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I wish someone would tell me where this is

This is a continual claim:

One of the legitimate complaints against the EU is its determination to drag us into treaties that claim to be about trade but are really about releasing multinational corporations from democratic control. Three of the agreements it is trying to impose – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) – make a mockery of parliamentary sovereignty.

They threaten to reduce to the lowest common denominator the laws protecting us from predatory finance, the exploitation of workers, food adulteration, climate change and environmental destruction. They threaten to force the privatisation of public services.

Specifically that privatisation. I have at least skimmed two of those three. And I cannot find anything, anywhere, which advocates, insists upon, determines, hinders or advances privatisation.

I can find things which say that if you do privatise and then reverse then compensation must be paid but that’s a standard part of current law anyway.

Anyone help me out here? Where is this insistence or advancement of privatisation?

All sounds good

First it was the Beatles, now Motown classics are to be re-recorded by stars for a new Netflix children’s show aimed at reaching out to parents tired of listening to saccharine children’s songs.

Hot on the heels of forthcoming animation series Beat Bugs, which features modern renditions of the Beatles classics sung by artists including Rod Stewart, Robbie Williams and James Corden, comes another show from the same creator, which will be based on the songs of Motown artists such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Jackson 5.

Seen a few of the trailers (hey, who wouldn’t on hearing of this?) and it’s all rather fun. Not entirely convinced the covers are better (Rod doing Sgt Pepper would be fun to hear but I can’t find it) but you know, better than Inky Tinky or whatever the Teletubbies songs were.

One complaint though. The animation of the mouths for the characters who are supposedly singing is terrible. Having actually been involved in a project that worked on this, marginally at least, I know it’s difficult. But, but no, more effort should have been expended there. It is possible to get it right.

And with Motown, really important question. Who are they going to use as the backing band? The Funk Brothers are still largely available…..

And if they are, if they can have just the one moment that is this at 3.35:

I’ve said this before and no doubt I’ll say it again. But at 3.35 and just following there’s that shit eating grin of being with a fucking hot band and knowing that you’re absolutely nailing it.

Just absolutely nothing quite like it. And if Netflix manages to coax that sort of work, even if it’s only for a few moments over the 50 songs, then they’ll have done well.

Eh?

Football has developed its own economy, with its own inflation rate. While the real world is looking down the back of the sofa, football burns money for a laugh – literally in the cases of some especially offensive players. A socialist sport has become an orgy of unashamed, self-congratulatory avarice.

I do agree that football is socialist. In one sense at least – the competition means that all the revenues and more flow through to the workers. With rare exceptions owning a club is the way to consume, not make, capital.

But assume you are a socialist and think that the workers getting the cash is a good thing. What’s wrong with them getting more?

Oh dear lord…..

Hummus and other “healthy” supermarket dips are laced with high levels of salt and fat, it has emerged, as health campaigners have revealed some pots contain more than four packets of crisps.

Hummus is made with chickpeas. Of curse there’s sodding salt in it. Ever tried chickpeas without salt?

They’ll be complaining that bread has salt in it next…..oh, hang on….

An interesting little point about Yahoo

From the Facebook results:

Facebook, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and joined the stock market in 2012, reported a 59pc rise in quarterly revenues to $6.44bn, while net income increased 186pc to $2.05bn. Both were ahead of forecasts.

Meanwhile, costs were up a third to $3.7bn. Spending on research and development rose 25pc to $1.46bn.

Yes, obviously, this doesn’t translate directly to Yahoo. But the general point stands. A large chunk of the costs of running these internet thingies is in trying to develop what to do next. If you accept that the basic idea is done, that you’ll not pivot to something else, then there’s good money to be made by simply running what already exists. Sweat the extant business that is, invest nothing in it. Pull that R&D spending out and profits do rather rise, don’t they?

The poster child for this is of course AOL. Their dial up business (no, seriously) still throws off rivers of cash.

To Yahoo, there’s an argument, which obviously I’ve not gone and checked but I think it could well be valid, that if Mayer had just said “Yahoo will die in a decade” therefore we’ll invest nothing and just send the rivers of cash to shareholders then those shareholders would be better off. That billion spent on Tumblr for example, but also just the general underlying spending on trying to advance things rather than just maintain and extract.

Or, as many have found before, sweating a dying business can be much more profitable than trying to reinvent it.

The same could even be true of Microsoft……forget mobiles, search and all that, Windows and Office, sweat them for two decades and let the thing die.

Naah, I’ve got this covered

Office workers must exercise for one hour a day to combat the deadly risk of modern working lifestyles, a major Lancet study has found.

Not quite as onerous as it sounds

A decent walk – at a speed of just over three miles an hour – was enough to achieve the benefit, he stressed.

“You don’t need to do sport, you don’t need to go to the gym, it’s OK doing some brisk walking maybe in the morning, during your lunchtime, after dinner in the evening. You can split it up over the day but you need to do at least one hour,” he said.

