Saturday, August 12, 2017

"Land-Banking" on London

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Britain, beset by a rising population, needs houses more than ever. Robby Du Toit, managing director of the property company Sellhousefast, explained that while house prices have risen 259 percent in the past 20 years, wages have only risen 68 percent, leaving homes largely unaffordable for the average earner. According to Du Toit, the average cost of buying a home in London is now 14 times more than the city's average wage of £33,720 -- the highest disparity on record. Put simply, unless you're on an extremely high salary, you can't afford to buy property in London.
"We know that the capital is becoming more polarised," Du Toit said. "Numbers of households considered wealthy have shot up and so have households considered poor, leaving a shrinking middle. London is the wealthiest yet most unequal part of the UK." Du Toit said that those who come to buy property assets in London nowadays are almost exclusively part of that top 1%.
The number of homeless residents has risen for a sixth successive year, with London accounting for 23 percent of England's homelessness. 170,000 British families in the capital are living in hostels, B&Bs, and temporary accommodation, unable to afford a home. Recent government figures show around 1.4 million homes have been lying vacant in the UK for at least six months -- the highest level of "spare" homes in two decades.
At the same time, London has witnessed a staggering 456 percent increase in "land banking" over the last 20 years. Kensington and Chelsea -- London's richest borough, where the Grenfell Tower tragedy took place -- has the highest number of empty homes.
Land banking in London has long been exploited by the super-rich. In 2014, one-third of the mansions stood empty on Bishops Avenue, a single street in north London that has been dubbed "Billionaires Row," which ranked as the UK's second most expensive street with an estimated £350 million worth of empty properties. A row of mansions -- believed to be owned by members of the Saudi royal family -- has stood virtually unused since being bought by investors between 1989 and 1993.
Developers are also purchasing land -- though not building on it -- then selling it for a tidy profit. A Guardian investigation on land banking revealed that in 2015, developers were sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission. That was four times the total number of homes built during 2016. As the report made clear, the average price of land in Britain with planning permission for housing is around £6 million per hectare -- making land banking an extremely lucrative venture.
In June, the housing charity Shelter issued a report warning that 1 million families are at risk of becoming homeless during the next three years. The group said that escalating rent costs, freezes to benefits and a lack of social housing was increasing the evictions and homelessness in the capital.
Only one application has been made to re-vacate the empty homes since 2006, the year that Empty Dwelling Management Orders were established in the UK, giving local authorities the power to put unoccupied property back into the market as liveable housing. The refusal by local councils to use similar powers to help solve the housing crisis is "disgraceful," according to Lucy Pendleton, director of James Pendleton estate agent. "It's even more disturbing to find that applications have been dropped to zero in London, where the high cost of living and severe, long-standing imbalance between supply and demand makes these powers even more urgent," Pendleton said.

Capitalism means this

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 According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, corporate profits are "near all-time highs." Wages for most workers, meanwhile, have been stagnant for decades. And the richest are rewarded with ever-lower tax rates. Only 0.1 percent of full-time workers earning the minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in any state in the U.S. As long as workers continue to vote in the same representatives that are robbing them expect more of the same. The problem is not with the Congress it is with the voters. While CEOs are earning unconscionable amounts of money, their workers are often forced to make ends meet on $20,000 annually or less, with decreasing benefits every year. Walmart has become notorious in this regard; their employees are even given instructions on how to apply for welfare and food stamps during their orientation. The fact that some of these companies are paying their workers so little that they qualify for government subsidies seems to have largely escaped the attention of the voters, who have been trained to focus their anger on the poorest individuals, benefiting from some nominal form of government assistance. In the minds of many Americans, it’s fraud for a decidedly poor person to be on government assistance and still have what appears to be too good of an automobile or television for someone of their lowly lot in life, but it’s okay for huge corporations to be given unlimited handouts from taxpayers to subsidize the shameful pittances they pay their employees.

