bernard Madoff in October 2008, two months before the fraudster confessed that his investment empire was a sham, according to a lawsuit unsealed in New York.

The allegation was made in a suit filed against JP Morgan, one of Madoff's banks, on behalf of the fraudster's victims.

According to the suit, filed by the court-appointed trustee Irving Picard, executives at JP Morgan allegedly told Soca that they were concerned about "investment performance achieved by its [Madoff's business] funds which is so consistently and significantly ahead of its peers, year-on-year, even in the prevailing market conditions, as to appear too good to be true – meaning that it probably is".

The lawsuit, which cites internal emails, claims that employees in the bank's "equity exotics & hybrids" desk found that the so-called feeder funds which brought in new investors knew little about Madoff's operations and asked few questions. "It's almost a cult [Madoff] seems to have fostered," one employee observed.

The suit is damning of JP Morgan's alleged role in the scandal. It claims that Soca was informed by JP Morgan "only in an effort to protect its own investments" and the bank did nothing further to stop the fraud even though it had informed the authorities. ...

The industrial city of Abu Rawash sits in the desert beyond the pyramids. You reach it down a dusty road that seems to lead to nowhere. Then the factories and warehouses begin: Toyota, Hyundai, Mazda and Jeep deserted save for a handful of security guards sitting in front of a vacant parking lot for absent staff.

Outside the gates of the Toyota warehouse Ayman Ibrahim is talking to the gatekeeper. The factories are closed, the man tells Ibrahim, who owns a window business on the same site. They won't reopen until at least mid-week. Perhaps even Friday. No one really knows.

The closures in places such as Abu Rawash have been accompanied by calls from unions for an indefinite general strike. "I'm losing £10,000 pounds a week," says Ibrahim. "But it's worth it, I've been to the protest in Tahrir Square for the past three days with my kids. Mubarak is costing me money, but he has been costing Egypt money for 30 years."

It is not only Ibrahim whose business is being hurt financially by the crisis. All of Egypt is hurting. On the main road close to the factories the large Carrefour-Dandy mall is as deserted as the car plants. Egypt's stock market, the bourse, is closed after losing 16% in value last week. Moody's and Fitch – the debt rating companies – have revised their outlook for the country's bonds to negative. The country's banks have been closed for the past two days in fear of a run on the county's bank system.

It is damaging Egypt at all levels. Already some bank machines have run out of money. Some petrol stations have begun running out of fuel. Economists are warning of the risks of shortages of staples, such as bread and water.

Elsewhere shops are shuttered. Those not shut, like some in the paved streets in the financial district close to the epicenter of Egypt's uprising in Tahrir Square, are empty. The owners sit on plastic chairs. "This is very, very bad," says Ah Mahmoud, who owns a clothes shop called Polo. "The problems between the people and president Hosni Mubarak are bad for business. Bad for work. With no money coming in how will we eat?" ...

Bankers and lawyers are believed to be high on the list of potential targets of a begging letter aiming to persuade them to make a donation.

The proposal, which is in its infancy, would help relieve some of the stress placed on council services and could mean some services which are currently facing the axe, such as libraries, survive.

Camden council in north London is proposing sending the open letter to selected residents. The scheme would be anonymous, completely voluntary and rely entirely on individuals’ generosity.

Councillors will point out that Camden, which covers Primrose Hill, Regents Park and Hampstead, is the fourth most wealthy borough in the country in terms of residents, but is facing severe cuts.

Bankers who might expect begging letters include Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group; Nigel Higgins, the chief executive of NM Rothschild; Michael Sherwood, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs; and Lord Peter Levene, the chairman of Lloyds of London. ...

With Egypt in turmoil, it’s widely being reported that the United States gives $1.5 billion in foreign aid to the government in Cairo each year. And with the U.S. at risk of running a $1.5 trillion deficit this year, that means it’s only a matter of time before budget hawks start picking apart U.S. foreign aid.

The $1.5 billion requested for Egypt in the president’s fiscal year 2011 budget puts the country fourth on the list of recipients for aid managed by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development. Only Afghanistan ($3.9 billion), Pakistan ($3.1 billion) and Israel ($3 billion) have more aid requested for them. Most of the money for these four countries is allocated for “peace and security,” a broad category that includes combating drug traffickers and terrorists as well as preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In Egypt specifically, $1.3 billion of the requested amount this year is for “peace and security.” ...

It should have been a chance to trumpet recovery in cosy Alpine surroundings. At Davos, David Cameron and George Osborne wanted to sell British austerity, discipline and economic stability to the world's most powerful people. It didn't quite work out like that.

The week started with dismal figures showing that Britain's economy had shrunk by 0.5% in the final quarter of 2010 and that questions were being asked about deficit-cutting without long-term growth. And instead of getting plaudits at the World Economic Forum's annual summit in Switzerland, wherever they went British ministers were confronted by economists casting doubt on British policy.

There was no respite when they met anxious financiers alarmed by "banker bashing". At a closed-door session today as the Alpine jamboree drew to an end, more than 40 bosses of banking and insurance companies met finance ministers from nations including Britain, Canada, France, South Africa, Turkey and Sweden.

A guest list obtained by the Observer reveals that those invited included Bank of America's boss, Brian Moynihan; Standard Chartered's chief, Peter Sands; the Lloyd's of London chairman, Lord Levene; the UK head of Santander, Ana Patricia Botín; and Aviva's chief executive, Andrew Moss.

In emollient form afterwards, Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, said the get-together had been an opportunity to deliver "very heartfelt thanks" to governments for rescuing the banking system.

"We have to recognise, although there is some fatigue, that an awful lot has been achieved over the last few years," said Diamond. "We should say thanks to the central bankers and regulators because we're operating in a much safer system than a couple of years ago."

But France's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, made it clear that the discussion had been robust: "The best way for the banking system to say 'thank you' would be with good financing of the economy, sensible compensation packages and a refinancing of their capital."

Impatient with criticism of bonuses, tax avoidance and lending to small businesses, many banks used the occasion to turn up the volume in protest at what they see as undue punishment. JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, snapped last week that banks were not prepared to simply "bend over and accept it" from regulators. The Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, declared that extra regulations on banks would simply encourage people to put their money into riskier hedge funds. ...

A former commodities trader threatened to torture his regulator until he would "beg to be killed", according to court documents.

Vincent McCrudden, founder of Alnbri Asset Management, was arrested in New York last month and charged with drawing up an "execution list" of more than 40 employees of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and other agencies.

Details of one threatening email McCrudden wrote to Dan Driscoll, chief operating officer of the National Futures Association, have now been released in court papers.

McCrudden said he had hired "professionals" to torture and kill Driscoll. "They have things they will do to you that will make you beg to be killed, shot, anything to get away from the pain," he wrote. "And the great thing is, you will be the first, but not the last."

According to his website, McCrudden is a former professional football player and a 25-year Wall Street veteran. The CFTC filed a civil enforcement lawsuit filed against McCrudden in December, according to prosecutors, who also say that McCrudden has been the subject of various enforcement or disciplinary proceedings over several years. ...

The international speculator George Soros warned David Cameron tonight that the government would push the British economy back into recession unless it modified its hardline austerity package.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, the hedge fund owner who famously wrecked the reputation for financial competence of the last Conservative administration on Black Wednesday said the mix of tax increases and spending cuts planned by the coalition was unsustainable.

Soros's suggestion that the UK needed a plan B came only hours after Cameron insisted in fierce Commons exchanges with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, that there would be no change of government policy following the unexpected news yesterday that the economy contracted by 0.5% in the final three months of 2010.

"I think they may be right in embarking on it [the austerity programme] but I think they will probably have the sense that they will have to modify it when the effects are felt," Soros said. "I don't think it can possibly be implemented without pushing the economy into a recession." Noting that the initial market reaction to the government's tough stance had been positive, Soros added: "We will have to see it unfold. My expectation is that it will prove to be unsustainable." ...

Tunisia's president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has fled his country after weeks of mass protests culminated in a victory for people power over one of the Arab world's most repressive regimes.

Ben Ali had taken refuge in Saudi Arabia, at the end of an extraordinary day which had seen the declaration of a state of emergency, the evacuation of tourists of British and other nationalities, and an earthquake for the authoritarian politics of the Middle East and north Africa.

After hours of conflicting reports had him criss-crossing southern Europe by air, the Saudi state news agency confirmed he had arrived in the kingdom together with his family. Earlier, French media reported that Nicolas Sarkozy had refused Ben Ali refuge, although France denied that any request had been received.

In Tunisia, prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi announced that he had taken over as interim president, vowing to respect the constitution and restore stability for Tunisia's 10.5 million citizens. "I call on the sons and daughters of Tunisia, of all political and intellectual persuasions, to unite to allow our beloved country to overcome this difficult period and to return to stability," he said in a broadcast.

But there was confusion among protesters about what will happen next, and concern that Ben Ali might be able to return before elections could be held. "We must remain vigilant," warned an email from the Free Tunis group, monitoring developments to circumvent an official news blackout. ...

Even while under curfew following the ouster of their long-serving authoritarian leader, Tunisians on Saturday experienced newfound freedoms online as their acting president promised a "new phase" for his embattled land.

Filters on websites like Facebook and YouTube, put in place under former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, were dropped and Internet speed picked up considerably -- a development that followed the new government's vow to ease restrictions on freedoms.

In addition, three Tunisian journalists -- including two bloggers critical of Ben Ali -- have been freed from jail, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Saturday.

These developments come as Fouad Mebazaa was sworn in as the country's acting leader on Saturday, after Ben Ali and his family took refuge in Saudi Arabia following days of angry street protests against the government.

Speaking on national TV, Mebazaa, who had been the country's parliamentary speaker, promised to ensure the nation's "stability," respect its constitution and "pursue the best interest of the nation." ...

As senior officials of the Jamaican Government rush to stave off a major diplomatic row with Honduras in the aftermath of an incident which left the captain of a Honduran fishing vessel dead, National Security Minister Dwight Nelson has dispatched a warning signal that all efforts will be made to protect Jamaica's economic zone.

Nelson disclosed late yesterday that the matter had been placed in the hands of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, which plans to initiate talks with Honduras through Jamaica's embassy in Mexico.

There is no Honduran embassy in Jamaica.

Yesterday, the Latin American Herald Tribune stated that Honduran navy chief Rear Admiral Juan Pablo Rodriguez claimed "excessive force" was used against the fishermen and the foreign ministry should file "the highest-level protest" with the Jamaican Government.

However, Nelson served a stern warning that local coastguard personnel manning Jamaican waters would not back down in the face of the potential row over the incident, which reportedly left at least three other Honduran crew members wounded.

"As minister of national security, I am stating that as of now, we are going to get tough on persons who encroach on Jamaica's economic zone," Nelson told The Gleaner.

He said Prime Minister Bruce Golding met with him, Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Dr Christopher Tufton, and Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Kenneth Baugh.

Tufton complained that Honduran fishermen plunder the fishing resources of Jamaica on a weekly basis.

"And when they come, they come with 150 people on the boats. So when they go diving, they take everything they can find under the surface."

Tufton pointed out that the issue was more complex than just encroachment on Jamaican waters.

"It's an economic issue, it's a diplomatic issue, it's a national security issue. It's a health issue also because it is not only lobster that they carry on these vessels; they carry wild animals that they trade - parrots, monkeys, that sort of thing. There are lots of issues that have to be sorted out." ...

Fresh rioting broke out in Algiers today as police were deployed around mosques and football matches were suspended after protests over food prices and unemployment.

Riot police armed with teargas and batons maintained a strong presence around the Algerian capital's main mosques. In the popular Belcourt district, rioting resumed after Friday prayers. Young protesters pelted police with stones and blocked access to the area.

The official APS news agency said protesters ransacked government buildings, bank branches and post offices in several eastern cities overnight, including Constantine, Jijel, Setif and Bouira. In Ras el Oued this morning, buildings belonging to the state-run gas utility Sonelgaz, the council and the tax authority were seriously damaged along with several schools, APS reported.

Earlier this week hundreds of youths clashed with police in several cities and ransacked stores in the capital. Police used teargas to disperse youths in the Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued, where the most violent protests occurred. ...

... You have to go back a thousand years to find a time when the world was genuinely western and eastern at the same time. Then, China’s Song dynasty presided over the world’s largest cities, mastered gunpowder and printed paper money. At around the same time India’s Chola empire ruled the seas to Indonesia, and the Abbasid caliphate dominated from Africa to Persia. Byzantium swayed and lulled in weakness both due to and despite its vastness. Only in Europe is this medieval landscape viewed negatively.

This was a truly multi-polar world. Both ends of Eurasia and the powers in between called their own shots, just as in our own time China, India and the Arab/Islamic community increasingly do as well. There is another reason why the metaphor is apt. In medieval times, the Crusades, and the Silk Road, linked Eurasia in the first global trading system – just as the globalised routes of trade are doing today.

The merchant houses of Bruges and Venice financed transcontinental ventures to discover sources of spices and other riches. Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in China, but only after admiring the vineyards of Kashgar and being awestruck by the material abundance of Xi’an. Arab pilgrim Ibn Battuta made an even greater parallel voyage from Morocco to the Far East, visiting the thriving civilisations of southern India and Sumatra along the way.

Now, globalisation is again doing much the same, diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists. This force of entropy will not be reversed for decades – if not for centuries. As was the case a millennium ago, diplomacy now takes place among anyone who is someone; its prerequisite is not sovereignty but authority.

Some see contrary trends in the light of the financial crisis. But given the power of the forces pushing a new medievalism, it is too simple to speak of a “return of the state” evident in the bail-out of Wall Street and the stimulus packages of governments. Far more revealing about the future is the crumbling of most of the post-colonial world from Africa to the Middle East to South Asia, where over-population, corrupt governance, ethnic grievances and collapsing infrastructure are pushing many states towards failure.

From Congo and Sudan to Pakistan, many “states” are likely to see a move towards a hybrid public-private system of governance. Take Afghanistan, where a postmodern arrangement between international extractive companies, the Kabul government, local warlords and foreign peacekeepers seems as likely an outcome as any – a neo-medieval model also being used in Africa and elsewhere too. ...



Plus ça change, plus ça même chose, mes chers.

Ta much, dear Ar0cketman

It's a deep pit in the Mojave desert. But it could hold the key to America challenging China's technological domination of the 21st century.

At the bottom of the vast site, beneath 6 metres (20ft) of bright emerald-green water, runs a rich seam of ores that are hardly household names but are rapidly emerging as the building blocks of the hi-tech future.

The mine is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements outside China. Eight years ago, it was shut down in a tacit admission that the US was ceding the market to China. Now, the owners have secured final approval to restart operations, and hope to begin production soon.

"We will probably never be the largest [mine] in the world again. It will be hard to overcome China's status in that regard, but we do think we will be a very significant supplier," Mark Smith, chief executive of Molycorp Minerals which owns the mine, told reporters during a tour of the site.

So far as the Obama administration is concerned, the mine can't open soon enough. A US department of energy report warned on 15 December that, in the absence of mines such as this one, America risks losing control over the production of a host of technologies, from smart phones to smart bombs, electric car batteries to wind turbines, because of a virtual Chinese monopoly on the rare earth metals essential to their production.

China controls 97% of global rare earth metals production. Such total domination of a strategic resource became impossible to ignore in October when China cut exports of rare earth elements by more than 70% over the previous year, disrupting manufacturing in Japan, Europe and the US. Prices of even the cheapest of the 17 rare earth elements rose 40%.

Now America, like Japan and Europe, is desperate to find alternatives. "Reopening domestic production is an important part of a globalised supply chain," David Sandalow, the energy department's assistant secretary for international affairs told a seminar in Washington. ...

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.

"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.

"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."

New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."

American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.

Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk. ...

Inside a freezing, derelict military barracks on the crest of a hill in the middle of Germany, Bernd Niesel single-handedly carries on with his labour of love.

The 67-year-old retired serviceman oversees a shrine to the Deutsche Mark, the symbol of postwar German success, running a small museum devoted to the remarkable birth and lamented death of the currency. The mark was born behind barbed wire in total secrecy in this barracks in 1948 in what became known as the "conclave of Rothwesten". The currency met an early death at the age of 50 in 1998 (though notes and coins were in circulation until 2001). But as the German opinion polls show every week at the moment, 30%-40% are hoping for a resurrection.

"Certainly for the older generation," said Niesel, "the feeling is very much one of nostalgia – 'if only we had the D-mark again'." The sentiment is hardly surprising given the turmoil besetting the D-mark's successor, the euro.