That hour in the evening standing at the bar and wandering out for a smoke now and again qualifies, no? I mean, that’s walking?

Ever so slightly more seriously I absolutely hate the way I feel with no exercise at all. And yes, that 15 minute wander to the office and back (when in Czech) does indeed help. Although as the stories about cycling will tell, in reasonable weather I do rather more than that.

Complete nonsense

nonsense

Equality, inequality, are defined as personal incomes. This we can alter whatever we do to corporate taxation rates.

So, nonsense.

But then think about it as Ritchie does. Which is that corporate taxes are carried by the business itself. It’s not the shareholders, they don’t change their actions as a result of a change in corporate tax rates (they are the same statement).

Thus corporate taxation doesn’t change inequality when measured against incomes, does it?

Not quite what the informed gossip says

Oddly speaking at such an event was not listed amongst the reasons why City University appointed me as Professor of Practice in International Political Economy, which is the role I really wanted last September, and which I got for reasons wholly unrelated to Corbynomics

Rather, the fuss about Corbynomics and the chuntering about the immediately arriving peerage is what led to the one day a week appointment.

Allegedly, according to the informed gossip.

Teddies, pram….

Richard Murphy says:
July 26 2016 at 3:49 pm
I walked away from McDonnell because I saw the contempt he had for those appointed to his team and knew there was a dsisaster in the making, as there has been

My bitterness is that Corbyn and McDonnell I have so badly failed those who trusted them

I have changed not an iota

I advised Miliband, Corbyn, McCluskey, Lucas, Osborne and Cameron (when he borrowed country-by-country reporting) alike because they wanted my ideas

Most have used them well

Corbyn has not

And please note his entire economics advisory team have walked away

Do you really think he’s going to find another one?

Get real

The problem being that there’s a limited number of prams to throw things out of.

There’s always been an advantage to Nigel

Bill Etheridge says he wants to see ‘a return to the days’ when prison focused first and foremost on punishment, and vowed to ‘rehabilitate without using significant financial resources’.

His measures include:

removing all luxuries from jails, including all electronic devices.
an automatic 10-year sentence increase for prisoners who attack prison officers.
locking prisoners in their cells for the first six months of sentences.
banning all visits over the same period.
a £40,000 annual charge on prisoners to be levied until ‘their assets are depleted’.

Idiocies like this were stamped upon and stamped upon fast.

I recall one version of a manifesto that lasted about 30 minutes as a result of things like this.

Idiocy.

Good luck with this Owen, good luck

The task ahead is to ensure Trump’s defeat – as decisively as possible – and Democratic control of both Houses of Congress, and then to build pressure from below to enact progressive legislation.

I can imagine Trump losing although I’m definitely not sure that he will (I think it will be a landslide one way or the other though) but D control of both Houses? Don’t think so, really don’t think so.

But of course we want to have regional banks!

One of the demands of those economics conservatives, the British left and assorted progressives, is that we must have regional banks again. Because, you know, well, regional banks YEAH!

The problem with this being Chesterton’s Fence. We used to have regional banks, why don’t we now? Because we had them, the market considered them and then they all merged to become national banks.

But Chesterton’s Fence. Why did they merge?

Because a regional bank can cause terrible, terrible, problems if it gets into trouble:

From a distance, Vicenza does not look like a city engulfed in turmoil. On the elegant Corso Andrea Palladio, named after the Renaissance architect whose work defines this city, a finely dressed woman clutches a Chanel handbag during her evening passeggiata. Locals sit back and enjoy their Campari spritz cocktails in the July heat. A black Maserati rolls slowly down the street.

But this apparent serenity belies an ugly truth. The regions of Veneto, where Vicenza is located, and Tuscany are the epicentres of Italy’s banking crisis, which has cost citizens hundreds of millions of euros.

If there’s that one dominant regional bank then it getting into trouble can bring the whole region to its knees:

Wealthy northern Italian manufacturing strongholds like Vicenza were the financial engine behind Italy’s postwar economic boom, and are critical for the country’s hopes today. About 30% of Vicenza’s 100,000 companies have a direct relationship with BPV, according to Variati, and those companies need lines of credit and support.

“What I hope, as mayor, is that the bank stays as close as it can to the companies. Those 30% cannot be abandoned, they have to be supported if they are healthy. BPV will be able to survive over time if the territory is strong. There will be no future for the bank if the territory is poorer,” Variati said.

The flip side is also true. Imagine a regional economy with a strong specialisation. That major industry (and in Italy it’s likely to be a cluster, hundreds or thousands of firms all working in roughly the same industry. There’s one little area that produces most of the world’s spectacle frames for example) tanks, what happens to the bank?

Quite, that’s why regional isn’t the way to go, you want banks that are geographically diverse so they’re not exposed to that one industry or one geography risk.

