I have been most impressed today by the ordinary strikers who have been interviewed on all broadcast news media. While some of them have been very low paid, they have not just been talking about their own problems and their own pensions. They have rather continually referred to the fact that they are suffering so much because hundreds of billions of public money have been given to the bankers, who continue to give themselves massive salaries and bonuses. There have also been many references to tax evasion by the wealthy and their massive income increases.
Plainly this is not just a strike about specific pension issues; in the mind of the ordinary people, this is action against the sickening levels of inequality in society.
I have also been struck by the horrible braying Tories, who to a man have stripped off their masks of social decency. How long will the Lib Dems go along with it?
Unfortunately, much of the detail on pensions is, just as the difference between Osborne’s and Balls’ spending plans, is irrelevant. The effects of the inevitable collapse of the South Sea Bubble model of western economy, are only just starting to be felt. They are not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Ed Balls is suggesting there should be a few more deck chairs, and special chairs for the old and sick, and better pay and conditions for the crew. But the ship is still going down.
Agreed, Craig. As a pal of mine pointed out, when the Govt gave everyone a day off for the Royal Wedding, no-one worried about the money lost to the economy. When, with very good reason, miilions of people go on strike for a day, suddenly “half-a-billion pounds” becomes an issue. How many trillions have we given to the financial institutions?
OT:
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Anybody else happen to see Oxford Films’ ‘Wikleaks — Secrets & Lies’ on More4 last night? Unless I’m missing something, most thorough coverage of débâcle so far.
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Most astonishing moment came when Nick Davies, who we may be sure has met a lot of villains in his time, described how he’d been forced to the conclusion that Brother Julian is ‘the most dishonest person I’ve ever met.’
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That the film should have been confined to such a marginal slot (testimony that spineless careerists now run British broadcasting) is a scandal it itself. Only came across the programme by accident.
Well worth a read of this Paul Krugman blogpost:
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/bleeding-britain/
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I guess you both reach a similar conclusion about Cameron and Osborne, that they are committed politically to being arseholes.
Yes well said.
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Occupy LSX invaded the HQ of Xstrata today. The CEO Mick Davis ‘earnt’ or rather took £18m last year. The previous year it was £27m. He is the highest paid executive on the FTSE quoted companies.
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Occupy London – part of the global movement for social and economic justice – today highlighted the corporate greed endemic in the UK and called for a change within society.
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About 60 protestors gained entry into the offices of mining company Xstrata, a ‘leading light’ of the FTSE 100 and British industry to highlight the fact that CEO Mick Davies was the highest compensated CEO of all the FTSE 100 companies in the last year, when his companies had losses and the economy collapsed. He received £18,426,105 for his efforts. [1]
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This comes in a year when the average pay rise of executives across FTSE 100 companies was 43%, with ‘top’ directors at 49%. [2]
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Led by a samba band to the building from Piccadilly Circus, the protesters entered the HQ at 25-7 Haymarket, London, with the protesters chanting against the corporate greed of Mick and other executives, in support of all those striking for fair pensions for all today. The protestors also unfurled a banner saying “All power to the 99%” from the roof top.
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There are currently about 20 protesters inside – being held down on knees, of which many are women. There are a few hundred people kettled outside.
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The protesters today are making the connection between the slashing of private and public sector pensions, while supposed ‘top’ executives cash in by increasing their own pay levels, leaving many without pensions. These CEOs like Mick Davies lavishly secure their own futures while ignoring the security and wellbeing of their own workers.
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Mines have closed in Australia, South Africa and Spain within the last decade resulting in hundreds of workers in the last decade being laid off.
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Karen Lincoln, supporter of Occupy London said: “Mick Davies is a prime example of the greedy 1 per cent, lining their own pockets while denying workers pensions. In this time when the government enforces austerity on the 99 per cent, these executives are profiting. The rest of us are having our pensions cuts, health service torn apart and youth centres shut down.