The results of a study published in the New York Times on July 22, 2013, confirmed that whether you’re born poor or born rich you tend overwhelmingly to stay that way. Nationally, a Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder never move up at all, while 70 percent never reach the middle rung. Even students from wealthy families with lower test scores are more likely to graduate from college than poor students with higher test scores. So few people control the marketplace that, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the top One Percent own half of all the stocks in this country, while the bottom 50 percent own only .5 percent of them. Sociologist and author G. William Domhoff revealed, in a report on his Who Rules America? website, that the One Percent has only 5 percent of the collective personal debt, while the bottom 90 percent has 73 percent. When we contrast the distribution of income and debt, it becomes obvious just how difficult economic upper mobility is in present-day America. Joseph Stiglitz went over much of this material in an excellent article in the May 2011 Vanity Fair, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” There is probably no truer saying than, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

US corporations repeatedly argue that businesses are being strangled by high tax rates and that American corporations pay the "highest tax rates in the world," it states. A new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds, however, that this is "misleading because what corporations actually pay (their effective rate) is far lower" than the statutory rate of 35 percent. By taking advantage of various loopholes and tax avoidance strategies American corporations are able to pay far less. The Trump administration has reversed its position on commitments to close the deferral loophole, and their most recent proposal followed congressional Republicans’ plans to institute a territorial tax system, which would no longer tax multinational corporations’ offshore profits at all. At its core, a territorial tax system makes the deferral loophole permanent. This globalization allows corporations to hide their wealth in tax havens and shell companies. While paying no tax at all in 2010, GE, citing merely one example of corporate tax “fairness,” paid an average of just one-eighth of a percent in taxes between 2002 and 2011. In response to these astonishing statistics, GE CEO Jeff Immelt termed the US tax system, “old, complex, and uncompetitive.” Immelt since he took over as GE’s CEO, the company’s stock lost 50 percent of its value, and GE had closed thirty-one factories and laid off nineteen thousand workers. For this dazzling performance, Immelt earned over $12 million a year. Forbes magazine ranked Immelt as the fourth worst CEO in America in its May 2012 issue.

While millions of Americans have lost their homes and were financially devastated by the 2007/2008 recession, the wealthy continue to be rescued from their own mistakes, time and time again. When individual Americans experience a terrible financial setback, they are told it’s their own fault and to try harder and pull up their bootstraps. Helping them somehow is a handout, the rich resent giving. But when the wealthiest groups in our society—the big banks, General Motors, etc.—make bad decisions and should ostensibly suffer the consequences, they aren’t penalized at all. Only a few relatively small fry—loan officers and the like—were ever prosecuted for crimes related to the 2008 financial crash.  only one banker—the Egyptian-born Kareem Serageldin—was ever sent to jail for the 2008 financial crisis. Despite that even the judge admitted that others at Credit Suisse were guiltier and that Serageldin was merely “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks,” he nevertheless sentenced him to thirty months behind bars. The overall lack of prosecutions related to the worst banking crisis in American history reflected a disturbing trend. From 1995–1997, the percentage of federal white-collar prosecutions was 17.6 percent. In the period from 2010–2012 however, this figure dipped to only 9.4 percent. As multiple sources within the banking industry told the New York Times, federal authorities appeared to lack the courage to go after powerful corporate figures, part of an overall change within the Justice Department of seeking settlements in lieu of prison sentences.