Which brings us back to Chesterton’s Fence and why we used to have regional banks and now do not.

Why don’t we have regional banks? Until that question is answered, A Reverse Chesterton’s if you like, we cannot sensibly discuss whether we should have them again.

And of course the moment anyone says we should have local banks with local worthies (usually, local politicians, unions and locally based businesses) running them we have only to point to Spain’s cajas. Absolutely every one of which went bust from memory.

Anyone?

“This would break open the chest of secrecy that exists in UK tax havens – places including the British Virgin Islands, which featured heavily in both the BHS affair and the Panama Papers.”

BVI in BHS?

So Jezza didn’t offer that peerage then, eh, Ritchie?

Or, to put it not too unsubtly, it’s been an argument about whether ideas I have promoted (the Green New Deal to create jobs, tackling the tax gap to beat austerity, delivering tax haven transparency and People’s Quantitative Easing to fund investment) are what Labour is about or not.

Which is why I am now a little annoyed to be told I’m a Blairite when I have had to acknowledge that Jeremy Corbyn cannot (and may not even want to) deliver this radical agenda, when I wished he could.

For the record, I think that Owen Smith would deliver the agenda I have proposed: the hype Wearing offers in the second half of his article is just that, and wrong. It’s time he worked out fact from fiction. There is only one chance of a Green New Deal right now, and Jeremy Corbyn has never been near the idea.

Charles Pooter had nothing on this bloke, eh?

Richard Murphy says:
July 26 2016 at 4:33 pm
There is one and only appropriate term for team Corbyn

Useless

Yep, that no peerage he was chuntering about hurts.

Richard Murphy says:
July 26 2016 at 3:21 pm
And let’s be honest, it was also just the pure drivel I have come to expect from Corbynistas that I think shows an absolute lack of judgement or ability to think critically in any way

If you honestly think Owen Smith is Tory lite, or a neoliberal then you left your ability to appraise a situation behind long ago

But there’s always another chance, eh?

Carol Wilcox says:
July 26 2016 at 8:44 pm
Jeremy Corbyn is not an economist. He’s a trade unionist, a pacifist and an internationalist. John McDonnell deals with the economy – as he has been doing for many, many years.

Reply
Richard Murphy says:
July 26 2016 at 8:56 pm
But he isn’t

That’s the problem

Although it’s true that bridges can be burnt prematurely…..

Well, yes Ritchie

But this does not just apply to pensions. It also applies to tax. And corporate reporting. And the environment and so much else.

But this requires three other things.

The first is that business should realise that regulation exists for a purpose.

The second is that they should stop the talk of the burden on business: fair competition that does not leave innocent victims behind is not a burdensome activity; it’s a necessity, but so are the rules that let it happen.

Third, the law should be enforced and right now in tax, company law and I am sure many other areas that is not done because of a lack of resources and a importantly a lack of willing on the part of a government that doe not really believe in its own role.

Business ethics are vital. But so is the rule of law.

Care to point out which laws have been broken?

The Green New Deal

There are two ways of doing this. The first involves the Treasury taking advantage of low interest rates to borrow for long-term investment. Not just in roads, railways and airports but in Britain’s digital infrastructure and its human capital. One of the country’s most glaring structural weaknesses is that the unemployment rate for young people who leave school with the most basic education is among the highest in the developed world.

Why not reduce the minimum wage that keeps them out of employment?

Paul Mason’s logic

What is striking, when you consider the modern reality of precarious work and coercive management, is how the concept of human rights stops at the factory gate. The workers of Georgian England had no democratic rights or access to law. But the 21st century is supposed to be an age of universal rights. Every one of the practices described at Sports Direct appears to not just have broken employment law, but also violated the human right of the citizen not to be bullied, shamed, endangered or sexually harassed.

So today’s workers do have democratic rights and both access to law and protection under it.

That’s good then, isn’t it?

what worries is that neither Mason nor any of his editors saw the error there.

Not really Frank, no, not really

Much of the Green family’s enormous wealth was built up during the early years of Green’s stewardship of BHS.

Umm, Tina had substantial funds already. And it was Arcadia, not BHS, that provided the really big money. It’s true that BHS and Arcadia were contemporaneous but that is a very politician’s phrasing, isn’t it?

And yet there is no evidence whatsoever from this period of the improved turnover, market share, or major increase in investment that might be expected from a leading retailer.

You don’t know how business works, do you Frank?

The decay which set in at individual BHS branches mirrors that of its pension fund – it was allowed to decline from a surplus of £43m in 2000, when Green bought the business, to a £571m deficit last year. Companies that are suppliers to BHS are now also under threat. So the picture that was presented to us in evidence was clear – the Green family’s wealth escalated beyond the dreams of avarice, while the health of BHS and its pension fund was neglected.

And of course low interest rates had nothing to do with that, did it?