Only 12 years after it was launched to great fanfare and after early success, the euro is fighting for its short life. Two of the 16 countries using the currency have had to be bailed out, despite the ban on such rescues in 1992's Maastricht treaty that created Europe's monetary union.

Following the traumas of Greece and Ireland, Portugal may be next in line. There are worries about Spain.

In Brussels tomorrow the leaders of 27 countries, as well as the heads of the European commission and the European Central Bank, gather for their seventh EU summit this year, all consumed by the crisis surrounding the single currency.

The air of rancour and pessimism is pervasive. Bitterness is widespread, particularly among the smaller EU countries and those who feel they are being bullied by the most powerful.

"There is no appetite anywhere for another Franco-German plan to save the euro," said an east European government minister. ...

Mark Madoff, the eldest son of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff, has been found hanged in his downtown Manhattan apartment on the second anniversary of the day his father turned himself in to authorities.

His death, which was reported to the police by his father-in-law at 7.30am today, came days after he was named in a new lawsuit by the liquidators of his father's empire.

"He was found hanged in his apartment. It was an apparent suicide," police spokesman Paul Browne said. But authorities said he left no suicide note.

Mark Madoff and his brother, Andrew, were under investigation but had not faced any criminal charges in the $50bn (£31bn) Ponzi scheme that led to their father being jailed.

His death also came on the cut-off date for trustees looking to clawback losses from the fraud to file final lawsuits.

On Wednesday, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for the liquidation of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities, the fraudster's main US firm, named all the directors of the London subsidiary in a new lawsuit.

The high court complaint – which named Mark and his brother Andrew, their uncle Peter, as well as Sonja Kohn, who has been charged separately for other Madoff-related fraud – will attempt to recoup $80m (£50.5bn). ...

Butterscotch the animatronic pony was flying off the e-shelves at retailer John Lewis yesterday, thought to be the UK's busiest online shopping day of the year and dubbed Cyber Monday by industry experts.

The life-sized Shetland pony, which stands more than 3ft tall and will set parents back a cool £199 (batteries not included), joined kids' VTech cameras and the John Lewis wooden play-kitchen as the retailer's most popular products yesterday.

Visa Europe said around 3.8m purchases worth £265m would be made in the UK yesterday using Visa cards, with 2,600 transactions worth £184,000 taking place every minute, or just over £3,000 a second.

By lunchtime, shopping comparison website Pricerunner.co.uk said traffic to its site had gone up 30%. According to the latest figures, said spokesman Marc Thomas, "we expect to see a £22m boost in online sales by lunchtime, with over 30m people searching online for a Christmas bargain." ...




[tiny Brit schoolgirl voice]Mummy, I want a pony![/tiny Brit schoolgirl voice]

Right on cue, exactly six months into David Cameron's premiership, the ancient British roar of "Tory scum" echoed across central London again. In honour of the coalition's deal on higher tuition fees, student protesters spliced their message with cheerful abuse of Nick Clegg. After almost 100 years of apathy Lib Dems can hold their heads high – hated at last. ...

... The first and more violent Grosvenor Square demo against the Vietnam war in 1968 attracted a reported 60,000, the poll tax riots of 1990 three times as many, the Chartist demo in 1848 even more. Yesterday's estimates ranged from 30,000 to 50,000, angry but polite. Diane Wheeler, a sixth-form teacher from Milton Keynes, carried a banner on behalf of her students. "Mrs Wheeler says No to higher tuition fees", it read.

The students of 2010 seem much better dressed than the soixante-huitards. Old ideological certainties have also faded, but the crowd reflected the multicultural face of modern Britain. There were brand new Oxbridge scarves ("only six of us from St Anne's: I'm afraid everyone's too busy working"), six busloads from Canterbury's assorted campuses and four teenagers from Manchester sporting neat hijabs and a "Don't Crush My Dreams" poster.

Creative arts students seemed especially fearful that their courses might be axed. Public school students ("my father's a diplomat, so I can afford the extra fees") declared solidarity with talented but poorer colleagues who might be squeezed out. "Cut fees – or we'll cut off your balls", declared the poster held by a young woman in pink trainers. ...

... Leaving their banners outside, some opted to duck out of the ruck and into the Tate's tranquillity for soup of the day (£3.85) and this month's special exhibition: the 18th-century Romantics – another group of frustrated young people breaking free of their elders. It seemed appropriate.

... 5.20pm:

I've just spoken to one of the protesters who disputes some of the reports that the Millbank building and roof protests were engineered by non-students – saying "only a couple" of people of the 30 on the rooftop were not students.

Olivia Wedderburn, 18, from Kingston in south east London, was one of "20 to 30" protesters who managed to get onto the roof of the Millbank building at around 2.30pm.

She is a second year A-level student at Esher College, in Kingston, studying History, English literature and Philosophy.

"We were in the courtyard [of Millbank] and people were smashing through the glass to get into the building and saying 'Come in', so we just went into the building," Widderburn said.

"Then there was an opportunity to go up the stairs so we thought 'Oh we'll do that', so we went up there.

"There were only about 20-30 people going up the stairs, but on the way up the whole staircase was flooded – they had pulled down a fire hose and flooded all the floors. All the windows were getting smashed, everything was getting smashed up all around."

"They were mainly young students, just a couple of older guys who looked like old school anarchists," she said.

"I only saw two people who didn't look like students."

Widderburn said she was inspired to come on the march because of the high fees she faced paying if she was unsuccessful in getting into university next year and had to defer.

"Because I'm only in my second year if I don't get into a university next year then it'll be around £9,000 which is just not affordable," she said.

"I don't understand why education should be a privilege and not a right, and that's why I came down." ...



Jolly good show, kids (and old school anarchists)! More power to your elbows!

Haggling over the deepest public spending cuts since the second world war has culminated in the BBC being forced to accept a 16% budget cut that will see its licence fee frozen for six years and the corporation taking over funding of the World Service from the Foreign Office.

The negotiations left the BBC stunned, with insiders claiming that a licence fee settlement that would normally take years to thrash out had been imposed in three days. The extra financial burdens are equivalent to the cost of running the BBC's five national radio stations.

The news came as the Treasury finally backed off money-saving plans to remove child benefit from 17- and 18-year-olds, but went ahead with plans to cut the means-tested education maintenance allowance aimed at largely the same age group.

There was acute embarrassment for the government, meanwhile, as Danny Alexander, the Treasury chief secretary, allowed himself to be photographed with a briefing paper showing that the government accepts that 490,000 public sector jobs will be lost by 2014-15 as a result of the spending cuts, which will finally be outlined by the chancellor, George Osborne, today.

Osborne acknowledges that his unprecedented spending review will take Britain into uncharted social and economic territory as he announces £83bn of spending cuts over the next four years.

The cuts will involve the loss of thousands of jobs, massive cuts in university funding, wholesale reform of public housing and further cuts to the welfare budget.

The coalition will also announce the state retirement age is to be raised to 66 in 2016, 10 years earlier than previously planned and liable to save billions of pounds in the medium term. It is also expected there will be big cuts to the budget for sport in schools and the abolition of the specialist school network. Some departments including the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Communities and Local Government and the culture department will see cuts of 30%, involving multibillion-pound reductions in the prison programme and to legal aid.

Voluntary groups and private companies operating on a payment-by-results basis will be asked to take over the rehabilitation of released prisoners. As many as 10,000 national offender management jobs will be lost.

The briefing document warns that spending cuts "inevitably impact" on workers because the pay bill in Whitehall accounts for around half of all departmental spending. It also claimed the overall public sector pay package has been generous, with pay rises four times as high as those in the private sector. Each public sector employer will have to "determine the workforce implications of spending settlements", the document says. It adds: "Government will do everything they can to mitigate the impact of redundancies."

This will be done by creating conditions for private sector growth, encouraging pay restraint and reduced hours, and finally supporting employees facing redundancy so they can find work in the private sector.

In perhaps the single most radical public service reform to be announced today, families stuck on council house waiting lists are to be offered a new form of shorter-term tenure at near-market rents as a way of freeing up social housing and filling a near-£4bn cut in the social housing budget, due to be announced.

The coalition hopes the new form of tenure, dubbed affordable rent, involving less exacting accommodation, will make it easier to build more social housing since the tenants will be asked to pay up to 80% of the market rent, well above the current rent levels in social housing. Ministers will also withdraw security of tenure for new council house tenants. The government hopes that as a result institutional investors will become more active in the social housing market. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321

French strikes and protests: live updates
19 Oct 2010
Protests against president Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms escalated today adding to widespread travel disruption, alarm about petrol supplies and the closure of schools. Follow live updates

3.03pm: Here's a summary of the main developments today:

• Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in scores of towns and cities across France to protest against Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms. Police and unions differed sharply on estimates of the number of people involved, but YouTube footage in various locations showed the scale and breadth of the demonstrations.

• Violence between police and protesters has continued for another day in some areas. The worst clashes occurred in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, and a school burnt down in Le Mans.

• Sarkozy warned of a crackdown against "troublemakers" and said he had a duty to push ahead with the reforms. A crucial Senate vote on raising the retirement age to 62 has been delayed until later in the week.

• Almost a third of French petrol stations have run out of fuel, as panic buying continues. But the government claims supplies will be back to normal within five days.

• The strikes caused the closures of hundreds of schools, the cancellation of around a third of flights, and continuing disruption to the rail network. But there is an expectation that the protests will fade once the pension reforms are passed in the Senate.

2.51pm: Around 30% of French petrol stations have run out of fuel, according to the France energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo. He said 4,000 petrol stations out of 13,000 were awaiting fuel supplies, according to Reuters.

But in an effort to stop panic buying the prime minister Francois Fillon claimed that supplies would be back to normal within four or five days following measures to tackle problems caused by refinery strikes.

2.33pm: Yet more videos of protests from another crop of French cities have been uploaded to YouTube...

... 2.06pm: Videos of protests across France are emerging thick and fast on YouTube. ...

... 1.37pm: When there are petrol shortages, someone usually stands to gain. In this case it's Belgian garage owners.

They are rubbing their hands with glee as French drivers cross over the border to get petrol, according to La Voix du Nord.

1.32pm: AP has details of the disruption to the French railway network. It has also been talking to disgruntled passengers:

Many commuters' patience was beginning to wear thin. Only about one in two trains were running on some of the Paris Metro lines, and commuters had to elbow their way onto packed trains.

At Paris' Gare Saint Lazare, which serves the French capital's western suburbs and the northwestern Normandy and Brittany regions, commuters waited on crowded platforms for their trains. Only about half of regularly scheduled trains were running out of the station Tuesday.

Caroline Mesnard, a 29-year-old teacher said she expected her commute to take about twice as long as usual as it has since last Tuesday's start of the open-ended strike on France's trains.

"All I can say is that after eight days, it's beginning to get a bit tiresome," said Mesnard.

"I'm really tired, but there's nothing to be done but hang on and wait for this to end."

1.24pm: Around 240,000 people have taken to the streets of Marseille, the CGT union told La Provence. ...

... 1.02pm: The minister of the interior, Brice Hortefeux, says he wants to agree a new way of calculating the size of demonstrations after wildly different estimates from the authorities and the unions.

Here's a case in point in Bordeaux, where unions say 140,000 people are taking part in demonstrations and the police say only 34,000 are involved.

12.49pm: How's this for a post modernist update? The French news site 20 minutes notes in its live blog that that the Guardian is also live blogging the protests (13h16). (He says, disappearing down an echo chamber).

More importantly, it has a useful map of today's protest route through Paris. ...

Strikes Force Travelers to Weave a Tangled Web Through Paris
By NICOLA CLARK
Published: October 19, 2010

PARIS — International travelers passing through Paris faced disruptions on Tuesday due because of strikes by public transport workers and air traffic controllers. But airlines said they were striving to maintain most, if not all, of their international flights to and from the French capital.

A spokesman for Aéroports de Paris, which operates the two main Paris airports of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly, said the terminals were calm and far less crowded than on a typical day, when roughly 160,000 travelers pass through their halls. Civil aviation authorities had asked airlines over the weekend to reduce their flight schedules by 30 percent at Charles de Gaulle and 50 percent at Orly airport in preparation for Tuesday’s action.

“All passengers would normally have been contacted by their airline either yesterday or the day before if their flight was going to be affected,” said a spokesman for the airport.

Air France said on its Web site that it was operating 100 percent of its intercontinental flights Tuesday, as well as roughly 80 percent of its domestic and inter-European flights from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport and 50 percent from Orly. Air France passengers whose flights had been canceled were being offered, when possible, seats on flights operated by its Dutch partner airline, KLM, or other members of the SkyTeam alliance.

Still, some passengers encountered delays. At Orly on Tuesday afternoon, Marianna Aptrah, a 40-year-old doctor from Cordoba, Argentina, had just wrapped up a weeklong vacation in France with her husband and was about to miss her connecting flight from Madrid to Buenos Aires. Her Iberia Airlines flight from Paris to Madrid had been canceled because of the strike.

“We checked on the web this morning and our flight was still okay,” Ms. Aptrah said. “Then we get here and we see it is not going anywhere. We have no hotel booked here, and I must go home for work. This is awful. I know the French workers are angry, but I am angry too.”

Public buses to and from the Paris airports were operating a normal schedule, the Paris transport operator, RATP, said. But those seeking to get to the airports by rail were facing significant delays. On the train line that runs from central Paris to the two main airports of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly, just 50 percent of trains were operating, and platforms and train cars were packed with people and luggage.

Taxis were running, although streets on the city’s Left Bank, especially the areas along the main protest route near Place d’Italie, Montparnasse and the Esplanade des Invalides were blocked by police officials for most of the day Tuesday in anticipation of tens of thousands of marchers in the afternoon.

Tourists planning to rent cars in France on arrival should be aware that shortages of gasoline — due to a weeklong strike by refinery workers — could make filling up their tanks difficult. Unions and associations representing independent fuel suppliers estimated late Monday that more than 2,500 gas stations across the country were running dry. Those groups could not be reached immediately for projections on Tuesday.

According to news reports, the areas most affected by the gasoline shortages included the Paris region, most of the north, Strasbourg in the east, much of western France and around the cities of Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and Marseille.

In France, Labor Strikes Head for Showdown
By ALAN COWELL
Published: October 19, 2010

PARIS — Hundreds of flights were canceled, frantic drivers lined up for fuel and hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, took to the streets of Paris and other cities on Tuesday as protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to change France’s pension system mounted in advance of a final parliamentary vote this week.

The protests came on the sixth day of national strikes or demonstrations since early September. Initial figures from government ministries said fewer public workers had participated than in previous stoppages. Overall, the Interior Ministry said 480,000 people were demonstrating across France by midday, comapred to 500,000 in protests a week ago. But the number of high schools reporting class boycotts and other student protests had risen to 379.

Garbage workers, teachers, armored truck drivers supplying automated teller machines and an array of others joined the strikes on Tuesday. Protest organizations said demonstrations were planned at more than 260 venues across the country during the day, ratcheting up the battle of nerves between the authorities and unions demanding that the government retreat from reforms as previous administrations did when confronted by outrage against tax and labor law changes in 1995 and 2006.

While most protests seemed orderly, around 300 young people threw up barricades of garbage cans to snarl traffic in the Place de la République in central Paris and scuffles between students and riot police were reported from there and from the suburb of Nanterre.

The disruptions have gained momentum since the first national protest on Sept. 7, and have been compounded by an eight-day strike at oil refineries and blockades of fuel depots, leaving motorists scrambling.

In central Paris, drivers lined up at gas stations hoping to fill their tanks before a two-week school vacation begins this weekend. Many waited for as long as an hour, creeping toward pumps in the hope that they were not yet empty of fuel. Some drivers from the suburbs said they had tried to fill up at other stations on their way into the city, but without success. At least one fifth of France’s 12,000 service stations have run out of some products.

But Mr. Sarkozy has shown no sign of abandoning his plan to raise the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60.

“The reform is essential and France is committed to it and will go ahead with it just as our German partners did,” he told reporters late Monday in the Normandy resort of Deauville, Reuters reported.

On Tuesday, he said it was his duty to enact the reforms and he promised measures to guarantee fuel supplies.

Mr. Sarkozy was speaking after talks with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. The government in Berlin resolved in 2007 to raise its retirement age from 62 to 63 by 2029, in line with a broader European trend. Overall, the continent is aging and, as people live longer with smaller families, fewer young people are available to pay for the continent’s social safety nets.