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“We refuse to stand by and let this happen. We call on others to join us in the fight for a more just society. Today we have taken this to one of the offices of the 1 per cent. This is only the beginning. Come and join us on 15th December for Occupy Everywhere.”
Occupy London will unveil details of Occupy Everywhere soon. Be ready.
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http://occupylsx.org/?p=1725
I’d have thought the ConDems would really welcome this strike, so they can blame it entirely for missed economic growth targets for years to come. After all, the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding provided a dead handy excuse, as did a bit of snow last Winter. Lord forbid we have the same number of public holidays as our continental partners – the economy would surely collapse completely and we’d all die of starvation.
Craig,
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To continue the Titanic analogy, I doubt if the ship is going to sink.
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More likely it will eventually limp into port, listing to one side and with all pumps going. The first class passengers will get off first and be taken away in limos, while the ordinary folk have to walk home.
@John K
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Ever the optimist!
Today’s strike is about how unjustly the rewards in British society are shared. For understandable reasons, the economy is as likely to contact as to grow, for many years. We would be a saner, healthier and more productive society if rewards and resources were shared on a basis that most felt were just. “We are all in it together” would be an admirable rallying cry if government action was based on how food ought to be shared in order to avert a famine.
It’s not just the bankers. My phone is a Nokia with Orange as the supplier. In January I took out a contract to pay a monthly payment. Periodically (although only occasionally) certain touch buttons are unaccountably disabled (when crucial). I have today been notified that there is to be an increase of more than 4% in my monthly payments because “as you will be aware inflation is at a record high for the last twenty years”. Now I might be a little stupid, but one of the reasons inflation is so high, is because Gas and other energy companies are increasing prices without justification. Unlike local government they are not ‘capped’. There used to be a call to nationalise the banks. I’m for that. Nationalised industries do not need to make a profit, and while I agree staff in nationalised industries tend to be less motivated, privates banking and power companies are interested, not just in profit, because that is an old word, since the introduction of super-profits. I couldn’t agree more that using taxpayers money to overpay with bonuses already overpaid bankers is a disgrace.
Jonanagus, I must be missing something. I don’t get TV, I live in Canada and I do not understand how the Guardian’s vendetta against Assange has got mixed up with the death agonies of liberal capitalism.
Clearly Nick Davies has never run into George Monbiot.
This strike might at least let off a bit of steam, as long as the employers or govt don’t resort to reprisals. When a society reaches breaking point, the results can often be abrupt and to no-one’s benefit. And that steam gauge has been in the red now for rather too long.
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Of course, Cameron is playing a game honed to excellence by previous govts from Mrs Thatcher on. A strike gives them someone to demonise and blame for the state of a nation they and their city friends have already looted. In fact a strike isn’t just expected – it’s required. If people don’t strike, they’re provoked until they do, and a tame media can be unleashed on them. And – like foreign wars – it seems to work every time.
Thanks for that Mary, occupy everywhere, hmm, we have the choice, what a great idea, the more the better.
Choose well I say. Who can say what a roadblock on the M40 and maybe a few other arteries winding their way round London could achieve? I surely could, it would kill the City stone dead within hours.
It was tried first by the muchachos I muchachas de Argentina, such delay would soon turn to gridlock to the delight of CEO’s everywhere. Interesting opinion piece, a bit long but full of ideas.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011113084114302954.html
From the Paul Krugman blog linked to by Eddie-G:
‘It really is just like a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding.’
Rather like the doctors in Missolonghi bleeding Lord Byron – so our government are applying the same measures to us as were current in Greece at that time – and still are, economically at least!
I’m getting anaemic, and so are you, but the Government are not, because they are the leeches, and are growing fatter by the hour (just look at the ConDem front bench).
Craig – I too wonder when the LibDems will turn away – but I fear that they can’t, now that they’ve followed the Tories so far down this path. And you are correct in saying that Ed Balls would be doing the same thing, if he were Chancellor, with just a few deckchairs moved from one side to the other to give an illusion of balance.