The banks bailed out by the government certainly didn’t stop lavishing excessive benefits on their top executives. Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was given over $70 million in total compensation in 2008, despite his company having been gifted $10 billion in the bailout. J. P. Morgan Chase’s James S. Dimon earned nearly $28 million, while his company had taken $25 billion from the taxpayers. The list goes on, as huge conglomerates such as American Express, Bank of America, and Capital One bestowed millions on their CEOs, only months after begging for handouts from the unwashed masses who were struggling to make ends meet, and to whom were still being told to sacrifice for the good of the country. All told, nine banks that begged the struggling taxpayers to bail them out awarded cumulative bonuses of nearly $33 billion in that same year of 2008, including $1 million each to some five thousand employees. Exposing the lie that these economic excesses are connected to the ironclad manifestations of an all-knowing marketplace, six of the nine banks paid out more in bonuses than they earned in profit.  Citigroup, which received about 25 percent of the bailout money going to the nine banks, bestowed an incredible $98.9 million in compensation on Andrew Hall, head of their energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, which dwarfed the $38 million they paid CEO Vikram Pandit in 2008.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the wealthy saw their net worth jump by $52.4 billion in 2013. On July 21, 2016, Bloomberg would recount how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had surpassed Warren Buffet as the third richest person in the world, thanks to a tidy increase of $5.4 billion in his personal fortune in 2016. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers, who desperately need a significant pay raise, are simply not getting one.

The wealthiest people in our society don’t appear to be improving any lives but their own, and they don’t seem to have special qualities or skills that explain why they’re being compensated so much more extravagantly than the rest of us. Warren Buffet, like so many very wealthy people, made his fortune with investments. Multi-billionaire Mexican Carlos Slim HelĂș is another whose occupation is investor. When we examine any list of the richest Americans, we find names such as notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose more polite title is investor, George Soros, who is yet another investor, hedge fund managers John Paulson and James Simons, and plenty of financiers, bond mavens, chairmen, and others with predictable titles that assure us, whatever they do, they aren’t positively impacting the lives of the bulk of humanity. 

Bill Gates’s Microsoft was primarily known for creating an operating system with numerous flaws, charging excessive prices for all the unnecessary upgrades and new versions, and engaging in monopolistic practices. In 2014 Gates wrote, “By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.” Well, it’s certainly become a better place for him. Apple founder Steve Jobs would declare that Gates had “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” Jobs had a right to feel that way; most people think that Microsoft stole many essential features from Apple. Of course, many believe that Jobs himself stole from Xerox.  Like almost all modern corporate leaders, Jobs used cheap migrant labor in foreign countries to build his iPhones. Both Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa, and Bill Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, referred succinctly to Jobs as “a walking antitrust violation.” Walter Isaacson, author of a biography on Jobs, declared that the founder of Apple “always believed that the rules that applied to ordinary people didn’t apply to him.” 

If it could be demonstrated that either Gates or Jobs had single-­handedly invented the personal computer, they might indeed be worth their fortunes. By any definition, that clearly isn’t the case. We hear regular, nonsensical references in the mainstream media about the difficulty of finding suitable executive talent and thus the need to compensate them extravagantly in order to beat the competition. It is never explained just what talent one requires to be an executive in a large corporation. One can’t quantify this kind of talent in any measurable way, the way one can assess the skills of an athlete, a musician, or an artist. Many powerful corporate leaders attain their positions in the most traditional manner, through simple nepotism. Sam Walton’s children, for example, exhibited no talent whatsoever in inheriting their father’s fortune. The Koch brothers inherited an oil refinery firm from their father. Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson is merely continuing the family tradition of running the company her grandfather established. Donald Trump began life as the son of a multimillionaire, which made the arduous climb to billionaire a bit easier. 

 “You didn’t build that,” Barack Obama once said.  Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed Obama’s comments, saying, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”  Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, explored the attitudes of these unfathomably wealthy people. She found that each of them felt strongly that they’d earned their great wealth. Just as unanimously, though, they all thought that at least some of their billionaire brethren hadn’t earned theirs. 