On Tuesday, police said a high school in Le Mans, southwest of Paris, was destroyed by arson in the early hours, but it was not clear if the blaze was linked to the protests. Transport authorities in Paris said commuter rail services would be cut by as much as a half.

The national railroad authority also announced cancellations of around half its high-speed and normal services on Tuesday, but said the Eurostar Paris-London link would not be affected. The authority said support for the strike among railroad workers seemed to be running at around 30 percent compared to 40 percent for the previous stoppage one week ago.

At the Gare du Nord station in Paris, travelers waited on benches, then raced for trains running on a reduced schedule. “It’s absolutely absurd,” said Emmanuel de Boos, 56, a writer from the western city of Nantes. “We absolutely need to reform the retirement system as it exists today.”

“I think these strikes are more about other things,” he said, likening them to a referendum on Mr. Sarkozy. “ This is a reaction against the elite.”

Yannick Kalu, 25, a student from a northern suburb of Paris, called Mr. Sarkozy’s reforms a bad idea. “For those who began working early in life it’s going to be rough.” He agreed that the strikes were about the broader issue of Mr. Sarkozy’s rule. “I really do hope it’s going to stop,” he said, but added, “We can’t hold it against people to worry about their retirements.”

In the central Chatelet neighborhood, Marie Rodriguez, 35, a middle school teacher, said the broad response to the protests “proves that not only one group is against the reform but that everybody is concerned. I support the strike.”

At Orly airport near Paris, where half of the scheduled flights were grounded, travelers peered at departure boards recording cancellations and delays.

Martin Raggio, 31, and Alejandro Molettieri, 29, who both work at a brewery in Buenos Aires, had come to Orly after their train to Barcelona was canceled. “I guess we will wait here, we will sleep here in Orly maybe, until we can leave,” Mr. Roggio said glumly. “We knew about the strike but we were hoping we would be okay.”

At other French airports, around a third of flights were expected to be affected as the test of wills between labor unions and the government intensified.

Presenting himself as a champion of necessary change, Mr. Sarkozy had proposed the retirement measures to help wrest France from the economic doldrums gripping many parts of Europe and to reverse years of declining fortunes before elections in 2012. With a final Senate vote on the measures expected this week and lower house approval already in hand, he believes he can bank on success.

Initially, the vote was set for Wednesday but French news reports said that it could now be held on Thursday or even as late as Sunday, extending the confrontation as the Senate plows its way through some 400 amendments introduced by the opposition. Those tactics will delay, but probably not alter, the outcome.

Almost half a million people in France are taking part in a sixth national day of action over planned pension reforms, officials say.

Strikes are disrupting travel and schools, a refinery blockade is hitting fuel supplies, and protesters and police have clashed in several cities.

The government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67.

President Nicolas Sarkozy insists he will press ahead with pension reforms. ...

The government was warned today that "unions will be back" as thousands of activists and other campaigners joined a rally in Westminster to protest against spending cuts.

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, did not join the demonstration, but aides denied the decision was a U-turn despite his declaration last month that he would "definitely" attend.

Miliband will meet union members from his constituency to hear their concerns about the coalition's deficit reduction programme, but will not participate in today's rally.

Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, said the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats wanted to "drag" the UK into a "dismal, downward spiral of despair" by announcing huge cuts in tomorrow's comprehensive spending review.

"The truth is they are not interested in alternatives. They don't care if the poor, the elderly, the vulnerable are the targets of cuts. They don't care if hundreds of thousands of families suffer because they no longer have a breadwinner.

"If they did, they would see that they could claw back billions of pounds by taxing the banks that caused the recession in the first place. I am warning the government today: the public can only take so much, working people will only take so much, and this union has already had enough.

"If the government doesn't listen to us today, they won't have heard the last of us. If George Osborne's cuts go through – cuts that could mean a death sentence for our services and our communities – then we will be back.

"For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We'll march in our thousands and we'll vote in our millions."

Miliband's aides insisted there had been no formal invitation to the rally as the TUC was treating the event as "non-political" and had not asked any politicians to attend. ...

As Jérôme Kerviel stood to hear the verdict that would decide his fate, not a flicker of emotion showed in his eyes. It was only once the judge had gone and the court had risen that the former trader slumped in his chair and stared down at the floor. He had entered the chamber looking sharp in a suit and shining leather shoes, but left it a broken man.

The ruling read out in Paris's historic Palais de Justice was eagerly anticipated. But few had predicted how hard the court would come down on Kerviel, the man behind one of history's biggest trading scandals.

Accused of breach of trust, computer abuse and forgery, the 33-year-old was convicted of all three charges and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, with two years suspended. In an order that prompted an audible gasp from court observers, he was also told to pay damages to Société Générale of €4.9bn (£4.2bn) – the total sum of money his risky betting strategies cost his former employers in January 2008.

It is understood the bank views the granting of damages as a symbolic payment, and may not intend to force its erstwhile employee into a lifetime of unpayable debt. Its lawyer, Jean Veil, said the tough verdict was "moral compensation" for a company which insists it knew nothing of the malpractice. "It has been very clearly shown that Jérôme Kerviel's behaviour, his lies, were so sophisticated that the bank could not suspect what he was doing," he added.

Olivier Metzner, the defendant's lawyer, begged to differ. "This is a completely unreasonable ruling which says that the bank is responsible for nothing, not responsible for a creature it has made, and that only Jérôme Kerviel is responsible for the excesses [and] the crises of a banking system," he said, adding that he would "quite obviously" be appealing.

Such outrage was unlikely to cut any ice with judge Dominique Pauthe, whose dense, often impenetrable ruling tore into Kerviel's character and demolished his lawyers' attempts to portray him as the victim of a wider system and global malaise.

According to Pauthe, the Brittany-born computer whizz was a quietly cynical operator who exploited his technological knowhow and market understanding to pull the wool over his employers' eyes.

Exposing the bank to uncovered trades worth €50bn – more than Société Générale's total value – he took risks on a "gigantic scale", all the time maintaining his sang-froid. "The varied nature of his means of forgery and deceit were rivalled only by the dazzling reactivity, the constant cool-headedness and the deceptive serenity which he was able to exhibit on an everyday basis," said the judge.

He added: "Through his deliberate actions, he put in danger the solvency of the bank employing 140,000 people, including him, whose future was seriously endangered … In their size, their specificity and the context of crisis in which they occurred, these acts undoubtedly harmed the international economic order." ...

Iceland's politicians forced to flee from angry protesters
Thousands take to the streets of Reykjavik as anger erupts over the impact of the financial crisis
Jill Treanor
Friday 1 October 2010

Protesters took to the streets of Reykjavik today, forcing MPs to run away from the people they represent as renewed anger about the impact of the financial crisis erupted in Iceland.

The violent protest came amid growing fury at austerity measures being imposed across Europe. Disruption in more than a dozen countries this week included a national strike in Spain and a cement truck driven into the Irish parliament's gates.

Witnesses said up to 2,000 people caused chaos at the state opening of the Icelandic parliament, with politicians forced to race to the back door of the building because of the large number of protesters at the front. Eggs were said to have hit the prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, other MPs and the wife of the Icelandic president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson.

Árni Páll Árnason, the minister of economics affairs, who was caught up in the protests, said: "We have a difficult economic situation and this is something to be expected in a democratic country."

A UN agency has warned of growing social unrest because of a long "labour market recession" that could last until 2015. The International Labour Organisation revised down its forecast and estimated that 22m new jobs were needed to return to levels before the banking crisis.

Juan Somavía, director general of the ILO, said social cohesion would be at risk, adding: "Governments should not have to choose between the demands of financial markets and the needs of their citizens." ...

... Like D’Mongo’s, there are lots of hidden jewels in this town: Avalon Bakery, Kings Books (I got some first editions), Eastern Market and The Polish Yacht Club—which is neither, it’s not even near the water. It’s a restaurant, and a comment on Yelp said “not a date place and will not impress anyone”, but it was still highly recommended.

Jenni asked, “Are there other towns that have been hit so hard that have come back?” Both Michael Morris of Artangel and I replied “Glasgow”. It was known as having the worst slums in Europe back in the day, and I remember visiting my grandparents and all the buildings were grimy black, from soot. That city hasn’t come back as an industrial powerhouse it once was (steel and shipbuilding) but as a cultural hub. Life is good there now, and the city is cleaned up and nice to look at.

Other cities have used culture to bring life back—Morris mentioned Bilbao—but to be honest, so much of Detroit is simply gone, vanished, that that kind of revitalization is hard to imagine. Bilbao was a smaller town, even if it was a dump. However, one can imagine that if the city center here can become more of the focus then a much smaller town with vibrant life might emerge. Forget much of the urban sprawl (or turn it into farmland) and see if the wonderful stuff can be encouraged and supported. Again, it could be arts and theater and music that spurs some of that—there were 3 movies and a TV show shooting when we where there; Matthew Barney was preparing a large scale performance involving molten metal not too far away, and local artists and musicians have always gone their own dark ways here—so the interest is there. The skies here are bigger than in New York.




Ta much, dear Edosan

Ecuador teetered on the brink of chaos early today as rebellious police officers protesting against austerity measures blocked airports and roads, occupied the national assembly and besieged the president in a hospital after physically assaulting him.

The government called the revolt a coup and declared a one-week state of emergency which put the military in charge of public order and suspended civil liberties. Peru shut its border with Ecuador.

"This is a coup attempt," President Rafael Correa told state-run Ecuador TV from the hospital where, outside, civilian supporters confronted mutinous police amid scenes of near anarchy.

"They're trying to get into my room, maybe to attack me. I don't know," said the president. "But, forget it. I won't relent. If something happens to me, remember my infinite love for my country, and to my family I say that I will love them anywhere I end up."

From an upstairs window Correa told supporters gathered below he would not buckle to the rebels. "If they want me, here I am," he said, and tore his tie loose.

The drama was sparked by a vote in congress on Wednesday which cut the benefits of police and members of the armed forces. The response was swift and underlined Ecuador's reputation as South America's most volatile country. ...

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Europe today as strikes against austerity measures that have hit public spending and services on the continent caused widespread disruption.

The main demonstrations were in Spain, Belgium and Greece, although there was co-ordinated action in more than a dozen countries including Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia and Lithuania.

One of the largest protests converged on a park in Brussels. The demonstrations in the European capital were reinforced by Spain's first general strike in eight years, which was called to oppose the Spanish government's spending cuts and reforms of the labour market and pensions. In Portugal, unions said 50,000 protesters joined a march in Lisbon and 20,000 in Porto.

"It's a crucial day for Europe," said John Monks, general secretary of the European Trades Union Confederation, which orchestrated the events. "This is the start of the fight, not the end. That our voice be heard is our major demand today – against austerity and for jobs and growth. There is a great danger that the workers are going to be paying the price for the reckless speculation that took place in financial markets. You've really got to reschedule these debts so that they are not a huge burden on the next few years and cause Europe to plunge down into recession."

In Brussels marchers from across Europe waved union flags and carried banners saying "No to austerity" and "Priority to jobs and growth", bringing parts of the city to a halt.

The protest was led by a group dressed in black suits and masks and carrying umbrellas and briefcases to represent financial speculators, acting as the head of a funeral cortege mourning the death of Europe.

As the protests were staged the centre-left cabinet in Portugal called an emergency session to try to prune more from public spending, as it grappled with a debt and deficit crisis that has thrown the spotlight back on to the country.

In Paris, the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy was wrestling with similar measures, although all the signs are that Sarkozy will not risk worsening his low ratings in the opinion polls with further substantive budget cuts. ...

Arseholes.

Caribbean hoteliers are threatening legal action against European tour operator, Thomas Cook, if the company goes ahead with a five per cent reduction in payment of August and September arrival invoices.

Thomas Cook says it has had a tough couple of months, financially, as a result of the Icelandic ash crisis in the summer and cannot pay the full amount owed to its suppliers. It is estimated that the loss to the travel and tourism industry because of the ash crisis was £70 million.

But the move by Thomas Cook has been strongly criticised by the Caribbean Hotel and Tourist Association (CHTA), which has deemed the company's action unethical.

Secretary General of the CHTA, Alec Sanguinetti, in a release on Friday, said his organisation is sending a letter to Thomas Cook on behalf of its member hotel associations expressing their concern and rejection of such unilateral actions by Thomas Cook.

Sanguinetti noted that Thomas Cook was not the only travel entity to have experienced losses in the summer of 2010, and that Caribbean hoteliers have also had the most challenging economic conditions to deal with in modern history.

Barring the cessation of this unauthorised policy of deductions for agreed-upon arrivals, the CHTA said it is supporting the strongest possible actions by its affected member associations against Thomas Cook.

"We can't have any company taking unilateral and unauthorised monetary deductions because they experienced a drop in their earnings, no matter how steeped in history, and credibility they have accumulated over the years," Sanguinetti said.

"Tour-operator contracts have been negotiated and are currently in place. Contracts are to be upheld by both parties and when this breaks down unilaterally, it undermines the entire contracting system," he added.

The Caribbean's response comes in the wake of hoteliers in Spain threatening to take the tour operator to court for the same reasons. An article in Travel Weekly on Thursday said with payments due next week, Ignacio Vasallo, United Kingdom director of the Spanish Tourist Office, said hoteliers in that destination were waiting to see if the operator would stand firm on its decision. ...

What the hell did you expect from conservatives?

Dear Economist: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?

By Tim Harford

Published: September 4 2010 00:46 | Last updated: September 4 2010 00:46

I have been a client of weed dealers in North America since the mid-1980s and no matter who the vendor, the price has remained $10 a gramme. I don’t think anything in 25 years has stayed fixed in price like weed has.

Dealers might have some power to increase prices, as it’s illegal, and there are some significant barriers to entry, such as getting arrested. But if I don’t like the prices, it’s pretty easy to grow some on my own, because it “grows like a weed”, even if it might not be as good as the dealer’s Cannabis sativa.

So how did we end up at $10 a gramme?

Sebastian

P.S. I meant to email this sooner, but was pretty baked and forgot to hit send …

Dear Sebastian,

The nominal price rigidity you describe is remarkable and unusual. If the price of weed had increased in line with US consumer price inflation, you’d be paying $20–$25 a gramme now. So I agree, it is a puzzle.

My guess is that the illegality of the market gives a push towards the price stickiness you have encountered. Buying and selling cannabis is hazardous and there must be a benefit to a situation where nobody haggles over the price.

Still, the nominal price wouldn’t stick like that unless supply and demand were at least roughly in balance at $10 a gramme. And I confess, I am perplexed. My own research, which has been purely academic, suggests that prices vary between £20 and £250 an ounce in the UK, roughly £1 to £10 a gramme. Since the price stability you describe is not matched in other markets, could it be purely fortuitous?

Whatever the reason, this could be a handy discovery. In hyperinflationary times, people turn to tobacco or coffee as more stable currencies. If quantitative easing gets out of hand, you have found a stable currency for the 21st century.

Our governor is a prick. You'd think she's a rethuglicunt, she's such a prick.

6. teabagger

A misinformed, right-wing corporate media consumer who often fails to understand that BOTH major parties represent a corrupt plutocracy that steals from the middle class by taxing labor and profiting from corporate tax subsidies.

A teabagger also often fails to acknowledge that George W. Bush and his neo-conservative minions perpetrated one of the boldest and most egregious executive power grabs in the history of the United States. Furthermore, teabaggers mistakenly continue to blame a newly elected President Obama for all that ails the United States of America, based on a grossly flawed perception of reality (including latent racial prejudice) and despite the fact the U.S. economy collapsed on the previous administration's watch.

Teabaggers are also known to base their misguided, right-wing-media-inspired beliefs about President Obama on stupid conspiracy theories about totalitarian takeovers, FEMA camps, etc., despite the fact these very same theories have been circulating around on the Internet for years, and were originally ascribed to neo-conservative cabalists at a time when Barack Obama had not even entered national politics. Teabaggers also are known to be particularly paranoid, xenophobic and intolerant, especially with regard to immigrants and anyone who isn't white.

Additionally, teabaggers generally echo stupid myths about entitlement spending (it actually only accounts for about 1% of federal budget spending), have no idea that most poor people in America are not lazy, actually do work and don't want to be on welfare, and have no idea what socialism actually means or that socialist reform in this country is actually what allowed a middle class to flourish and ultimately make the U.S. one of the most prosperous nations in human history.