@ Jonangus
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No, just realistic. I very much doubt if we are going to see a complete collapse of Western capitalism, rather a reversal or at best a halt to the last 30 years or so of unustainable “growth” based on a property and financial bubble.
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Expectations of continual increases in amounts of “stuff” cluttering the nations homes will have to be put on hold and some will experience genuine hardship. But at the end of the period material I would think average living standards in the UK will still be very much better than they were even 20 years ago.
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Whether we will be able to reverse or even check the continued looting of the national and international wealth pile by the “overclass” is a different issue. There seems to be no appetite for taking on these people by any political party likely to have a say in government. Income inequality will clearly get worse, as it has for the last 15 years or more, before it gets better again.
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But that’s not the same as the whole ship sinking.
Spot on, Craig. Whenever are people going to get it that the well has run dry? There’s only so much profit they can screw out of ordinary people and the environment. All Ponzi schemes eventually fall flat, all South Sea Bubbles burst finally.
Speaking as a middle-ground, ordinary person for whom moderate and moderated capitalism worked more or less until c. late ’90s, rationally I can see it’s as plain as the nose on CallMeDave’s face that we’ve reached the end of the line. All we’re experiencing now is the increasingly agonised death throes of a system that is now too desperate to cover up its innate, even psychopathic savagery.
BTW, may I suggest – with great sadness – that the LibDems will go along with it until their clutch on power runs out? There is no social decency in this psychopathically rapacious era, those who need political power cannot afford decency, social or otherwise. Indeed, the whole desperate debacle can be summed up, IMHO, not as an global economic crisis but, rather, as a complete catastrophe for ethics globally and personally.
@Chris 2: Just checkin’. You do know that OT stands for ‘off topic’? I fear those (i.e. most people) who didn’t see this film but who are at all interested in the topic are missing something. That was partly my point.
“The People Are Not Stupid”
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Unfortunately the people are very stupid!, given a vote tomorrow the people will still (once again) vote for one of the three main parties. I see you are still at it Craig, thinking there is a difference between the tories and the lib dems!!!, I will have to put you into the category of the “very stupid”. Clegg is to the right of Cameron, truth be known Miliband is to the right of Clegg, you have bought the illusion hook, line and sinker. Try and undestand there is only one party in the houses of parliament, it is the tory party.
@John K: Was being sarcastic. But not entirely. BBC Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason said in autumn 2008, off air: ‘This is worse than 1929.’ And look what that led to.
Despite the bad hair do and crap duffel coat, blogger Richard Seymour aka Lenin gives an interesting and informative backgrounder on today’s strike.
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https://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/30/millions_of_british_public_sector_workers
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Seems to be saying that the govt are making enemies unnecessarily.
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Cameron was reported to have wanted the strike (shades of Maggie and the miners). But back then was very different to today. Now every one of the 99% is pissed off about something and they will only be getting more pissed off as time goes on. This is not a time for an adversarial approach. I think the govt are showing what amateurs they are, but that’s good in many ways.
For the first time in ages changed the Channel to BBC to find Jeremy Clarkson ranting on; ” I would shoot the strikers in front of their family, ….. blah … bollocks… Some of us have to work for a living”.
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That coming from a tosser who plays teenage boys; driving cars and mincing on the telly, damn hard work I should imagine, but hey that is the bizarre fucked up world we live in. These days “kardashians” is a job description, and keeping up with them is another.
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Had enough and Changed the channel to Simpsons cartoon to stay in touch with reality. Thinking; most probably I will have to work until my ninetieth Birthday, because the too big to fail banks have to be kept going no matter how long I work, and how hard these bastards can squeeze the life out of me.
“The People Are Not Stupid”
Well, I am.
I can’t work out how to upload my avatar to this website, and have been asking on the previous thread.
I see Glenn, has already worked it out. Perhaps he could answer on the previous thread so as not to clutter this one.
Many Thanks,
Tony
Quite telling for the times that lie ahead?
