Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros

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like loyal, faithful dogs

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I don’t find it particularly surprising that some of the people freed by police after allegedly being kept as slaves at a travellers site say that they wanted to be there. For one, thing, that doesn’t tell you anything about what would have happened if they had tried to leave and been caught.

And there are a whole number of reasons why people picked up from soup kitchens and homeless shelters being kept as slaves might have found their situation preferable to the one they were in before. They had regular accommodation, no matter how squalid. They were wanted, if only for forced labour. As the local MP pointed out, they will have worked out there where everybody could see the condition they were in – and nobody apparently thought that worth remarking on. They had a reliable, if reliably inadequate, food. Perhaps some of them were made into pets, or even given a kind of kapo status. They had regular company. Above all, people can be treated much worse than they were allegedly treated and still behave like loyal, faithful dogs. Rebelling against your condition, as the people who escaped and complained to the police did, is entirely natural. So is accepting it. Neither acts determine what your actual condition was in the first place.

And it should hardly be so surprising that people accept the idea they have to work in order to receive the means of basic sustenance when this notion forms a large part of government policy on unemployment.

surplus to political requirements

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p>Our American comrades will be familiar with this kind of thing:

As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists warned .

The changes will pave the way for a further review of constituency boundaries that will reduce the number of safe Labour seats before the 2020 election.

It's a two stage thing. First shift voting registrations from households to individuals and remove the legal obligation to report. Then measure constituencies by individual registrations rather than numbers eligible to vote, thus cutting down the number of urban constituencies, and therefore Labour constituencies. And the man driving this through is Mr Fair Votes himself, Nick Clegg.

It should be said that if core Labour voters are demotivated then that has a lot to do with the Labour Party: the numbers voting between 1997 and 2001 dropped by around 13%, I think. This is where new Labour's they've got nowhere else to go attitude to their voters eventually got them. many went anyway, and now we have a rightwing government trying to systematically discourage them from coming back.

I'm also not at all sure that if this goes through that it won't rebound on the Tories, who have their own secular decline in voters to worry about. Party loyalties are so generally attenuated these days that it makes no sense for any government to discourage voting.

Maggie Thatcher, Hard ECUs, and the Eurozone shambles

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House of Commons, 30 October 1990 –

Mr. Terence Higgins (Worthing)  Will my right hon. Friend [the PM, Mrs Thatcher] take time between now and the conference in December to explain to her European colleagues what any first-year economic student could tell them, which is that the imposition of a single currency, as opposed to a common currency, would rule out for all time the most effective means of adjusting for national differences in costs and prices? Will she explain that that in turn would cause widespread unemployment, which would probably exist on a perpetual basis, and very serious financial imbalances?

The Prime Minister Yes, I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. It would do just that. It would also mean that there would have to be enormous transfers of money from one country to another. It would cost us a great deal of money. One reason why some of the poorer countries want it is that they would get those big transfers of money. We are trying to contest that. If we have a single currency or a locked currency, the differences come out substantially in unemployment or vast movements of people from one country to another. Many people who talk about a single currency have never considered its full implications.

But wait, there’s more.

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Why you shouldn’t trust the WSJ piece on BNP Paribas

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The Wall Street Journal Europe has published this morning a market-moving opinion piece claiming to reveal serious funding troubles at French bank BNP Paribas. The article opens with an alleged quote from a BNP executive:

We can no longer borrow dollars. U.S. money-market funds are not lending to us anymore. Since we don’t have access to dollars anymore, we’re creating a market in euros. This is a first. . . . we hope it will work, otherwise the downward spiral will be hell. We will no longer be trusted at all and no one will lend to us anymore.

On the face of it, the quote didn’t seem that outlandish: the major French banks have a significant amount of the bad kind of European sovereign debt in their books, have not written off the potential losses quite as extensively as others have done and thus stand to suffer dearly in case of a Greek default. You could also argue that French banks haven’t always been 100% straightforward in their defense. And it’s not like hints of a dollar funding problem at a European bank haven’t surfaced in the past weeks.