Furthermore, teabaggers incorrectly equate socialism with Stalinism, think a system that rewards greed (capitalism) is the divine preference (despite Gospel evidence to the contrary), and are shameless champions of a misguided belief in American exceptionalism. Teabaggers also fail to recognize the inherently unpatriotic nature of their failed every-man-for-himself ideology that ultimately vilifies anyone who supports public policy aimed at reaching out to fellow Americans in need. They celebrate an exploitative corporatocracy (holy creator of jobs, blah blah blah) while denigrating the little guy for being "weak."

Interestingly, teabaggers uphold an immoral, morbidly obese, twice divorced, draft-dodging, college dropout and known drug addict as their de facto leader, and are even known to advocate burning books. Of course, teabaggers fail to recognize the blatant hypocrisy within the GOP and tend to oversimplify all political debate and social issues, much like their pseudo-intellectual, fat-ass leader.

Finally, incredibly, teabaggers fail to recognize the hysterical double entendre associated with their proudly adopted teabag moniker.

Every village has its idiots, of course, but it's sad when citizens of any nation allow themselves to be whipped into a frenzy en masse by a state-run propaganda machine masquerading as a legitimate, fair, balanced and independent news organization. Teabaggers are right to believe the future of the U.S.A. is in jeopardy, but sadly they have not yet correctly identified the real enemy. Perhaps when teabaggers finally grow up and mature into thinking adults, they will see the right-leaning power establishment for the oppressive and cunning beast that it is.

Teabagger: We don't care that George Bush tripled the deficit and lied us into a war. The new administration only cut taxes for 90% of the population... fascists. Let's go throw some Lipton tea bags into a fountain!

tags: brainwashed misfit idiot fool foxlover
by deepshot Apr 20, 2009


Ta much, dear MSiegel

Mission Accomplished: The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class
by David Michael Green | June 25, 2010

... If Americans understood the real ambitions of Ronald Reagan and his puppeteers, and if they knew the degree to which the supposed patriotism of those folks extended beyond falsity and into the far darker waters of being an irritating irrelevance put on purely for show, then they would not only stop seeing Reagan as some sort of national hero, but would also understand that he instead launched a process far more equivalent to an invasion and occupation of this country.

The goal of the right - which cares about America about as much as it does about Burkina Faso - has been to restore the economic order last seen under Herbert Hoover, in which a tiny minority possess vast sums of wealth and there is (therefore) essentially no remaining middle class. It is nothing short of a breathtaking display of a world class greed, worthy of the ages.

It has also been a work of strategic genius (in much the same way one might appreciate the Germans' engineering prowess in figuring out the logistics of how to mass murder ten or twelve million civilians in a year or two), one which has drawn upon deep psychological insights, absolutely sociopathic amoralism, and clever tactics that have all simultaneously pushed in the same direction. In plain English, they hired some politicians of hit-man level moral integrity, who then marshaled fear, insecurity, hate and deceit into a witch's brew of self-destruction that would prove highly attractive to a large segment of the population already sinking from the effects of a global economic order rebalancing after decades of post-war American dominance.

Of course, you couldn't just come right out and say, "Vote for me and I'll give your money to people so rich they can't even imagine what they'll do with it (but they still demand to have it anyhow)", so slightly more subtle tactics had to be employed. It is telling that the most honest thing Barack Obama ever said was when he thought there were no microphones in the room. But he was right when, at a presidential fundraiser in San Francisco he told the wine and cheese set that the right uses guns, god and gays (I would add Gaddafis) to scare people out of their money. I'll believe that Republicans are serious about protecting heterosexual marriage on the day that you can't find half of them prowling the gay bars of DC every night (and you don't even want to know what the other half are into).

This bait-and-switch tactic worked perfectly well whenever it was applied. It didn't hurt that the regressive Billy-Bobs who vote for these folks are as dumb as a tree. With bags of hammers for leaves. But stupid is really only the facilitating quality, and often one that is neither present nor required. What really drives this stuff is fear. If you can turn that into a loathing of fur'ners, fags, bitches, blackies and brownies, you got their vote. Then you can do what you really set out to accomplish in the first place. George W. Bush's 2004 campaign was the paradigmatic example....

You surely weren't expecting tax rises for the rich - not with a conservative PM!

Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy.

The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

There is also evidence that some nations are stockpiling important materials, buying up key producers and land and restricting exports in an attempt to protect their own businesses from increasingly fierce global competition.

Several research projects have also warned of a pending crisis in natural resources, such as water and wildlife, which have suffered dramatic losses due to over-use, pollution, habitat loss, and, increasingly, changes caused by global warming. ...

May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Kyle Bass, who made $500 million in 2007 on the U.S. subprime collapse, is betting Europe’s debt crisis won’t be solved by the $1 trillion loan package the International Monetary Fund and European Union agreed on last week.

“The EU and the IMF effectively went all-in with a bad hand in the highest stakes game of financial poker ever played with the world,” wrote Bass, head of Dallas-based Hayman Advisors LP, in a letter to clients sent after the bailout was announced.

Bass bought gold last week and took other steps to position the fund for hyperinflation and a “competitive devaluation” by Europe, Japan and the U.S. that he is forecasting, according to the letter. Christopher Kirkpatrick, general counsel for Hayman, declined to elaborate on the comments. ...


Ta much, dear MSiegel

Is it finally the end of the road for the euro?
With confidence in the single currency plummeting, experts are suggesting Greece should do the decent thing…
By Tim Edwards
LAST UPDATED 1:54 PM, MAY 21, 2010

A meeting of European Union finance ministers today will attempt to defuse the crisis enveloping the countries that use the euro – and those, like the UK, which trade with them.

This week, the value of the euro against the dollar has plummeted, and stock markets have fallen thanks to worries over the ability of the eurozone's weaker economies to finance their ballooning deficits.

German Chancellor Angel Merkel said: "It is a question of survival. The euro is in danger. If the euro fails, then Europe fails. If we succeed, Europe will be stronger."

So, is the game up for the single currency in its current form?

WHY IS THE EURO FALLING?

It all boils down to worries that one or all of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain may default on their debts. A €750bn insurance fund – designed to pay back lenders if any countries default on their debts – was agreed last week. But it only provided temporary respite.

SO WHY IS THE EURO STILL FALLING?

The point of the €750bn bailout package is to persuade financial institutions that it is safe to lend to Portugal, Spain and Greece – the countries thought most at risk of defaulting on their debts – and to show that the EU will do whatever it takes to protect the euro.

However, this week's unilateral action by Germany in banning some kinds of short selling of government debt - and subsequent criticism from France - spooked the markets by proving that when push comes to shove, a German Chancellor is more than happy to make populist financial gestures in order to gain domestic political support. Markets were even more spooked by the possibility that other countries may follow suit. ...

Germany slammed as short selling ban hits euro
Critics round on Germany as its ban on ‘naked’ short selling looks like being counter-productive
By Tim Edwards
LAST UPDATED 10:40 AM, MAY 20, 2010

Germany will host a meeting aimed at forging a common approach to financial regulation tomorrow – two days after the country unilaterally declared a ban on 'naked' short-selling.

The irony of the situation was compounded when the measure - which surprised and dismayed fellow EU governments - far from stabilising the euro led to a mass sell-off that sent the single currency plummeting to a four-year low against the dollar.

The euro recovered slightly against the dollar yesterday. But British tourists hoping for a cheap holiday to eurozone countries this year will be disappointed, since the pound has been suffering similar falls – reflecting the fact that 54 per cent of its exports go to Europe.

Germany's ban, which was introduced at midnight on Tuesday and will last until March 2011, was against short selling of eurozone government debt and the shares of certain German financial institutions – unless the investor has at least borrowed or owns some of the debt or shares in question.

Chancellor Angela Merkel told the German parliament: “It is a question of survival. The euro is in danger. If the euro fails, then Europe fails. If we succeed, Europe will be stronger.”

But the move was generally seen as political rather than as an effective stabilisation measure, because unless other governments join Germany in the naked shorts ban, it will have absolutely no effect. ...

SHAME!

May 20, 2010
Euro in danger: Germans trigger panic over future of single currency
David Charter, Berlin

Shocked European ministers are preparing for emergency talks to shore up the euro after markets fell in reaction to panic measures in Germany.

Angela Merkel stunned EU capitals by warning that the euro was in danger and triggered fears of a fresh financial meltdown by announcing a ban on risky trading practices by speculators. The German Chancellor’s actions opened up new cracks in the single currency, drawing sharp criticism from France and prompting Brussels to issue an appeal for unity.

Shares in London plunged by nearly 3 per cent, with similar falls in Paris, Berlin and Madrid. The euro plummeted to a new low against the dollar before making a slight recovery.

European finance ministers, who have just hammered out a massive rescue plan for Greece, will hear controversial calls from Germany at a meeting tomorrow for changes to the Lisbon treaty to give Brussels powers to co-ordinate national budgets.

Ms Merkel believes that the EU should have stronger powers to organise the “orderly insolvency” of countries such as Greece that set giveaway budgets with no means of paying for them. After announcing a ban on speculative share trading in Germany’s top financial institutions and the bonds of eurozone countries until next March, she warned: “This challenge is existential and we have to rise to it. The euro is in danger. If we don’t deal with this danger, then the consequences for us in Europe are incalculable . . . If the euro fails, then Europe fails.” ...

The Long Emergency: An Interview with James Howard Kunstler
By Kurt Cagle
January 14, 2009

... KC: The role of urban planning plays a large part in your writings. What's wrong with our current urban planning models, and how can we readjust the way that we build (and connect) cities to work better in a world of changing resources?

JHK: Omigod! What's wrong. We'll, let's just start by saying we've constructed an infrastructure for daily life with no future. That's pretty disturbing, isn't it? I customarily refer to this as the greatest misallocation off resources in the history of the world. Having poured all our post-WW2 wealth in it, we've made ourselves hostage to the psychology of previous investment -- meaning we will desperately try anything to keep it all going, to sustain the unsustainable, at all costs. Thus, we'll be squandering our dwindling resources in a gigantic act of futility. That's the Big Picture end of the story.

The more micro view is that we've constructed a daily living arrangement that is depressing, demoralizing, unrewarding, unfair to children and old people, grossly wasteful, ecologically unsound to-the-max, and profoundly unhealthy. It is a bad human habitat. It's toxic in every sense. It punishes us intensely, despite the number of bathrooms per inhabitant and the air conditioning. And for most people in the USA, it is absolutely normal -- it's all they know.

Now, the reason we can't get past it (stemming from the psychology of previous investment) is that we've encoded the template for building all this crap in our laws, and trained our municipal officials and politicians to administer the template rigorously (and outlaw most of the remedies in traditional urban design), and trained the architects to be grandstanding narcissists, and conditioned the public to expect to drive everywhere for everything, and empowered the developers and bankers to deliver only the "products" (say, houses and strip malls) that comport with the template. It will take a shock to induce the necessary paradigm shift away from all this foolishness -- and we're in for one. In fact, we've entered it. How do you like the Long Emergency so far? ...



Ta much, dear MSiegel

A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

"We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it's escalated to $95,000," said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university's Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

"That's primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

Shapiro says the gap remains wide even between blacks and whites of similar classes and with similar jobs and incomes.

"How do we explain the wealth gap among equally-achieving African-American and white families? The same ratio holds up even among low income groups. Finding ways to accumulate financial resources for all low and moderate income families in the United States has been a huge challenge and that challenge keeps getting steeper and steeper. ...




Yeah, well, let's also see a comparison between white men's earnings and all women's earnings, shall we?

Reputations, good and bad, tend to lag reality. Except in Detroit. For years, Detroit was like Buffalo, which I wrote about last week; its bad reputation fit the reality on the ground, due to abandoned homes, crumbling towers, and pervasive crime. But after decades of false starts, there is mounting evidence that a renaissance is tentatively gaining traction.

And man, have there been false starts, so many that “systemic failure,” that tired, awful phrase, most accurately sums up Detroit’s struggle to rediscover the civic swagger lost to “white flight,” freeways, economic stagnation, and everything else. How so, systemic? Over the years, hundreds of companies - of all kinds, not just the manufacturers - fled to outlying suburbs (where employees had long since moved) or worse, overseas (where employees could not compete).

Once commerce left Detroit, it was only a matter of time before commercial properties began decaying like the thousands of crumbling homes ringing downtown. Even when civic pride and good intentions caused business leaders to stay within city limits - for instance, to build the Renaissance Center - Detroit still suffered. A massive influx of new office and retail space was the last thing downtown needed - especially space confusingly organized and enclosed in cookie-cutter towers that were spatially isolated from the downtown meant to benefit from their construction.

On the governmental front, recent leaders faced with Detroit’s gutted cityscape and battered population failed to leverage their public offices in an even minimally-positive way. If ever there was a place where citizens need visionary leadership, courageous creativity, and determined optimism, it is Detroit, where “the estimated functional illiteracy rate in the city limits hovers near 50%. The unsolved-murder rate is about 70%, and unemployment is around an astonishing 29%.“

Instead, Detroiters got folks like former Mayor (and most recently, former inmate) Kwame Kilpatrick, who didn’t trouble himself much with actual governing. As Michael Rosenberg wrote in Sports Illustrated, Kilpatrick “seemed to treat city government as his personal ATM. His reign featured a credit-card scandal, a luxury-SUV scandal, a security-team scandal, a petty-cash-fund scandal, a nonprofit-foundation scandal, a cronyism scandal, a fire-the-whistleblowers scandal and of course a sex scandal, the last of which he covered up by lying under oath and settling a lawsuit with $8.4 million of city money.”

While that farce was playing out in city hall over the last few years, other enterprising folks decided to spark their own renaissance. Completed over the last 15 years, some of their achievements include: (1) two new urban stadiums (Comerica Park for the Detroit Tigers and Ford Field for the Detroit Lions), (2) refurbished theaters (Fox Theatre, Gem/Century Theatre, Fillmore Detroit, Orchestra Hall, Music Hall, etc.), (2) new/revived park land (most prominently, Campus Martius Park and the partly-finished Detroit International Waterfront), and (3) reused skyscrapers (Westin Book Cadillac Hotel, Dime Building, Guardian Building, Cadillac Place, etc.). ...

Plans to repatriate an estimated 400,000 Britons stranded by the Icelandic volcano eruption were disrupted by a new ash cloud last night, forcing air traffic controllers to reconsider lifting a UK flight ban.

Hopes that Heathrow airport would open from 7pm were thrown into doubt as a fresh plume of volcanic dust drifted towards Britain. Nats, the national air traffic controller, said Scottish airports should be open by 7am today, with airspace over England becoming available by midday but not as far south as London's airports.

"The volcano eruption in Iceland has strengthened and a new ash cloud is spreading south and east towards the UK," said Nats. The situation for airports in Northern Ireland is "uncertain", it added.

Earlier Nats forecasts had given rise to hopes that UK airspace might be fully open after 6pm. However, aviation industry sources said the new ash cloud appeared to have dashed those expectations. ...

British airspace to stay closed until Tuesday
Mon Apr 19, 2010 8:41am BST

LONDON (Reuters) - British airspace will remain closed to flights until 1 a.m. on Tuesday at the earliest because of the danger posed by clouds of volcanic ash from Iceland, UK aviation officials said.

The air traffic body NATS said it would continue to review weather information and would issue an update around 3 p.m. Monday.



I'm hoping this story will be updated while I sleep.

April 19, 2010
Every volcano cloud has some silver linings
The skies are quiet, we are more aware of our place in the world – but best of all there’s no one to blame
Libby Purves

... Particular sympathy for the poor farmers in the tropics whose fruit rots in the fields because it cannot fly to rich Europe, also to invalids and to those awaiting important medication or stranded without it. Economic disasters loom too, for airlines and others. There are genuinely frightened travellers stuck from Mumbai to Moscow, without much money and often with confused children, who now know that airline bookings mean that, even when the black cloud does blow away, it may be next month before they get seats. A family of my own relatives is fretting in New Zealand as I write, with jobs waiting back home and children worried about school. No, the hardships are not to be taken lightly.

On the other hand, it is legitimate to have a brief giggle at those self-importantly prosperous media and banking types stranded in the Maldives and forced to teleconference on Skype, to shake your head at the idea of John Cleese struggling back from Norway via a £3,300 cab journey from Oslo to Brussels, and at the pinstriped chaps in Dunkirk buying pink kiddie bicycles to claim ferry spaces designated for cyclists only.