Bill Gates did not come from a “middle-class” family; his parents were quite wealthy, and his father was on the board of Planned Parenthood. Warren Buffet’s climb up the corporate ladder was undoubtedly aided by the fact he was the son of a United States congressman. Nike founder and chairman Philip Knight’s father was a newspaper publisher. Hedge fund magnate James H. Simons grew up the son of a factory owner. Any present-day Rockefeller, Rothschild, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, etc. invariably succeeded because of their names and their inherited wealth, while Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduaro Salverin, Chris Hughes, and Justin Rosenstein all came from wealthy families and met at the ultimate breeding ground for the elite, Harvard University. Horatio Alger stories, if they ever existed to any great degree, are clearly a thing of the past. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent much of his childhood on a 25,000-acre Texas ranch with his maternal grandfather, who was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission. Liliane Bettencourt, presently estimated to be worth more than $33 billion, earned her riches by inheriting L’Oreal, one of the world’s biggest companies, from her father. Google founder Larry Page’s father Carl was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Forest Mars Jr., worth some $21 billion, achieved his success through inheriting the giant candy company from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather. His siblings, John and Jacqueline, are also worth $21 billion each. They mirror the work ethic of Sam Walton’s children, yet undoubtedly many Americans, from all income levels, would argue that they earned this incredible wealth.

According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 75.4 percent of all wealth in the United States belongs to the richest 10 percent of the people. Comparable nations (none of them as bad as the United States) in terms of wealth disparity include Chile, Indonesia, and South Africa. The bottom 90 percent of American citizens own only 24.6 percent of the aggregate wealth, while the norm for developed countries is around 40 percent. Meanwhile, under Obama, who was often accused of being a socialist, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans received 95 percent of the income gains during the alleged economic “recovery.” 

 During his 2016 presidential run, Bernie Sanders made statements such as “something is profoundly wrong when the twenty richest people in our country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population—150 million people.” FactCheck.org claimed that the situation for the 40 percent at the bottom of the ladder has grown even more dismal, declaring that by early 2016, they actually had a combined negative financial worth. Every statistic on income and wealth disparity supports the notions of Ferdinand Lundberg, who postulated in his 1937 book America’s Sixty Families that, “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of the richest families, buttressed by no more than 90 families of lesser wealth.”

CEOs are not only given wildly excessive salaries and “performance” bonuses; they are often given parting “gifts” that boggle the mind. ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva, for example, was gifted an unbelievable $260 million from the company when he left them in June 2012. Evidently the $141 million total compensation package he’d accrued in 2011 wasn’t enough. Mulva’s package paled in comparison to the more than $417 million doled out to John Welch, in honor of his twenty-year tenure at General Electric. But perhaps Welch was deserving of such an honor, considering General Electric paid no taxes at all in 2010, according to the New York Times and numerous other mainstream media outlets. In 2015, Citizens for Tax Justice claimed that GE had again paid no taxes, along with fourteen other Fortune 500 companies. These lucrative deals, often called golden parachutes, are extended to overpaid executives even when they fail miserably at their jobs. The magazine Mother Jones calculated that the average golden parachute for these CEOs was an amount equal to forty-nine lifetimes’ worth of work for a median income employee. In the case of Welch, this would rise to 203 lifetimes’ worth of work.

Some executive pay rates are so astronomical that they defy belief. John Hammergren, CEO of drug giant McKesson, made $54.4 million in 2010. This works out to $210,000 a day, and that daily salary would be more than nearly 99 percent of Americans make annually ($250,000 a year is generally considered the basement level for the top One Percent). Health Care pays its executives extremely well, too, which goes a long way toward explaining the spiraling, out of control medical costs in this country. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield paid CEO Larry Glasscock a $42.5 million bonus in 2004, which nicely dwarfed his $3.6 million compensation for the year. As an anonymous wit on a conspiracy forum noted in outrage over this, “At my former salary, I would have to work 1,214 years to make $42.5 million. That’s over twelve centuries.” To show just how rapidly, and drastically, the gap between upper management and workers is growing, during the 1980s, executives made about forty times what average workers did. By 2015, the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 204 to 1. During the Clinton years, the average pay for CEOs increased more than 400 percent.