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30 November 2011
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More baton rounds training at Metropolitan Police
There was a “level of tension” that police might not have picked up on before the riots, the report found
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Scotland Yard is training more officers to use baton rounds – also known as plastic bullets – according to a police report into the August riots.
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The Metropolitan Police force is also considering whether to buy water cannon to deal with any large-scale disorder. The use of CCTV with facial recognition could also be stepped up.
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Extra public order powers might also be requested from the government.
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/..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15957872
https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/107-my-profile-account-settings/articles/127871-how-to-change-your-profile-picture-or-information
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Why do you guys go to tweeter? I have posted in the last thread too, go to the site and register and it is as easy as that.
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Tony,
You are not stupid, it is the computers wot done it.
Contrasting BBC coverage of the Strike this evening. Radio 4’s PM dealt with it very even-handedly, giving the awful Gove a hard time. But the BBC1 6.00pm News was the usual tabloid nonsense with Nick Robinson arranging a meeting between a young teacher protesting the pension changes and a Cafe owner in London who “couldn’t afford a pension”. Of course everyone knew almost exactly what the teacher earned, while the Cafe owner (who looked pretty prosperous) wasn’t asked how much he earned or how much a pension would cost him. It was the usual Toryboy Nick Robinson stuff, comparing apples and oranges and concluding the apples had nothing to moan about. Bet he gets an honour before too long.
And Craig,
A big part of the problem of inequity and inequality in the UK relates to the “war machine”. Not myself a pacifist, but I believe that – the issue is not whether you have guns or you don’t – it really is whether you use the weapon(s) that you have to make peace or war…trouble is some want to keep making the war..and war…and more war….and the people then logically must take to the streets – what else can they do? – become soldiers to get paid and means of living….look at the “war machine” and the expenditures related thereto…and then you start coming close to the heart of the matter.
FOLLOWNG IS EXTRACTED FROM RT….
The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide
1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…
2. They arm, train, finance local terrorist groups through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Al-Qaeda (a CIA operation), drug cartels (often CIA operations) and call them “freedom fighters”; then…
3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…
4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it “the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…
5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…
6. As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…
7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”
Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.
Their Elders recommended this many decades ago in a blueprint for World Domination written on a hoary manuscript of old…
“What did you say…? That you don’t want to be ‘liberated’ and ‘democratized’?!?”
“Then, take this Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Berlin, Dresden, Baghdad, and Basra!! Take that Tokyo, Gaza, Lebanon, Kabul, Pakistan, Tripoli, Belgrade, Egypt, El Salvador and Grenada!! And take that, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Africa!!”
Always bombing people to smithereens… Always, of course, in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”
Fedup, yeah, I agree completely about that crass, hypocritical oaf, Clarkson and everything he represents.
PLEASE – HAVE A LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THE DEFENCE BUDGET; THE STRATEGIES FOR STARTING WAR; THE ARMS INDUSTRY …AND ADD IT ALL TOGETHER – THEN CONTRAST AGAINST THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE JOBS OR MUCH PROSPECT FOR HONESTLY IMPROVING THEIR LOT IN LIFE….ANY CONNECTIONS THERE?
WHY NOT SPEND THE “WAR MACHINE MONEY” IN THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY TO ASSIST THE PEOPLE? – OR – IS THAT A STUPID QUESTION?
Yes but what is to be done. Some may think occupying thinks and the inevitable collapse of capitalism will solve everything – but all it will cause is alot of misery for most people and its replacement with goodness with what. But my guess is that it will be somewhat more nationalistic and right wing than what we have now.
Eddie G gave a link to the excellent Krugman blog – who as well as moaning about what is happening now happens to be a Keynesian with more than a few ideas about how to get us out of this mess – this post is as good a starting point as any http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/death-by-hawkery/#more-26755
As Craig should note it takes a rather different stance about debt than that of the Manchester Liberal school to which he appears to belong. It is also as far as I can discern the only coherent alternative on the left that has any chance of getting popular endorsement.
[Jon/mod: Sorry Tony, off-topic]