Raise an eyebrow at the information that the Duchess of Cornwall was “unable” to get to London to sign a condolence book for President Kaczynski of Poland because she was in, er, Scotland. That the London Marathon’s organisers are anxious because “the entire elite field” of athletes is abroad just makes you wish that the Channel had a public foot tunnel, so that they could all pound through it together by way of practice.

The contrasting response of two gung-ho television celebrities is instructive, too. Dan Snow is mustering a Dunkirk-style fleet of speedboats to rescue holidaymakers from Europe; James May, of the idiot petrolhead BBC programme Top Gear, has been criticised by the Icelandic police for trying to drive up the lava flow in a superjeep. His tyres caught fire. You decide which model of adventurous machismo to set before your sons.

From sympathy to schadenfreude, responses tumble in ashy, smoky confusion: this thing is almost too enormous to take in. The pious response is to chunter on about the Majesty of Nature and slide seamlessly into eco-preaching; OK, take that as read. What I have been doing, with due respect to those whose suffering is beyond annoyance, is to make a list of the silver linings. If cheerfulness offends you, turn straight to the election pages. I will not take offence. ...

April 12, 2010
I’m not worth £213,000. This wage bill is mad
My Micawber Plan will help to cut Britain’s debt by freezing public sector pay, starting with those at the top
Norman Bettison

... Something else happened in the 1980s. The idea took hold that public sector organisations had to compete in the market place for senior managers. NHS chief executives were the first “growth” industry that I remember. ...

... The only secure ground for any senior public servant in this angry debate is the argument of relative values. The whole public sector is caught by this dilemma and so the remuneration of one individual needs to be judged against those relativities. If you took me out and shot me in a revolutionary uprising, it would still cost the taxpayer £163k, plus 24 per cent pension contribution to replace me — the official, relative, rate.

So what are we going to do about this untenable situation? The debt burden of the public sector is 56 per cent of GDP and, if unchecked, is forecast to rise to more than 75 per cent in three years’ time.

That’s what makes this uncharted territory for the public sector. Delaying action, or trimming staff numbers, just won’t sort it. We need a more fundamental wage bill correction. None of the main political parties is presenting a solution . . . yet. With 6.1 million voters employed in the public sector, should we be surprised at this silence?

I should like to see economic modelling of the deceleration rate required in public sector pay bills to respond to the financial reality that faces the country, and a speedy, if painful, application of the brake. I’d call it The Micawber Plan.

If a plan was introduced to freeze public sector pay and pension entitlement, incrementally — the whole sector mind, no exclusions or special pleading. And if that freeze started with the highest paid 25 per cent first, followed, in succeeding years, by the second, and then the third, quarters of earners. Then, three years from now, we would have smaller differentials in public sector pay and would have made a huge dent in the debt burden. This, coupled with the impact of the removal of all tax allowances and the imposition of a 50p in the pound tax rate for higher earners, might do the trick and sustain public services.

I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn’t the Fed?
By MICHAEL J. BURRY
Published: April 3, 2010
Cupertino, Calif.

... By mid-2005, I had so much confidence in my analysis that I staked my reputation on it. That is, I purchased credit default swaps — a type of insurance — on billions of dollars worth of both subprime mortgage-backed securities and the bonds of many of the financial companies that would be devastated when the real estate bubble burst. As the value of the bonds fell, the value of the credit default swaps would rise. Our swaps covered many of the firms that failed or nearly failed, including the insurer American International Group and the mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I entered these trades carefully. Suspecting that my Wall Street counterparties might not be able or willing to pay up when the time came, I used six counterparties to minimize my exposure to any one of them. I also specifically avoided using Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns as counterparties, as I viewed both to be mortally exposed to the crisis I foresaw.

What’s more, I demanded daily collateral settlement — if positions moved in our favor, I wanted cash posted to our account the next day. This was something I knew that Goldman Sachs and other derivatives dealers did not demand of AAA-rated A.I.G.

I believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market would ultimately lead to huge failures among the largest financial institutions. But at the time almost no one else thought these trades would work out in my favor.

During 2007, under constant pressure from my investors, I liquidated most of our credit default swaps at a substantial profit. By early 2008, I feared the effects of government intervention and exited all our remaining credit default positions — by auctioning them to the many Wall Street banks that were themselves by then desperate to buy protection against default. This was well in advance of the government bailouts. Because I had been operating in the face of strong opposition from both my investors and the Wall Street community, it took everything I had to see these trades through to completion. Disheartened on many fronts, I shut down Scion Capital in 2008. ...

...our leaders in Washington either willfully or ignorantly aided and abetted the bubble. And even when the full extent of the financial crisis became painfully clear early in 2007, the Federal Reserve chairman, the Treasury secretary, the president and senior members of Congress repeatedly underestimated the severity of the problem, ultimately leaving themselves with only one policy tool — the epic and unfair taxpayer-financed bailouts. Now, in exchange for that extra year or two of consumer bliss we all enjoyed, our children and our children’s children will suffer terrible financial consequences.

It did not have to be this way. And at this point there is no reason to reflexively dismiss the analysis of those who foresaw the crisis. Mr. Greenspan should use his substantial intellect and unsurpassed knowledge of government to ascertain and explain exactly how he and other officials missed the boat. If the mistakes were properly outlined, that might both inform Congress’s efforts to improve financial regulation and help keep future Fed chairmen from making the same errors again.


Ta much, dear MSiegel

Why we must break up the banks
Paul Krugman says it isn't necessary – but breaking up financial giants would at least give us hope that things can change
Dean Baker
Wednesday 7 April 2010

It's not often that I disagree with Paul Krugman, but there are occasions where at least one of us is wrong. And the treatment of too big to fail (TBTF) banks is one of them.

Krugman argued in a column last week that breaking up the TBTF banks is not a necessary part of financial reform. Krugman pointed to the example of Canada as a country with a well-regulated financial system. Canada did not experience a financial crisis in 2008 in spite of the fact that five big banks essentially account for the whole of the Canadian banking system. On the other side, Krugman noted that the collapse of large numbers of small banks can also create a crisis, pointing to the chain of bank collapses at the start of the Great Depression.

These are valid points, but to paraphrase Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: "we're not in Canada anymore." While Canadian banking regulation appears to have been effective thus far (we may want to see how they cope with a yet to deflate housing bubble before pronouncing it a success), Canada is a very different country from the United States. In Canada, they have had universal Medicare for 40 years. As the first President Bush used to say, it is a kinder, gentler, country.

This matters for financial regulation, because there is a level of independence and integrity on the part of the regulators in Canada that does not exist in the United States. The line in Washington is that if you want to talk to someone from Goldman Sachs, call the treasury department. ...

... Houses on sale for a few dollars are something of an urban legend in the US on the back of the mortgage crisis that drove millions of people from their homes. But in Detroit it is no myth.

One in five houses now stand empty in the city that launched the automobile age, forged America's middle-class and blessed the world with Motown.

Detroit has been in decline for decades; its falling population is now well below a million – half of its 1950 peak. But the recent mortgage crisis and the fall of the big car makers into bankruptcy has pushed the town into a realm unique among big cities in America.

A third of the population are unemployed. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in large parts of Detroit over the last three years. The average price of a home sold in the city last year has been put at $7,500 (£4,900).

The recent financial crash forced wholesale foreclosures among people unable to pay their mortgages or who walked away from houses that fell to a fraction of the value of the loans they had taken out on them.

Banks are selling off properties in the worst neighbourhoods, which are usually surrounded by empty and wrecked housing, for a few dollars each. But even better houses can be had at a fraction of their former value. ...

One of the biggest bonuses seen this year for any London-based banker was revealed today as HSBC announced it had given Stuart Gulliver, its head of investment banking, a £9.8 million package.

Mr Gulliver was awarded a £9 million bonus on top of his £800,000 base pay for his "exceptional performance" in trebling the profits of his division to $10.5 billion, HSBC said.

The payment came as Michael Geoghegan, HSBC chief executive, confirmed that he will give his £4 million bonus to charity.

HSBC disappointed investors after full-year profits fell by 24 per cent to $7.1 billion (£4.7 billion) following a big write down of the value of its own bonds. Its shares lost more than 5 per cent, down 37.1p, to 682.46p. ...

... Buffett has been criticizing overreaching corporate managers and complaisant directors for decades. But the question of how to motivate good corporate behavior has taken on new weight as Washington debates reining in the financial giants whose missteps brought the economy to its knees two years ago.

The Obama administration last month proposed separating banks' proprietary trading activities from their federally subsidized deposit-gathering and lending ones. Other proposed rules would increase the amount of capital banks hold against losses and how much cash they carry to deal with a surge of withdrawals.

But Buffett said there's a simpler way to cap risk-taking: Forcing lavishly compensated CEOs to take responsibility for assessing the risks at their firms -- and putting their own wealth at stake, to boot.

"It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed," he wrote. "They have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be employed as well."

The comment reflects a theme that has run through Buffett's letters to investors over the years: Shareholders are best served by managers who think like owners. More often, he has said, they are ill served by executives who instead pursue value-destroying mergers or pile up debt in a bid to boost returns. ...

This is a rich suburb, folks.

Give me a break, you idiot. You aren't supplying needed services anywhere!

Vulture funds would be banned from pursuing the world's poorest countries for debts in the UK courts, under a private member's bill that has won the backing of the government.

MPs will vote on the second reading of the debt relief (developing countries) bill, sponsored by Labour backbencher Andrew Gwynne, on Friday. The Treasury has repeatedly promised to tackle the problem of investors suing poverty-stricken governments, often over debts contracted decades ago.

So-called vulture funds buy the debts of poor countries, usually at a sizeable discount, wait until the government has received debt relief from foreign creditors, and then pursue their share of the debt in courts around the world.

The Treasury minister Ian Pearson told the Guardian he believes the government will support the bill on Friday. "It just isn't right that when governments and companies are reducing debts to these highly indebted countries, one or two unscrupulous companies that don't want to play ball can free ride," he said, calling the bill "another example of where the UK is leading on debt relief".

The legislation would apply to all countries that qualify for the international heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative, administered by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It would prevent vulture funds from claiming back any more than is agreed by other creditors under HIPC negotiations, which often involve up to 90% of the debt being written off. ...

The European parliament has urged EU authorities to investigate the role of Goldman Sachs and other investment banks in contracts that helped inflate Greece's public debt.

Over the past few years, Goldman Sachs and other banks lent money to Greece through currency contracts that allowed the government to raise millions but that didn't count as debt. The transactions led to hefty fees for the investment banks.

"It appears that Goldman Sachs have colluded with past Greek governments to reduce the appearance of Greece's debt for short-term gain, while in reality making it worse than ever," said Arlene McCarthy, vice-president of the European parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee. "These deals have increased costs for Greek taxpayers and left a mess behind for Greece's citizens and the eurozone."

McCarthy urged the EU's economic and monetary affairs commissioner, Olli Rehn, to explain the banks' role and to specify what action he plans to take "to stop banks assisting European governments in hiding public debt". ...

Innocent victims of the subprime crisis
In spite of a law protecting tenants, people who rent across the US are being illegally evicted even if their finances are fine
Sasha Abramsky
6 February 2010

"What happens often is that after a foreclosure, a broker or an agent comes to the house and, as though the law didn't exist, tells renters the house has been foreclosed and they have to leave," says Judith Liben, senior housing attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

The law Liben is referencing is the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, passed in spring last year and intended to remain on the books until 2012. It was intended to mitigate the collateral damage from the foreclosure epidemic by making banks give tenants on month-to-month leases 90 days notice before evicting them following the home owners' foreclosure; and by ensuring that tenants in good standing with year, or multi-year, leases couldn't be evicted mid-lease following a foreclosure. The new owners would, according to this act, have to honour the terms of the lease, keep up repairs on the property, and repay the tenants' security deposits upon completion of the lease.

Housing advocates cheered the law as representing a signal victory for struggling tenants in an increasingly brutal real estate environment. In the months since it was passed, however, many have concluded that in practice it is a largely toothless wonder: most tenants don't know about its existence, many banks – desperate to evict tenants living in foreclosed homes so that they can more easily sell the properties – have continued sending out illegal eviction notices; some even hire bailiffs to change the locks and to throw possessions out onto the street. And the federal government has no real mechanisms to enforce the act's provisions.

It is not uncommon for tenants in these situations to come home and find intimidating, anonymous, and legally misleading, posters stuck to their doors. One such starts with "Attention!! This property has been foreclosed and is now bank-owned. The eviction process has started. The property is being monitored." The words are in bold and the text is circled for emphasis. Another begins: "To whom it may concern: We were informed this property was vacant. We have changed the locks." Another resorts to financial intimidation: "The eviction process has been started by the bank. It is in your best interest to avoid having an eviction added to your credit report. It is very difficult to rent a property with an eviction on your credit report."

That homeowners have been hammered by subprime mortgages, by the collapse of real estate value, and by the broader economic malaise, is well-documented. But, out of the spotlight, more and more rented homes go into foreclosure: many tenants continue to pay rent to delinquent landlords, only to subsequently find they have been giving their money to a person who no longer owns the property. Others have been summarily evicted, having to scurry to find new homes – or ending up homeless. Many have lost the security deposits on their old rentals to owners who have simply disappeared. Others have seen their credit records [affected] by being evicted, despite the eviction not being the result of their own financial failings. ...

...Moore has dug out of a South Carolina archive a piece of film buried away 66 years ago because it threatened to rock the foundations of the capitalist system as Americans now know it.

President Franklin D Roosevelt was ailing. Too ill to make his 1944 state of the nation address to Congress, he instead broadcast it by radio. But at one point he called in the cameras, and set out his vision of a new America he knew he would not live to see.

Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights to guarantee every American a job with a living wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, and, perhaps most dangerously for big business, freedom from unfair monopolies. He said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence".

The film was quickly locked away.

"The next week on the newsreels – and we've gone back and researched this – they didn't run that," said Moore. "They talked about other parts of his speech, the war. Nothing about this. The footage became lost. When we called the Roosevelt presidential library and asked them about it they said it wasn't filmed. His own family told us it wasn't filmed." Moore's team scoured the country without luck until they were given a tip about a collector connected to the university of South Carolina.

The university didn't have anything archived under FDR's speeches that fitted, but there were a couple of boxes from that week in 1944.

"We pop it in. It was all there. We had tears in our eyes watching it. For 65 years not a single American saw that speech, not one. I decided right then that we're going to fulfil Roosevelt's wishes that the American people see him saying this. Of all the things in the film, probably I feel most privileged that I get to share this. I get to give him his stage." It's a powerful moment not only because it offers an alternative view of American values rarely spoken of today – almost all of which would be condemned as rampant socialism – but also an interesting reference point with which to compare the more restrained ambitions of the Obama administration. ...

January 21, 2010
The fault line in Haiti runs straight to France
The earthquake’s destruction has been aggravated not by a pact with the Devil, but by the crippling legacy of imperialism
Ben Macintyre

Where does the fault lie in Haiti? For geologists, it lies on the line between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. For some, the earthquake is evidence of God’s wrath: the American evangelist Pat Robertson has even suggested that the horror is recompense for some voodoo pact made with the Devil at Haiti’s birth.

More sensible voices point to the procession of despots who have plundered Haiti over the years, depriving it of an effective infrastructure and rendering it uniquely vulnerable to natural disaster. But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.

In the 18th century, Haiti was France’s imperial jewel, the Pearl of the Caribbean, the largest sugar exporter in the world. Even by colonial standards, the treatment of slaves working the Haitian plantations was truly vile. They died so fast that, at times, France was importing 50,000 slaves a year to keep up the numbers and the profits.

Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, in 1791 the slaves rebelled under the leadership of the self-educated slave Toussaint L’Ouverture. After a vicious war, Napoleon’s forces were defeated. Haiti declared independence in 1804.

As Haiti struggles with new misfortune, it is worth remembering that noble achievement — this is the only nation to gain independence by a slave-led rebellion, the first black republic, and the second oldest republic in the western hemisphere. Haiti was founded on a demand for liberty from people whose liberty had been stolen: the country itself is a tribute to human resilience and freedom.

France did not forgive the impertinence and loss of earnings: 800 destroyed sugar plantations, 3,000 lost coffee estates. A brutal trade blockade was imposed. Former plantation owners demanded that Haiti be invaded, its population enslaved once more. Instead, the French State opted to bleed the new black republic white.

In 1825, in return for recognising Haitian independence, France demanded indemnity on a staggering scale: 150 million gold francs, five times the country’s annual export revenue. The Royal Ordinance was backed up by 12 French warships with 150 cannon.

