Life under Capitalism – Page 6

Water, Water everywhere, but not a reservoir in sight

Published on May 6, 2012Leave a comment

It’s been the wettest April on record in Britain, yet large parts of the country still have drought warnings and hosepipe bans. How is that possible? Could it just be that the water companies have been selling off reservoirs:

Gary Smith, GMB National Secretary for Water, accused Thames Water of â€œmismanagementâ€ of the south-east of Englandâ€™s water supplies.

He said: â€œIt is simple mismanagement. A major city like London has run out of water twice in the space of five years. Thames Water must recognise that this is dismal water management in a country that is filled with water.

Its analysis found that 25 â€œbulk water storage facilitiesâ€ in the south-east closed since the 1980s, including sites at Stoke Newington, Hornsey and Barnes.

That’s what you get when companies are allowed to profit from a necessity of life.

How the Irish get burned on debt repayal

Published on March 19, 2012Leave a comment

But I pointed out to him that the money the Irish people were repaying by accepting decreases in government spending and increases in taxes was simply going to the central bank and from there it was being destroyed. I explained that what had happened was that the central bank had created a load of new money and thrown it into the crumbling Irish banking sector. Now the Irish people were paying back this newly created money so that it could be destroyed by the central bank.

London’s killer app

Published on January 31, 2012Leave a comment

In the comments at Blood & Treasure, Dsquared explains why banks threatening to leave London don’t have to be taken too seriously:

In actual fact, the thing that keeps everyone bolted down to the UK with little hope of escape, is that amazingly important national intangible asset called “the commercial common law of England & Wales”. Any time anything goes wrong, or when you’re drawing up documentation to make sure it doesn’t, it’s amazingly useful to be able to make use of all those hundreds of years of precedent. It’s the difference between a well-designed high level programming language, and having to write all your own functions from scratch.

A lot of the reason for not shifting out to the suburbs (for trading at least) is simply telecoms infrastructure. A hell of a lot of the IT talent that’s gone into the City over the last twenty years has gone into the building of what amounts to a very fast, very very reliable specialised telecom system (to replace SWIFT, the previously existing very fast, very very reliable specialised telegram and telex system).

Welfare “reform” kills

Published on December 6, 20115 Comments

Just some of the people who committed suicide after their (disability) benefits were stopped:

Richard Sanderson, 44, an unemployed helicopter pilot of Southfields in London, who stabbed himself twice in the heart in May. He had been informed that his family faced a Â£30 a week cut in housing benefit and he feared this would leave his family homeless

Paul Willcoxson, 33, of Corby, Northants, was according to the suicide note he left behind, worried about benefit cuts when he hung himself in April.

[…]

Elaine Christian, 57, of Hull, was worried, according to reports of an inquest in July, about a meeting to assess her disability benefits. She was found drowned in a drain with ten self-inflicted cuts to her wrist and she had taken painkillers.

Now imagine you’re on long term disability benefits, unable to work or even find an employer willing to take you on, knowing that the “reforms” will mean you will lose what little money and assistance is getting you by at the moment. Sign the petition against this “reform” that will end up killing more people.

Victory to the public sector workers

Published on November 30, 2011Leave a comment

Today public sector workers in the UK are on strike. According to a BBC poll,
the majority of the British public supports them:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

[…]

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…

Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.