 Angelo Mozilo was the co-founder and longtime CEO of Countrywide Financial. During one eight-year period alone, Mozilo earned $521.5 million from his company, according to compensation research firm Equilar. Mozilo became the first executive to be penalized for the losses incurred by millions of investors during the mortgage collapse when he agreed to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a civil fraud case. Of the $67.5 million Mozilo was assessed, Countrywide agreed to pay $20 million as part of the indemnification agreement he had with the company. Mozilo, like many of the highest-paid corporate leaders, received innumerable, valuable perks along with his millions. For instance, his compensation package covered annual country club and golf course dues. Mozilo knew how to take care of his influential friends, too; Senator Christopher Dodd, for example, was given a $75,000 reduction in mortgage payments at below-­market interest rates, that in real terms worked out to be a sweetheart deal worth over a million dollars. Other luminaries who benefited financially from being “friends of Angelo” included members of Congress Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer, as well as Nancy Pelosi’s son, Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, and Democratic Party figures Richard Holbrooke and Donna Shalala.

 Congress, in 1993, capped the tax deductibility for executive pay at $1 million but still allowed US corporations to profit from deducting so-called performance-based pay, including stock options. Thanks to this provision, corporations regularly use these stock options to lower their taxes, making large executive bonuses in effect tax-free. The total yearly cost to taxpayers from all these shenanigans is some $7 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The fast-food industry has been especially noteworthy in this regard; the Institute for Policy Studies found that fast-food CEOs had deducted about $183 million of this performance pay, which decreased their tax liability by $64 million over two years. These are the same folks who are claiming no one will be able to afford their putrid food if they were forced to pay their employees a living wage. McDonald’s CEO James Skinner, for example, received a performance bonus of $23 million in 2012, while David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands (which includes Taco Bell and KFC), was given more than twice that amount, with a $48 million “performance” bonus.

During the 2013 holiday season, Walmart launched a canned-food drive for its own employees. Somehow, I don’t expect Sam Walton’s children to reexamine their priorities, despite all the attention and criticism this campaign received. No less ironic was the boast from Walmart’s CEO Bill Simon, the month before, during a presentation about the opportunities at his corporation, that 475,000 Walmart associates earned salaries of at least $25,000. There are about a million Walmart employees, so this means that less than half of them are paid even this kind of paltry salary. The Committee for Better Banks surveyed bank tellers in New York and found that 39 percent of them were on some form of public assistance, because their salaries were so low. By the end of 2012, the top ten CEOs each were making over $100 million a year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg led the way, with $2.28 billion. Almost all of Zuckerberg’s earnings came through stock options, which meant a very low tax bill.

Adapted from here 
http://www.alternet.org/comments/books/how-top-one-percent-have-rigged-economic-system#disqus_thread


Friday, August 11, 2017

Modern Slavery & Trafficking In Capitalism

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According to The National Crime Agency modern slavery and human trafficking is going on in
' every large town and city ' in The U. K. (The Metro / 11~8~17).

         Will Kerr from The N.C.A. said there were 'lots of different outlets ' for people trafficked into
The U. K. to be working illegally and against their will.

          He went onto say ' they are working in car washes, construction, agriculture and food processing~often receiving little pay and forced to put up with poor living conditions. '

         ' More than 3,800 potential slaves were identified in 2016, up from 1,745 in 2013.'

A campaign has been launched to spot the signs, including visible injuries, a distressed appearance
and any indication a person is being controlled by another.

          The S.P.G.B. as always said we will continue to be wage slaves whilst capitalism exists.
When capitalism is abolished there will be no employer or employed. No exploitation. We will all be treated with dignity.

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Our Burning Planet

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A 543-page report by scientists from 13 federal agencies details rapidly rising temperatures in the United States since 1980 and cites global events including an extreme heatwave in Europe in 2003 and in Australia in 2013, as concrete examples of climate change, saying that both examples offer "relatively strong evidence" that humans are contributing to global warming.

The authors write that they have "a medium degree of confidence" that rising temperatures throughout much of the U.S. are linked to human activity. The report also concludes that so much damage has already been done by the greenhouse gases humans have emitted into the atmosphere, warming would still continue over the next century even if emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases were to stop immediately.