The terms were non-negotiable. The fledgeling nation acceded, since it had little choice. Haiti must pay for its freedom, and pay it did, through the nose, for the next 122 years. ...

A “financial crisis responsibility fee” - I like it.

I like it very much, thank you.

see more Political Pictures

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered. ...

The banks' defence of Fortress Bonus is starting to crumble. Their claim that unilateral action against excessive rewards by the UK would damage the City has been a key plank of their case against bonus reform, but that has been demolished by the chancellor's bank levy in the pre-budget report.

In this column I have repeatedly argued that action by the UK, where the financial sector is so dominant, would send a powerful signal to the rest of the world and embolden other countries to follow suit.

So it has proved: Nicolas Sarkozy is introducing a similar tax, with one French official saying "There is no obstacle to doing it now if it has been done in London." Angela Merkel is making warm noises; the hope is that the rest of the EU and the United States will join in.

Politically, the tax surcharge was a clever move. By sparking international action, the sting has been drawn from the Conservatives' cry of "class war"; George Osborne and David Cameron could not oppose the measure without alienating an angry public. ...

Kucinich seeks 60 percent excise tax on TARP executive bonuses
By Sabrina Eaton, The Plain Dealer
December 10, 2009

Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich wants to impose a 60 percent excise tax on the fat bonuses that were paid to executives of companies that took money from last year's bank bailout.

On Wednesday, he proposed an amendment to a pending financial industry reform bill that would do that and impose an additional 70 percent tax on TARP recipients' corporate profits.

"Without the extraordinary actions of the federal government, many of these institutions would have collapsed a long time ago," Kucinich told the House Rules Committee, arguing that his amendment would hold "to account those institutions and individuals that made the decisions that led to the crisis." ...

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has blinked in the face of a public outcry over its multimillion-dollar pay packages by suspending cash bonuses for its top 30 executives, in a concession to critics delivered as political momentum mounts for a crackdown on rewards in the financial sector.

Goldman is typically the biggest payer of any leading US bank, with a policy of distributing more than 40% of its revenue to employees, and it has faced furious protests over an anticipated handout of $23bn (£14.1bn) this year, an average of more than $700,000 per employee.

The bank yesterday announced that its senior staff, including six London-based executives, would receive shares vesting over a five-year period instead of cash bonuses. Under enhanced "clawback" powers, it will be able to reclaim shares from any employees found to have inflicted "material financial harm" on its businesses. In an unprecedented move for a major US bank, Goldman will put its remuneration policies before a yearly "say on pay" vote by shareholders at its annual meetings.

A Goldman spokesman said the bank had taken public opinion into consideration: "The motivation was that these are extraordinary times, that the firm has done well and that that has excited a great deal of comment and not a little criticism." ...

... Aware of industrialism’s potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitable distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods or our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global “free market.” But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting them. ...



Ta much, dear MSiegel

Cash please; small bills.

Shops and markets in North Korea have been closed and all cash transactions frozen after the Government’s shock announcement of a devaluation of its currency in an effort to crack down on the country’s burgeoning free-market economy.

In the capital, Pyongyang, yesterday only the few shops and restaurants permitted to trade in foreign currencies — patronised by the privileged elite and the city’s small foreign population — were open for business. All other enterprises and services based on cash, including markets, long-distance bus services, barbers’ shops, saunas and bath houses, were suspended until the revaluation of the won is completed next week.

There were reports of public outrage and confusion after the announcement of the measure, which requires North Koreans to swap existing won notes for new ones at an exchange rate of one to 100 — effectively knocking two zeroes off their value. Because of a cap of 100,000 won per family (£475 at the official exchange rate), anyone with significant holdings of cash will have their savings wiped out.

“Loud sounds of weeping in every house have not ceased since the news was released,” a South Korean website quoted an inhabitant of Sinuiju, a city on the border with China, as saying. “Weeping and fighting between couples has not stopped anywhere. The atmosphere of the city is terrible now.” ...

...The one thing I knew [about Dubai] was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.

Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing. ...




I love you, Charlie.

I saw a tv show about Dubai a number of years ago and wanted to puke. I kept staring at the screen instead of changing channel, simultaneously nauseous and fascinated - like a hypnotized, rubbernecking car-crash passerby.


[Tangent:
A British woman shopping in Suthun Coliforniyah was delighted with the term "rubberneck" when I used it to describe the nearby idiot car-crash passersby, who'd naturally blocked traffic more than the accident. She said she'd never heard a Yank use it in context before, and she loved it. She mimed holding a steering wheel and sharply turning her head, moronically gawking open-mouthed while driving past and laughed.

Not quite all Yankistanisms suck.]

Fears of a dangerous new phase in the economic crisis swept around the globe yesterday as traders responded to the shock announcement that a debt-laden Dubai state corporation was unable to meet its interest bill.

Shares plunged, weak currencies were battered and more than £14 billion was wiped from the value of British banks on fears that they would be left nursing new losses. ...

... A computer crash at the London Stock Exchange, which by coincidence [Ed. Note: Yeah, suuuuure!] is 21 per cent owned by the Dubai Government, left dealers unable to trade for three and a half hours.

Shares in HSBC slumped by 5 per cent, wiping £6.2 billion from its value. According to the United Arab Emirates Banks Association, HSBC has £11 billion of loans outstanding to the UAE, of which Dubai is one of seven emirates. HSBC declined to comment.

More than £2.6 billion was slashed from the value of Barclays, while Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, both partly owned by the taxpayer, saw their values fall by £1.7 billion and £1.5 billion respectively.

One analyst said that the fears were overdone because Abu Dhabi would eventually come to the rescue to save the UAE from embarrassment. Dubai World has liabilities of £36 billion, about three quarters of Dubai’s total state debt. Its subsidiary Nakheel built The Palm Islands development, but the property bubble in the emirate burst a year ago, leaving buildings unfinished, debts unpaid and paper fortunes erased.

Brilliant comment:
... Sorry, but I can't help but shake my head in disbelief that people didn't see this one from a long way away. Dubai has been spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave for years; a financial hangover was inevitable. I've had a number of dealings with Dubai World over the last few years involving leveraged buyout of American corporations and I've steered my company away from representing them for the last six months. They always seemed to have the attitude that money was in an endless supply for them and that oil would do nothing but rise on the world market.

I've had a few angry firms tell me I was crazy to turn Dubai World away, but by Monday morning, I know of several that didn't listen to me that will be absolutely livid with a delay of payment for a half year. The problems are going to be far more deeply rooted than what is being announced.

Dubai World and other state run corporations are inevitably poorly executed due to the lack of competitive constraints and lack of firewalling between government and the corporate interests. Never rely on a state owned entity.

I would urge the Times and other reputable news sources, along with various international monetary agencies to exhaustively investigate and DISCLOSE their financials. The public has a right to know whats going on.

Just my little opinion, but I'd steer away for Saudi for the next year or so, but you didn't hear that from me.

~ Lauren Z

Reality Strikes Fake Fantasyland Dubai - Film at eleven.

Some of this is total crap, and most of the commenters need to change their meds.

Par example, every Friday our trash is collected unless holiday/s makes it a day or two later, which has always been the case.

We did have a female garbage truck driver for a while in the 80s (during coleman young's reign as mayor) who'd often pull into our alley, take a nap in her truck, and then drive away w/o ever collecting. When our dumpsters were full to all but overflowing and covered with flies and attracting rats she'd finally collect. She only lasted a few months, tho. Someone with real clout musta bitched about the bitch.

I love this man.

Employers yesterday called upon the Government to get to grips with its ballooning debts as a new study put the true size of the public sector’s net liabilities at £2,200 billion, almost three times official figures.

The CBI said that the Government needed to cut its planned spending by £120 billion over the next six years, amid forecasts that official figures due tomorrow will show that total net borrowing has surged by another £10 billion in the past month.

The true level of Government debt is equivalent to 157 per cent of national output and nearly three times as large as the £805 billion figure reported by the Office for National Statistics, according to a new book published by a centre-right think tank.

Brooks Newmark, the Conservative MP for Braintree, Essex, says in The Hidden Bombshell, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies, that government debt is actually £2,200 billion. In the book, Mr Newmark argues that the UK’s public sector net debt is equivalent to £85,610 per household and in the last year has risen by £346 billion — or by £11,000 a second. ...

I thought the maps were a bit of a pain, but I've figured it out. Open the page I've posted in another tab and play with the big map there until it's legible. Use th' above thang to get a fix on the map's legend, and make it legible so you can refer to it w/o fuss while you play with large map.

I thought the maps were a bit of a pain, but I've figured it out. Open the page I've posted in another tab and play with the big map there until it's legible. Use th' above thang to get a fix on the map's legend, and make it legible so you can refer to it w/o fuss while you play with large map.

Former Wall Street financiers face criminal action

Former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager Matthew Tannin's private jottings show concerns about 'blow up risk' to investors

Andrew Clark in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 11 October 2009

They are scribblings that may come back to haunt Matthew Tannin. The former high-flying Bear Stearns hedge fund manager – who goes on trial for fraud in a New York court this week – had a habit of recording his inner-most thoughts in emails sent to himself on a private Google Mail account.

"I am going to use this to keep my diary," he wrote. "I didn't want to use my work email any more."

In words never intended for public consumption, Tannin wrote of his worries about becoming dependant on an antidepressant, Wellbutrin, and a stress medication, Lorazapan, to cope with concern about the performance of his fund. He expressed satisfaction at earning close to $2m (£1.3m) in a year but alluded to a "religious crisis" and complained about "schlepping the kids around from place to place" during a holiday in London.

As his confidence in his money-making panache began to falter, Tannin pinpointed a meeting in 2006 when he realised that his Bear Stearns fund faced potential trouble: "I had a wave of fear set over me – that the Fund couldn't be run in the way that I was 'hoping'. And that it was going to subject investors to 'blow up risk'."

Tannin and his boss, Ralph Cioffi, ran two funds holding $1.4bn of clients' funds that collapsed in July 2007, an event widely viewed as the first clear signal of America's sub-prime mortgage crisis and the global credit crunch. The meltdown of these funds sparked a chain of events that contributed to the demise of Bear Stearns, an 85-year-old Wall Street institution, in early 2008. They have been charged by US prosecutors with defrauding customers by hiding the true condition of investments as prospects steadily darkened.

The first high-rolling financiers to face criminal action arising from the financial crisis, Cioffi and Tannin have become unwitting poster boys for perceived arrogance, recklessness and irresponsibility on Wall Street. Frustrated at not seeing higher-ranking bank bosses clapped in irons, the public and the US media are watching keenly. ...

A Daily Telegraph investigation has discovered that the Ministry of Defence's housing stock was sold to the private equity firm in 1996 for £1.6 billion, but taxpayers have already paid almost £1.8 billion to rent the soldiers’ homes back. The firm is expected to receive more than £1.5 billion in rent over the next decade.

Under the terms of the deal the company will also soon be able to retain the profits of selling the homes which are now worth more than £3.4 billion.

The decision to sell the properties at such a low price is now being compared to Gordon Brown's sale of Britain's gold reserves which has cost the country £2 billion.

Last night, a defence minister admitted that the deal had “not been good” for the armed forces and MPs called it a “national scandal”.

Bob Russell, the Liberal Democrat MP for the garrison town of Colchester, said: “Every single aspect of the privatisation of the MoD housing has been a scandal and an embarrassment. The whole deal with Annington needs to be investigated.” ...

Will California become America's first failed state?

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong? ...



Too many years of rethuglicunt rule. Simple as.

The International Monetary Fund today threw its weight behind a new tax on the global financial sector designed to limit risky speculative behaviour and help the world's poorest countries.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said banks and other big financial institutions were responsible for systemic risk and it was only right that they provided resources to mitigate those threats to the world economy.

While ruling out a so-called Tobin tax – a levy on foreign currency transactions proposed by the American economist James Tobin in the early 1970s – Strauss-Kahn said a high-level IMF team would work on proposals in the coming months.

"The very simple idea of putting a tax on transactions won't work for many technical reasons," Strauss-Kahn said at a press conference held in the run-up to the IMF's annual meeting in Istanbul next week.

"On the other hand, considering the financial sector is creating a lot of systemic risks for the global economy, it is fair that the sector pay some part of its resources to mitigate risks it is creating itself." ...



Hmmm. This is a lot like seeing Lucifer giving orders to Beelzebub, innit.

I could have attended the Labour party conference. But I thought: why squander a trip to the seaside? Yet I am still amazed by the timid mendacity of the event. There they all were, still hoping against hope that they'd soon gain full credit – and another term in power – for "saving the economy", while at the same time promising earnestly to tackle the social problems that they were voted in to curb 12 years ago.

First, why don't Labour politicians grasp that the "economy" they fostered is not worth "saving", because it exacerbated the very social problems that they are presently wringing their hands over (again)? Second, why don't they grasp that the "economy" they fostered can't be "saved" anyway? It is all over, because it was a mirage.

The transition from a manufacturing to a skills-based economy, started under Thatcher in the 80s and continued so enthusiastically by New Labour, has been a failure. Its triumphs would be rubble were it not for the scaffold of bail-out support that has been erected around it.

It's no use crying that the crash was caused by "international conditions". Not long before the financial meltdown, Labour was thrilled to observe that London had recently overtaken New York as the most powerful financial centre in the world. Britain played a huge part in setting those international conditions, under a chancellor who thought he could harness the cash generated by a free-market economy to deliver on public services and make everybody happy. ...

Brown intervenes in bank charges standoff

PM tells bankers to settle long-running court battle over refunds for excessive charges 'without further delay' ...

The European Union will seek a global deal on clawing back or cancelling bankers’ bonuses at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh next week after agreement among the 27 European leaders last night.

Supervisory bodies should be given the power to “reduce compensations” for bankers if their bank performs badly, while “the major part” of bonuses should be deferred over time and “could be cancelled” in the light of poor outcomes, the EU leaders agreed at a pre-G20 summit in Brussels.

The leaders agreed a united front on bankers’ bonuses after Nicolas Sarkozy of France relaxed his call for a ceiling on bonuses in return for the tough-sounding general threat of bonus cancellation “in case of a negative development in the bank’s performance.” What this means in detail has yet to be thrashed out.

“The bonus bubble bursts tonight,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister and current holder of the EU presidency. “We particularly want to focus on the link between performance and compensation.” ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation's caseload for mortgage fraud has continued to grow as homeowners cope with the shattered housing market, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the U.S. Congress on Wednesday.

"The schemes have evolved with the changing economy, targeting vulnerable individuals, victimizing them even as they are about to lose their homes," he said in prepared remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He told the panel that the FBI has more than 2,600 cases open with most of them involving losses of over $1 million. That is more than triple the number three years ago and up from 2,400 cases Mueller said were open in May.

The FBI has shifted its investigative resources to focus on mortgage fraud and assigned about 300 special agents to the task, Mueller said, adding that their focus has centered on what he described as "industry insiders."

Economists have cited the housing bust that left banks holding souring mortgage securities as the primary cause of the deep recession that has swamped the U.S. economy since December 2007. ...



Sic 'em!!

New research suggests that the NHS spends close to £200 million a year on cholesterol-lowering statins for people who then fail to take them properly. This must be galling for a Chancellor faced with the herculean task of reducing the national debt.

And this study, presented at the British Pharmaceutical Conference in Manchester last week, represents the tip of a much larger iceberg. Other research suggests that though people on statins may be better at taking their medication than some others, overall it is thought that four out of ten don’t take their medicines regularly enough to derive any benefit. If you extrapolate that to the total annual NHS drugs bill of around £10 billion, it equates to £4 billion wastage a year — enough for 120,000 extra nurses. ...

Last month Harriet Harman made the perfectly commonsense observation that groups with different kinds of people in them tend to make better decisions than those composed of people who have the same background, experience and outlook. Her remarks proved explosive because she made the counterfactual joke that “Lehman Sisters” might not have made the same mistakes as their real-world brothers. In the ensuing deluge of indignation, few made the point that should really worry us: we have no prospect of discovering whether she is right, because so few women rise to the upper ranks of City firms.

The results of a major investigation released today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission show that, despite the genuine efforts of leading figures in the sector and the success of a handful of high-profile women, the City still has miles to go before it can honestly say that women are treated fairly.

The average woman working in financial services takes home less than 50p for every pound earned by her typical male colleague. Her bonus is a fifth the size of his. This isn’t just the result of old-fashioned bigotry, though there’s a bit of that. Schools and universities, for example, tend to steer girls away from the technical number-crunching skills that provide the greatest rewards.

