Are carbon credits a solution or extra wealth for the rich?
There is evidence that the activities of the human race over the years have adversely affected the environment. The debt based financial system has seen to that. Whether the carbon credits schemes are the answer to the problems of air pollution is questionable. They seem to advance the pockets of the rich rather than help clean the earth.
Under the European emissions trading scheme (ETS), companies are permitted to emit CO2 to a specific cap. Those with carbon permits are allowed to sell their excess to those who don't have enough allowed for their pollution of the planet.
An investigation of one big company has shown, according to the Sunday Times[6-12-09], that it has been allocated by the European State far more carbon permits than it needs. Each European State carbon permit is worth about $30, but the price the European Stateseeks is above $70.
It is surely only coincidental that this allocation followed intensive lobbying in Brussels with threats to take around 90,000 jobs out of Europe. The excess carbon credits given this company will ensure it gains assets of around $2.3 billion by 2012.
Life and Debt-a stable and just money sytem vital
Creating money is easy – banks persuade someone to borrow it; governments borrow from citizens’ futures – but once it exists it has a right to make a claim on real stuff: the goods and services that require sweat, resources and energy to produce. This is the explanation for economic growth and the reason why, when growth stops, the pyramid selling scheme falls apart.
The ballooning of money, debt and economic activity over the past 100 years or so has been fuelled by the exploitation of fossil fuels. As Richard Heinberg’s idea of the ‘energy slave’ makes clear, such economic growth would be impossible within the confines of the human capacity for sweated labour. Oil especially has allowed us to defy this natural balance at the price of disrupting the carbon cycle that is the fundamental support system of life on Earth. This is the link between fiscal irrectitude and climate change – when our greed outstrips our capacity for work we just allow Mother Nature to pay the price.
The strategy of creating money now, stimulating economic activity and putting off the problem into the future has run its course. A stable and just money system is vital to develop a democratic global society: it would go a long way towards restoring a rightful relationship with our precious planet and other nations, and is the real answer for any politician pledging to end boom-and-bust cycles.
Molly Scott Cato, a reader in green economics at the Cardiff School of Management, writing in The Ecologist [23-4-09]
Tobin Tax - endorsed by UK Treasury
The General Secretary of the UK Trade Unions Congress is reported to have said that the UK Treasury in a document makes an overwhelming case for a financial transaction tax- one of the best ways of both taming finance and ensuring it makes a fair contribution to society.
The DSC has had a financial transaction tax as policy for over 20 years.
What do the Scots know that we ignore?
Labour has decided that nuclear power stations are the thing to have - forgetting the effects of the Chernobyl disaster. [Is it safe to eat Welsh lamb yet?]. As one letter to the editor writer said all are to be built in England, apart from a proposed one in North Wales.
And, of course, Scotland will not have them at any price.
Being in debt not quite a business advantage - quite the opposite
Borrowing money - from banks which created it out of nothing - to capitalise a company and then returning to shareholders' some of their investment was the perceived wisdom of business experts not so long ago. The alternative was a private equity buy out- with the same debt money.
Ineos, a chemical company, which borrowed from Barclays Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has planned to raise $1672 million to refinance some of its debt. As part of previous refinancing, its annual interest bill jumped from $1300 million to $1532. It also had to pay one-off refinancing fees of $131 million.
Compare that with the Canadian owned upmarket Selfridges with its main store in Oxford Street,by the bus stop for the meeting place of the London Global Table.
One would think that a place like this would be feeling the pinch with the high priced gear and accessories it has for sale- well out of my paltry income range. Apparently not. The group's chief's executive said that Selfridge's strong balance sheet - with little debt - had let it concentrate on shop-keeping. He is reported to have said We've been able to concentrate on our business where other companies have been distracted because they have been highly leveraged . In other words -they've too much debt.
The threat to USA security is not in Afghanistan
US Congressman Dennis Kucinich in an address told his audience
The community I represent in Cleveland, Ohio, is suffering from massive unemployment, record home foreclosures, and small business failures. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their homes, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. The middle class is gravely threatened. What is happening in Cleveland is occurring nationwide. Yet, Wall Street received over $13 trillion in bailouts, with untold millions for high salaries and bonuses, while Main Street loses its power through unemployment, reduced wages and benefits and little or no access to credit or investment capital. There is something fundamentally wrong with our economy which borrowing more money to spend on war cannot and will not cure. Perhaps nation building should begin at home.
On 3 December 2009 he told Congress
America is in the fight of its life and that fight is not in Afghanistan - it's here. We are deeply in debt. Our GDP is down. Our manufacturing is down. Our savings are down. Our trade deficit is up. Business failures are up. Bankruptcies are up.
The war is a threat to our National Security. We'll spend over $100 billion next year to bomb a nation of poor people while we reenergize the Taliban, destabilize Pakistan, deplete our army and put more of our soldiers' lives on the line. Meanwhile, back here in the USA, 15 million people are out of work. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. Trillions in bailouts for Wall Street, trillions for war; when are we going to start taking care of things here at home?
What's the latest "product" of your bank or kiwisaver provider ?
Hunter Davies- a successful businessman - wrote in the Sunday Times [13-12-09] how he had failed to convince his building society to allow him to cash in his holdings in a fixed term bond a month early. He needed the money urgently. He was told it couldn't be done.
He was not amused to find that, when it suited them, the society could bring a fixed term bond to an early closure. They called the new "product" an Advance-Maturity Option Bond.
He commented all banks and building societies and other financial chancers love to call such things a product- as if they produced something, did proper creative work, instead of mucking around with our money. slicing off bits for themselves.
Duty of governments - to serve the people not financial interests
Lord Robert Skidelsky, emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick, wrote in the Financial Times [23-12-09] The duty of governments is to govern in the best interests of the people who elected them-not the City of London.
No worry for bankers in 2010
Even while the London Sunday Times in its last editon for 2009 was warning that debt would dominate the agenda for 2010, James Ashton writing an article in the same newspaper commented
The bankers that caused the crash need not worry. By bailing them out once, politicians have demonstrated that financiers will never have to face the ultimate payback for their actions. And they can always avoid punitive taxes by slipping through a loophole to the havens of Geneva and Luxembourg.
Economists are failures
Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy studies at the American Hudson Institute, in his Sunday Times column [27-12-09] wrote this was a year that marked the rout of the economists. Their failure to foresee the near collapse of the world financial system did not do much to enhance the always spurious claim of the profession to be just another of the sciences. It isn't, never was, and never will be.
- contributed by Colin J Whitmill, DSC's UK correspondent