Still, there are many reasons to be extremely skeptical of the article. Continue reading →

the man on the Clapham omnibus says bring death from the sky

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Micah Zenko on the burgeoning US assassination programme. Here's the halfway point:

However, in mid-2008, President Bush authorized a vast expansion in the scope and intensity of the use of drones in Pakistan. Since then, there have been an additional 250 strikes. As David Sanger reported, Bush lowered the threshold for an attack to what one anonymous U.S. official described as the "reasonable man" standard: "If it seemed reasonable, you could hit it."

I'm not returning to the good old days of Bush bashing here. We've now reached the stage where people whose names are not known can be assassinated on the grounds that their "life patterns" as interpreted by targeters provide "operational support" to organisations that the US has decided are terrorist, and on the grounds that their deaths will "minimize threats to allies and partner states." Widely interpreted – and the trend is clearly towards wide interpretation – those parameters could end up including a lot of reasonable men.

life in a low trust society

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I missed this when it came out a week ago. Have yourselves a cheerful read:

On the morning of Sept. 4, in the riverside boomtown of Wuhan, Mr. Li, an 88-year-old man, fell in the street and injured his nose. People passed him by, but no one raised a hand to help as he lay on the ground, suffocating on his own blood.

This week, China’s netizens have expressed an outpouring of sympathy – for the bystanders. This is nothing new here. In recent years, there have been several high-profile cases of elderly men and women who have collapsed or suffered accidents in public spaces who then sue the good Samaritans who have tried to help them. These cases have created a genuine and widespread fear that helping a person in need will lead to personal financial loss.

The proximate cause of this is a court ruling back in 2006 which found the fact that someone helped an old lady in distress was evidence that he caused that distress in the first place. But there's maybe more to it than that. More good commentary here.

 

 

mining in North Manchester

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Alex’s post on the sub-prime/ legal loansharking industry’s rental of the Conservative Party reminds me again of the odd cluster of payday loan cum pawnbroking storefronts in our local high street; four on a hundred yard frontage.

Now the thing is that Crumpsall ward has low numbers of absolutely workless households, but the highest number in Manchester of households earning below 60% of median income, the official poverty metric. Still, they have stuff in their houses, stuff that can be pawned, until it runs out. And they have an income: a low income, but one bad month for them allows you to crack into it and extract yourself a little value. And once you’ve extracted that value, you’ve created the need which enables you to crack into it again next month and the month after that. Some of this, of course, can be kicked upstairs for legislative protection. And so here is our growth sector with its own emerging lobby. Not Osborne’s magic export pixies but the working poor considered as an extractive industry.

human currency

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The operation coincided exactly with Tony Blair's first visit to Libya. Two days after the fax was sent, Blair arrived to shake hands with Gaddafi, and said the two nations wanted to make "common cause" in counter-terrorism operations. It was also announced that Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a £550m gas exploration deal. Three days later Saadi and his family were put aboard a private Egyptian-registered jet and flown to Tripoli.

Associates of Saadi cannot understand why his capture and interrogation would hold any great intelligence value for the British authorities, and are speculating that he may have been a "gift" from the British to the Gaddafi regime.

He came with fugitives in his chain, and the two leaders met in a tent. Interesting the extent of Beijing's co-operation, too.

 

boutique conservative leftism

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Mironov has headed the left-leaning Fair Russia party since its foundation in 2006. The party united pensioners, ecologists and trade union activists, but its political program is very close to the parliamentary majority United Russia party, and thus many analysts see Fair Russia as a project aimed at weakening the positions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation rather than a genuine struggle for power.

Mr Fair Russia is currently griping about internet porn. This kind of offering must be very appealing to the people currently in charge of Egypt, for instance.

Crying All The Way To The Bank

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Ireland’s Minister for Finance Michael Noonan is an optimistic man. He is also a persistent one. He is optimistic, since he clearly feels that his country’s 85 billion euro IMF/EU programme is going to work as planned, and he is persistent as he patently refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. The dogs in question here would be the bondholders of Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society senior debt. The heir to these banks owes them some 3.8 billion euros, and the first repayment of 719 million euros of Anglo debt falls due on November 2.
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