But our study reveals that women in the City face unjustified inequalities at every stage of their careers. Ninety-five per cent of employers have at least one category or grade of job with a significant gender pay gap. This suggests women earn less than their male colleagues for doing similar work with similar responsibilities. Something is going wrong that needs to be righted. ...



Um, something's been seriously wrong with women's pay for an awfully long time. What took your damn ass so long to notice?

Déja vu!

Women earn around 80% less than men in performance-related pay at some of the UK's leading finance companies, revealing a "shocking disparity", according to an official inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Findings also show more than eight out of 10 women starting new jobs are paid lower average salaries than men.

The "massive gender gap" is one of the highest in the UK economy and entrenched by recruitment patterns, said the commission. It is calling for an overhaul in recruitment practices in the industry which provided 1.3 million jobs in Britain last year.

The disparity is revealed after the inquiry, the first of its kind, questioned 44 top firms which between them employ almost one quarter (22.6%)of finance sector workers. A key factor is believed to be the sector's age profile, where the majority of workers are between 25 and 39, the age at which women have childcare responsibilities.

The commission's inquiry found women earned an average of £2,875 in annual performance pay compared to £14,554 for men.

Meanwhile, there was a gap of 39% in annual basic pay between women and men – rising to 47% for total earnings taking into account performance-related pay, bonuses and overtime. Fewer than half the companies questioned were making any efforts to address the pay gap, and fewer than one quarter (23%) had undertaken an equal pay audit.

Previous figures have shown that, for the financial sector overall, women working fulltime earned 55% less annual gross salary than men. This compares to a pay gap of 28% for the economy in general. ...

Michigan State Fair representatives tell Action News that this is the last year for the family tradition.

Until now, the future was uncertain for the fair, but officials confirm that the fair will not return after 2009.

Because of a severe budget deficit, the state of Michigan cannot continue to fund the event.

The first ever Michigan State Fair was held in Detroit back in 1849. It's billed as the oldest state fair in the United States. In 1905, the fair got its permanent home at the Michigan State Fairgrounds. ...

... Fair officials confirmed Thursday this will be the last Michigan State Fair.

The future of the 161-year old state fair has looked dim since Governor Granholm said earlier this year that its state funding would end after this year.

But fair supporters had hoped for a last minute reprieve. They gave up yesterday. Fair general manager Robert Porter says there will be no last minute infusion of funds to keep the fair going. ...

Saturday, September 5, 2009
Michigan State Fair prepares to enter history books
Darren A. Nichols and Michael H. Hodges / The Detroit News

Savor the Miracle of Life. Soak in the midway. Take plenty of snapshots.

Because this weekend is it for the Michigan State Fair, officials confirmed Friday.

A last-gasp effort to maintain the nation's oldest fair beyond this year has failed, confirming the worst fears of fans after Gov. Jennifer Granholm eliminated subsidies this year.

"The fair will be closing. We said that back in April, and it's (now) sinking in that it's going to close," fair spokeswoman Carmen Carter said.

The closure comes at a time when state fairs throughout the Midwest are seeing gangbuster attendance. Officials for several said they never heard of a state fair going under. ...



Our governor is an evil cow.

Bankruptcy threat brings new concept to the Cayman Islands … taxes

• UK refuses request to bail out Cayman Islands
• Workers' benefits not paid as state runs out of cash

* Nick Mathiason and James Doran
* Tuesday 1 September 2009

....the world's biggest hedge-fund venue and fifth-biggest bank centre is now threatened, as the government of the Cayman Islands heads for bankruptcy — unable to pay its own staff and facing the prospect of introducing taxes as income from the world's shrunken financial system collapses.

But the situation is about to get worse after the British government, which has ultimate responsibility for the islands, last week refused to bail out the Caribbean idyll. It is not convinced the country will have the money to pay it back.

At the same time, hundreds of civil servants found that pension contributions and health insurance payments were missing from their pay slips. Contractors and government suppliers also had bills unpaid.

The leader of government business, William McKeeva Bush, begged the British government to borrow $310m (£190m) from banks. In a strongly worded response, Chris Bryant, a junior Foreign Office minister, has demanded the Caymans cut its borrowing and debt. And in a shockwave that will send tremors through the island's financial elite, Bryant even suggested that the tax haven introduce taxes.

"I fear you will have no choice but to consider new taxes – perhaps payroll and property taxes," Bryant wrote to Bush. "I understand, of course, that in so doing you will want to consider carefully the implications for Caymans' economy, including the financial services industry."

The wealth in the Caymans is staggering. Its hedge funds alone look after $2.3tn (£1.4tn), according to figures last year, and its GDP places it as the world's 12th richest jurisdiction, despite a population of only 51,900.

It made the Caymans a high-profile target as the global financial storm clouds broke. The Caymans were singled out by Barack Obama last year in his presidential campaign. It was also placed on a "grey list" of harmful tax jurisdictions by the OECD last April. ...

... The Cayman Islands, like most Caribbean island nations, is deeply divided socially and economically. On the one hand there are the ultra-wealthy – Microsoft's Paul Allen and golf champion Tiger Woods both moor their yachts there. On the other there are the native Caymanians, many of whom live in simple single-storey breeze block homes typical of the islands, with chickens and goats running about on scrub-like surrounding land. They are poor people who largely exist on the island to serve the wealthy in the hotels, private clubs and staffed households. ...

... Richard Murphy, of the campaign group Tax Justice Network, said: "Cayman is proving three things. The first is that tax havens are not sustainable: their business model is bankrupt. The second is that free-riding the tax system can't pay. The third is that international finance services that uses these places undermine the effective operations of states by denying them the resources they need to fulfil local electoral mandates." ...

New York signs order to let OTB file for bankruptcy
Tue Sep 1, 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Governor David Paterson on Tuesday signed an executive order that will enable the troubled New York City Off-Track Betting Corp file for bankruptcy as a municipality.

The order will allow the state-owned OTB to file for Chapter 9, the part of the federal bankruptcy code that applies to municipalities and allows them time to restructure without being forced into liquidation, Paterson told a news conference.

"This will give the OTB an effective and efficient way to become the dynamic, transparent and profitable agency it was intended to be," Paterson said.

The OTB was set up as a public benefit corporation in 1970 to raise money from pari-mutuel betting for New York City, the state and the horse-racing industry. In pari-mutuel betting, all bets of a specific type are pooled with the house subtracting its "take" before paying the winners. ...

... "This is the first time that we have this kind of precise information, with the names, the account numbers and the amounts deposited," he said in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. "It's exceptional."

The unprecedented move, which will send jitters through the thousands of French citizens thought to escape their own country's fiscal regulations by stashing money over the border, comes days after Paris and Berne signed an agreement aimed at sharing more information on suspected tax evaders. Switzerland, the world's largest offshore banking centre, is attempting to bring itself back in from the cold after its idiosyncratic financial practices were sharply rebuked at the London G20 summit of leaders in April.

Amid an economic crisis which left little patience for the continuing existence of tax havens, Switzerland was put on a "grey list" of countries considered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to be failing to co-operate "substantially" on sharing information. Since then, it has reluctantly promised to help other countries crack down on tax evasion while at the same time seeking to reassure its banks' customers that its protective layer of secrecy will remain.

According to the Swiss finance ministry, the government has now signed taxation agreements in line with OECD recommendations with France, Denmark and Luxembourg, which was removed from the "grey list" in July.

It is also understood to have initialled - but not yet signed - similar deals with a number of other countries, including Britain and the United States. ...



"Taxes are for the little people!"
- leona helmsley

Posted: Aug. 30, 2009
GM power has shifted to China
Foreign operations report to Shanghai

BY MARCIN SZCZEPANSKI and TIM HIGGINS
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITERS

SHANGHAI -- Largely overlooked in last month's sweeping management reorganization of the new post-bankruptcy General Motors Co. was a recentering of power to Shanghai. ...



I bloody well noticed, and told gm months ago to get all their arses the hell outta my city, and off to chinastan. Maybe they'll destroy chinastan the way they did my town.

Detroit on brink of financial ruin
As budget balloons, some fear city can't stay afloat

BY SUZETTE HACKNEY and JOHN WISELY
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

Detroit has fallen so far into debt that the only way out is through bankruptcy or mass layoffs, according to a former city auditor who is familiar with the city's financial structure.

Mayor Dave Bing is trying to plug a $60-million to $80-million cash shortfall and deal with a ballooning $300-million deficit. He is being hampered, though, with falling revenue from property and income taxes and state revenue sharing.

"I don't see the city getting out of this financial mess short of a bankruptcy," said Joe Harris, a former auditor general who was chief financial officer in late 2008 and early 2009.

Bing took the first step last week in addressing the cash crunch by laying off 205 workers, but Harris calls the move a stopgap. The city is bleeding at least $5 million a month, Harris said.

Adding to the cash woes, on Monday the state will again withhold about $1 million in revenue sharing because the city is late with its required audit.

"An $80-million cash flow shortfall sounds terrible," said Jan Lazar, a municipal finance and management consultant, "but it doesn't mean the city can't manage it."

On July 1, Detroit began its fiscal year with less than $20 million in the bank -- not even enough of a surplus to pay the roughly 13,000 employees who cost the city $50 million a month in salaries and benefits.

Now, as the budget continues to balloon -- Detroit Mayor Dave Bing estimates at least a $300-million accumulated deficit and a $60-million to $80-million immediate cash shortfall -- there's concern that the city will not be able to limp its way through the end of the year. ...



Where da money at, you bastards?

That's a minor example of what always happens to companies who'd hired me and then screwed me over. I don't cast spells or make evil incantations, it's just their karma.

New inquiry into exploitation of the work-for-free interns

Employers and MPs taking advantage as graduates struggle to find jobs

Polly Curtis, education editor
Friday 31 July 2009 22.05 BST

A government watchdog is to investigate whether companies are exploiting thousands of graduates by employing them on unpaid, long-term internships during the recession, the Guardian has learned.

The Low Pay Commission is expecting to include recommendations on internships in its annual review in the new year amid concerns that companies are taking advantage of the tough jobs market.

A Guardian inquiry has also discovered that MPs could be breaking the rules. Ministers have estimated that unpaid interns work up to 18,000 hours a week inside parliament, a saving of more than £5m a year on the national minimum wage. MPs are each given a staffing allowance of £104,000pa. ...

Most Units Still Unsold

Faced with the worst residential real estate market in decades, the developers of the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel are relaunching the sale of the condominiums atop the hotel with a new campaign and price cuts on remaining units. ...

Royal Dutch Shell, Europe's largest oil company, said today profits fell by 70 per cent in the second quarter due to lower prices and a collapse in demand.

Shell's earnings in the three months to the end of June declined from $7.9 billion (£4.8 billion) in the same period last year to $2.3 billion. Its first half performance was 64 per cent lower at $5.6 billion.

In his first results as chief executive, since taking over from Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s Peter Voser gave a gloomy assessment of the oil market blaming the economic downturn for reduced energy demand. Since reaching a record high of $147 a barrel last year, oil is now trading 57 per cent lower at $63.

Mr Voser also warned that production capacity and costs remained too high in the industry and would remain a threat. ...



Good show! Jolly good show!

Michigan needs to send out an SOS. And the federal government will need to toss a life preserver.

Starting late next month, the number of people exhausting their jobless benefits will balloon. By year's end, roughly 100,000 laid-off workers will have lost their unemployment pay, which softens the blow of joblessness by up to $362 a week, plus a $25 federal supplement.

Which, if you believe in vicious downward cycles, will cause more foreclosures, more joblessness as purchasing power dwindles, more demand for already strained services like Medicaid and Michigan's pathetically weak welfare program, and more pressure on food banks and other nonprofits.

This jaw-dropping increase in the number of people losing benefits does not necessarily reflect a precise spate of layoffs. More likely it's attributable to when federal extensions of unemployment benefits became available, and people who previously ran out of eligibility came back on the rolls in bursts.

However the spike developed, these are truly scary numbers: 25,689 more people without benefits by year's end in Wayne County, 10,884 in Oakland and 10,158 in Macomb. United Way CEO Mike Brennan talks a good game about ways everyone can pitch in, but he concedes that demand will outstrip the region's capacity to help itself.

When even the health care workforce is shrinking, it's hard to claim job opportunities exist. Michigan's jobless rate was 15.2% in June, and U.S. statistics suggest it would rise by at least another 4 percentage points if it included so-called discouraged workers and the underemployed. That's a lot of families with very few resources -- and now facing even fewer -- after months and months of scarcity already. ...

Sexism in the City and pay inequalities faced by women working in financial firms are to be investigated by the Treasury select committee of MPs as part of its attempt to prevent another financial crisis.

The committee, which includes just one woman, is calling for evidence on the role of women in the City and information about the proportion of women occupying senior positions in leading financial firms.

John McFall, chairman of the committee, intends to hold two hearings in the autumn. The investigation has been born out of the committee's work looking into the banking meltdown.

The government is expected to respond to the 45 conclusions reached by the committee following its high-profile hearings into the banking crisis. Among the conclusions were that the review of the future of regulation by the Financial Services Authority chairman, Lord Turner, was too complacent about the role of City pay in the current crisis. ...

De Beers profits lose their sparkle in global recession
Luxury goods sector is being hit hard by the financial crisis
Graeme Wearden
Friday 24 July 2009

Profits at diamond firm De Beers have been crushed after demand for luxury products was hit by the recession.

The world's largest diamond producer reported a 99% drop in net profits for the first half of 2009 this morning, to just $3m (£1.82m). It made $316m in the same period a year ago, before the economic downturn deterred even the wealthy from splashing out on non-essentials.

De Beers blamed an "extraordinarily difficult" trading environment for the slump in profitability. Sales of rough diamonds were down by 57% to $1.4bn, with production slashed by 73% to 6.6m carats. ...



Woo hoo! What great news!
They are, however, fulla shite. It's not just that all luxury goods pushers are slumping, it's that people want to buy only un-bloody diamonds, and debeers don't sell that kind!

... After spending most of his first two months in office poring over Detroit’s financial books and organizational structure, Bing said the city is so deeply in the red that the following measures must be taken to avoid bankruptcy:

• The consolidation and elimination of some city departments.

• A reduction in nonessential city services.

• Concessions by city employees, including job losses in some cases.

• The hiring of an outside emergency collection agency to help recoup some of the debt owed to the city.

“We’ve got a cash-flow problem in the second quarter,” Bing said, referring to the autumn period of the city’s budget cycle. He told Free Press editors and reporters in an exclusive interview: “The city could actually run out of cash if we do nothing, and I’m not going to sit back and do nothing.”

Bing said the city cannot afford to continue operating the way it has for generations, nor can it afford to keep all of its 13,000 employees.
Labor concessions, big cuts in services needed, he says

Detroit's financial picture is grim, but Bing says a complete overhaul of city government by 2010 could help the city avoid the appointment of an emergency financial manager or the filing of municipal bankruptcy.

Bing said Thursday there are no more creative moves to make -- those budgetary tricks were all tapped by previous administrations -- and the city is up against a wall financially. The only answer, he said, is to change how the city functions. ...



Problem is, dave, you're a rethuglicunt so we can't trust ya.

Amen, Brother, Amen!

... Michigan counts on the border for business: Canada and the U.S. are the world’s two biggest trading partners – with $596 billion in trade in 2008 – and Michigan does more trade with Canada than any other state. More than 200,000 jobs in Michigan are supported by trade, and the supply links in the auto industry run deep.

The report notes, for instance, that “A vehicle produced by a U.S. automaker crosses the border seven times on average during its assembly.”

Author Chris Sands of the Hudson Institute – a global security research organization in Washington, D.C – says that despite strides made in handling border concerns since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, security is still dominated by “one-size-fits-all rules” that “at times have equated conditions at the U.S.-Canadian border with those at the more difficult U.S-Mexican border.”

That has led to long lines, delays in trade and hassles for those who decide to cross.

“The unfortunate reality is that the border today remains a source of considerable user frustration and economic drag,” Sands wrote.

The report makes several broad recommendations, including empowering local federal officials to work toward solutions specific to their border crossings; enacting plans at the local level to address customs concerns, and adopting a policy approach in Washington that recognizes the differences between the issues facing the northern and southern borders. ...

July 8, 2009
Bankers to face draconian pay veto
Suzy Jagger, Politics and Business Correspondent

City regulators will be able to veto the pay deals of bank executives under new proposals set out today by Alistair Darling.

Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, the Chancellor said that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) will monitor the structure of bankers' remuneration packages and produce a report on them every year.

Should the City watchdog find that an executive's pay encourages the financier to take risky investment decisions, it can order the lender to put aside more capital in reserve. Any such requirement would reduce a bank's profitability and, the Treasury believes, act as an effective veto.

"We need a change of culture in the banks and their boardrooms, with pay practices that are focused on long-term stability and not short-term profit," Mr Darling said. ...

July 6, 2009
FSA to triple fines and dock pay for market abuse
Patrick Hosking, Financial Editor

Companies guilty of the biggest financial offences could be fined as much as £50 million after the Financial Services Authority (FSA) today announced a step change in the size of penalties it wants to mete out.

The City regulator said some fines could treble in size as it seeks to address concerns that penalties thus far have not proved much of a deterrent in improving company behaviour.

It also announced proposals for a minimum fine of £100,000 for individuals found guilty of market abuse offences such as insider dealing. Up to 40 per cent of an individual's salary and benefits could be taken, it said.

Fines would amount to 20 per cent of turnover from the relevant product or business area over the period of the offences, the FSA said. ...

DETROIT INCINERATOR
Shut plant down
Emissions are unacceptable and increasingly costly to city
BY NOAH HALL
June 18, 2009

The City of Detroit's garbage incinerator -- the largest trash incinerator in the world -- has long been a concern of local residents and environmental justice groups. It burns nearly 800,000 tons of trash per year, emitting hazardous air pollutants including mercury, lead and dioxins.

In addition to these issues, heightened concerns and coming federal regulations regarding greenhouse gas emissions should give the City Council another reason to stop using the incinerator.

In response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gas pollution may be subject to the federal Clean Air Act, Congress and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama are moving toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide. When these regulations take effect -- and it's only a question of when, not if -- the incinerator's greenhouse gas emissions will become a huge financial and legal liability for the City of Detroit.

It's not yet clear just how big a liability the incinerator's greenhouse gas emissions will be, but the stakes are huge. The incinerator emits a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide. Based on data provided by the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Authority and federal estimates for carbon dioxide emissions, the facility could be responsible for as much as 750,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year -- equivalent to the annual emissions of 150,000 cars. ...



Shut it down and tear it down.

$380,000 TO TRAVEL THE WORLD
Detroit pension trustees take flight on funds' tab
The Free Press sued to get the records. Little is offered; some were destroyed. Are the assets of city workers safe?

BY JENNIFER DIXON • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • June 14, 2009

The trustees who oversee Detroit's two public pensions, their lawyers and staff spent $380,000 over the past year circling the globe to attend conferences -- often traveling in packs, with virtually no limitation on where they went or how often they traveled.

Trustee Ronald Gracia spent the most time on the road -- billing the General Retirement System for $105,000 in travel, including three trips to Singapore and $18,600 on travel to Hong Kong, according to records provided by the pension funds.

The two public pensions, with 21 trustees, have guarded their travel records from scrutiny. The Free Press sued to get the records -- which are actually only summaries from the past year.

The funds have yet to turn over actual receipts that would show, for instance, where trustees and staffers stayed and how they spent some of the money. Other documents have been destroyed.

However limited, these summaries provide a fuller snapshot than previously reported examples of the pensions' freewheeling travel practices.

The records also raise questions about how the travel squares with the trustees' legal duty to protect city workers' and retirees' assets, pension fund experts say.

Gracia declined to be interviewed. But in an e-mail, he said in today's world of global economics, trustees have an obligation to stay educated. He also said that the pension funds are in good financial shape.

Other pension officials declined comment. ...

Water department gives him $56,600 a year, but Gracia focuses on pension
BY JENNIFER DIXON • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • June 14, 2009

Ronald Gracia, the $100,000-a-year traveler at Detroit's General Retirement System, also has a day job with the city's water department.

At least on paper.

Gracia receives $56,600 a year as a senior data processing program analyst with Detroit's Water and Sewerage Department, but spokesman George Ellenwood concedes Gracia doesn't actually work at his job.

Ellenwood said the department allows Gracia to devote full attention to his trustee duties for the pension fund, which typically meets once a week.

"All of his time is allocated to the pension work that he did," Ellenwood said, calling it a "long-term practice based on an understanding that is some years old."

Gracia, a trustee for 26 years, said in an e-mail he doesn't have to be on the job because he's a full-time union official and, like some other city employees, he's allowed to do union work full-time.

He did not respond to questions about whether he had a written agreement regarding his water department position. He also did not identify the union and his position.

Ellenwood said the water department is "trying to find if there was a written agreement with HR or some policy decision from perhaps labor relations that established this practice." ...



Yu a stinkin' t'ief, mon an' mi hope ya lose bot' ya jobs!
Rass claaat!

Make Michigan nation's clean energy powerhouse
State should push for carbon cap legislation

BY WILLIAM G. MILLIKEN • June 14, 2009

It wasn't that long ago that the American Midwest was the economic powerhouse of the world and Michigan was the engine of it. For more than a century, we led the way in all the most important industries: steel, automobiles and every type of manufacturing imaginable. We have a proud and powerful history.

To write a new chapter in that history, we must reject fear and turn with hope toward a clean energy future.

Renewable energy has the potential to create even more jobs and more wealth than the Internet did. The Midwest, and Michigan in particular, could see huge benefits from clean energy industries. To accelerate these benefits, Congress must swiftly act to put a cap on carbon pollution.

A cap creates rewards for companies that invent new, better ways of doing business. It spurs investment in the most innovative businesses and builds support for renewable energy entrepreneurs. Michigan will see plenty of new opportunities to make money from clean energy -- from wave power in the Great Lakes to biofuels from our farms.

Perhaps more important for our state economy, our established manufacturing companies have a chance for big profits as well. For instance, it takes 250 tons of steel and 8,000 separate parts to make one wind turbine, and our state already has the infrastructure and the skilled workers to build what America needs.

That's why the United Steelworkers support a carbon cap; they know it's a chance to bring jobs back to the Midwest. The Big Three automakers have joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership to support a cap on carbon as well, and so have companies from John Deere to PepsiCo to Shell Oil. They all see the potential in a clean energy future. We need to seize this opportunity now. ...

Hmmm...let's think about this, girls and boys.

Gas got so damn expen$ive no one bought any if they could avoid it.

People quit buying vast hulking brutes of cars what go through gas like Yul Brynner went through cigarettes.

Folks began using Shanks' Mare, bicycles, carpools, and public ma-transport.

Folks are still doing this to an extent, even though gas prices have fallen.

Automobile manufactures are broken and broke.

The World At Large is finally starting to look at saudi arabia as if it's insane, and might want sectioning and a straitjacket.

Iran is run (not for long we hope, Gentle Categorians) by a man who is truly insane and defo wants sectioning and a straitjacket.


Conclusion:
Yer damn ahem straight oil consumption's low as hell!

Ed. Note: Bill Griffith (Griffy) once designed Wacky Packs.

Click pic and learn still more.

Deficits certainly threaten real people's financial stability.

Thanks so much for telling us, ben - we never would have known otherwise.

Why the fuck didn't you ever mention this to shrub junior, who put us in this godawful mess?

Idiot.

Well, he can't successfully defend their actions to me.

General Motors? Cha! Dem are genall motas!

I waited on GM employees when I worked in the Fisher Building, and GM still lived right across the street.

White men in $1000 suits (this was in 1990) would scream at me that the store where I worked charged too much for a can of soda. This was obviously the fault of whomever was behind the counter, so they let us have it. Others, of all flavo/urs and equally well-dressed, would try talking us into giving them discounts while a long line of customers behind them waited and waited during their ridic song and dance.

When I had a very nice customer, I occasionally asked them where they worked.

None of them was a GM worker. None.

I worked in a bookstore at the Renaissance Center for many years. When I began working there, Ford owned the joint and it was their HQ. Most of the customers there were very nice, except for the illiterate brutes and the crackhead street crazies. The Ford folks were very polite and well-behaved.

Then GM bought the Ren Cen from Ford, and I thought, "Uh oh!" I immediately hipped my boss and co-workers to GM employees' behavio/ur, since fair warned is fair armed.

Sure enough, after less than a week, they all told me I was right and the GM employees were just plain wrong. White men in $1500 suits (some time had passed) screamed at us for no reason, and others of all flavo/urs who were equally well-dressed wheedled and whined that they wanted a discount.

I must say it's quite good for one's morale when one refuses a discount to a slimy bitch wearing a fur coat.

I used to love GM's cars if not their office employees.

Now they've taken a lot of our money, screwed their workers - the ones they have left, and plan on making everything in chinastan; yet still wearing their expensive suits, they beg for discounts and tax breaks from a city who is poorer than they are. They're dumping Pontiac, which people could afford and still had some style; but keeping Cadillac, which for years has been nothing but hyper-expensive butt-ugly tanklike things.

I don't care about them anymore. I know it's tanatamount to blasphemy for a car-addict Detroiter, but they can go to hell. They certainly don't care about us! They don't care about this city, their own workers, their own company's once-illustrious history, and most certainly not the pitiable folks who serve them their food and sell them their soda. They've treated us like shit for years, and will take the manufacturing jobs to a slave-labo/ur-fuelled communistical country.

Again I say, They can go to hell.

chinastan is hell, after all, isn't it?

Mortgage rescue plan accepts just two families
The Government has been derided after it emerged that its £285m scheme to rescue families from having their homes repossessed has been taken up by just two households since it was set up at the start of the year.

By Edmund Conway and Angela Monaghan
29 May 2009

Angry shareholders ambush the top pay bandwagon

The eruption of anger at Shell's annual meeting will also hit directors of other companies - and the institutional investors who stand accused of complacency and collusion, writes Richard Wachman
Sunday 24 May 2009

In the City, a whiff of grapeshot hangs in the air after the unleashing of one of the biggest waves of shareholder anger in recent times. The target companies include big names such as Shell, BP, RBS, Xstrata, Next, Amec and Provident Financial.

All must bear the shame of knowing that their remuneration reports have been opposed by a majority or a sizeable minority of shareholders. Once again, bosses are accused of having their snouts in the trough during a period when capitalism was coming off the rails.

The onslaught comes after politicians, regulators and public opinion identified bonuses and sky-high pay packets as one of the prime causes of the slump. By linking pay with share price performance, managers were encouraged to make foolish short-term decisions that ultimately brought the edifice of capitalism crashing down. Now there is a backlash as shareholders target excessive pay and bonuses sometimes awarded even if a company does badly or misses its performance targets.

Few would disagree that executive pay has been spiralling out of control. According to remuneration specialists, the average FTSE 100 chief executive has seen his rewards jump 125% in the past 10 years, while the heads of smaller quoted firms have seen their pay increase by 80% in the same time span. ...

[Ed. Note: Blame dear Glenn321 for the following rant: he sent me this story. kthxbai]

You know, chinastan, you have done nothing to endear yourself for um....how long is it now? More than 50 freakin' years!

I understand your country was named after the first real Emperor you had, a bloke named chin who'd successfully united so many far-flung provinces and peoples. He was a bit of an arse.....well, to be honest, a power-mad rat bastard who was unbelievably abusive. Illustrated dictionaries have his picture near the definition of 'autocrat.'

Thing is, he died 2220 years ago! Can't you lot get past that um past, and try a different way of treating people? FFS, chin buried scholars alive and outlawed Confucianism so his kingdom would have "stability," and that moronic evil prick mao slaughtered and imprisoned intellectuals, monks and scholars on a similar scale and for similar reasons only 42 years ago.

chin's original Great Wall project enslaved hundreds of thousands, and killed God/dess knows how many. That was all his building endeavo/urs' modus operandi.

mao musta thought he was chin's backasswards reincarnation:
"Moreover, most of the dams, canals and other infrastructure projects, [on] which millions of peasants and prisoners had been forced to toil...and in many cases die for, proved useless as they had been built without the input of trained engineers, whom Mao had rejected on ideological grounds." [Nicked from the inevitable Wikipedia page]

I'd think this news item a hoax had it appeared on auntie beeb's site, thanks to dear DontheFox's hippin' me.

President Obama has launched a crackdown on tax loopholes used by multinational corporations as part of a plan to save up to $210 billion over the next decade....

Nice one, mate.

To Detroit: Never, never give up!
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
April 28, 2009

In all the 307 years since Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac and a convoy of 25 canoes carrying two priests, 50 soldiers, 50 fur-runners and 100 American Indians arrived on the banks of the Detroit River and built a settlement named Fort Ponchartrain du Detroit, this city has survived every kind of crisis and catastrophe.

Detroit has never given up. Sometimes we need a reminder that we shouldn't.

Motown is at the center now of a perfect storm of disasters that threaten to sink us: the banking and insurance mess that is costing the government billions, a growing unemployment rate that is now the nation's highest and the implosion of an auto industry that, like Michigan, waited too long to redefine itself.

But consider this: Nearly 204 years ago, an early-morning fire began in a stable at the west end of Ste. Anne Street and spread. By day's end, Detroit had burned down.

We survived.

And consider this: On Aug. 13, 1812, just weeks after the United States declared war on Britain, Detroit commander William Hull surrendered the city to avoid a possible massacre by Indians the British claimed were on their side. Detroit was occupied for a year before the Brits abandoned it, and Detroit owned itself again. ...



It's been hard for the folks living here even before Detroit was founded:
"The first recorded mention of what became Detroit was in 1670, when the French Sulpician missionaries François Dollier de Casson and René Bréhant de Galinée stopped at the site on their way to the mission at Sault Ste. Marie. Galínee's journal notes that near the site of present-day Detroit, they found a stone idol venerated by the Indians and destroyed the idol with an axe and dropped the pieces into the river." ...
From Wikipedia, History of Detroit article

Industry slows to a throttle 10 years after gas riot
Sunday | April 26, 2009
Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

JUST BEFORE noon last Friday, taxi operator Hopeland Scarlett sat outside his vehicle, patiently waiting for his first customer at a service station in New Kingston.

The day before, Finance Minister Audley Shaw announced a price increase on fuel, meaning motorists will have to pay $8.75 more for regular petrol and the ethanol-based E10. Scarlett was bracing for possible civil unrest.

"Well, yuh know once yuh raise gas everything going go up, so things going get harder. Dat ah the hardest part, but it nuh mek sense yuh shut down the country," said Scarlett, who has been a cabbie for 27 years.

Ten years ago, Scarlett says he was angered when Shaw's predecessor, Dr Omar Davies, announced a six per cent hike in fuel. That triggered a three-day islandwide riot that Scarlett says he supported.

Even though government has not increased gas prices since, Scarlett says things are tighter now for motorists, especially those in the transport business.

"Ten year ago things neva so hard like now, yuh coulda come out an' mek $5,000 an' si wha' yuh work fah," he said. "Now, it come in like nutten." ...



Mom and I arrived in Jamaica again not long after the aforementioned three days' rioting. When we heard what had brought it about, we supported the rioters too.

April 25, 2009
Get thee to a miserable Swiss tax haven
Millions are losing their jobs and others having their homes repossessed. How dare the rich whine at paying more tax
Janice Turner

In Hong Kong last weekend I'd expected to find excitement and verve, some wild fusion of ancient East and Western ultra-new. Instead there was only money. No culture, no community, no green space or any space at all. Just swarming, ill-tempered, listless crowds shopping, forever shopping. As if someone had turned the Bluewater centre into a city state. Across the bay in Kowloon were only air-sucked temples to Versace ringed by men in doorways whispering “fake watch, fake bag”.

Fake city. Let the rich, so stung and outraged by this week's Budget, flee there. They'll find so much to love. Up in your £500K one-bedroom “unit” on the 43rd floor you can rise at dawn, rush to your work-pod in the sky, pile up the cash and have no human distraction beyond how to spend it. All those “international luxury brands” tax-free! And income tax at 16 per cent - if you're mug enough to pay any at all.

Hong Kong was like those other tax havens I've visited: soulless, dead-eyed. Citizenship of Andorra must be like living forever in Heathrow Terminal 3, with its filthy food, rows of strange duty-free stores where Russians pick over bling, booze, Bensons and - bizarrely - great cut-price hunks of yellow cheese. Or empty-hearted Monte Carlo, with eerie candy-coloured skyscraper canyons blocking out every inch of the lovely bay and the sunlight with it, silent but for the growl of Ferrari sports cars, where every tax-exile pensioner has the hunted, dodgy mien of a cornered war criminal. ...

Go get 'em, Hopey!

Eat the rich.