Just in the next few decades average temperatures in the US will go up 2.5 degrees F. But by 2100, only 80 years from now, the average temperature will be 5 to 8.5 degrees F. higher! Remember, average surface temperature includes the cold Great Lakes and cold North Dakota. So in any particular place, say Savannah or Atlanta or Phoenix, the temperature could go up even higher than 8.5 degrees F. The scientists are saying that unusual record temperatures will become normal. Some whole cities (Tucson, for example) could become uninhabitable.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/08/08/fearing-trump-censorship-govt-scientists-leak-alarming-climate-report

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/08/08/scientists-leak-study-global-heating-impact-trump-can-suppress-it

Out of sight, out of mind

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Refugees and migrants face kidnap, rape, torture, slave labour and sexual violence in Libya before attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy, an Oxfam report has found. The report describes the conditions in which thousands lived trapped until they managed to make their way to Italy as a "living hell". 

The report states: "The EU is meant to be a bastion of human rights: EU member states should ensure that migrants arrive safely in Europe where they can have access to a fair and transparent process for claiming asylum."  The report adds that a proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron to open processing centres on Libyan soil risks "entrapping more people in a lawless and dangerous state". 


In the report, Oxfam and its partners found that in 84 per cent of the testimonies, people said they had suffered inhuman or degrading treatment, extreme violence or torture, 80 per cent said they had regularly been denied food and water during their stay and 70 per cent said they had been tied up. 



Oxfam and its partners are calling on Italy and other European member states to stop pursuing migration policies that prevent people leaving Libya and escape the abuse they are suffering. The charities are urging European countries to take their fair share of asylum seekers and create safe routes for migrants to leave Libya. Oxfam has accused the EU of "trying to keep migration at arm's length" by using development money to reduce mobility at African borders, "effectively moving its borders so they are out of sight and out of mind".
Penny Lawrence, deputy chief executive of Oxfam GB, described the testimonies of atrocities in Libya as "unimaginable cruelty".
She said: “These testimonies paint a horrifying picture of desperate people who have risked their lives to escape war, persecution and poverty only to be confronted with unimaginable cruelty in Libya. The UK, along with other EU member states, has actively supported efforts to limit arrivals in Europe, trapping refugees and other migrants in a living hell. Outsourcing the policing of our borders to Libya isn’t the solution; EU member states, including the UK, should provide safe routes for people to come to Europe, including expanding opportunities for refugee families to reunite, and provide access to fair and transparent processes for claiming asylum.” 

Meanwhile, there is another growing risk to migrants. Traffickers in Niger are taking African migrants dreaming of reaching Europe on more dangerous routes through the Sahara desert in order to avoid detection after a government crackdown on smuggling, the U.N. migration agency said .

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said it had rescued 1,000 migrants since April in Niger's desert north, a transit point to Libya, from where more than 600,000 people have set out on flimsy boats for Europe in the past four years. Fewer smugglers are setting off from the Nigerien city of Agadez - a smuggling hub until the European Union last year bankrolled a clampdown - and are now taking more treacherous routes through the Sahara, far away from water sources and basic services, the IOM said.
"Smugglers are taking more risks to avoid major hubs, checkpoints and security controls," Alberto Preato, programme manager at the IOM in Niger, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation . "But cars break down, drivers get lost and migrants get abandoned ... the conditions are dire," he added. "Migrants say: 'The desert is a larger cemetery than the Mediterranean'."
More migrants may die in the Sahara than in the Mediterranean, says migration tracking group 4mi. Dozens have died of thirst in Niger's desert north in recent months, while hundreds of others have been rescued by authorities.
"Because the desert is so vast ... it is hard to know how many people are actually dying en route," IOM spokeswoman Olivia Headon told a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday. "But it is definitely in the hundreds if not thousands."

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

What capitalist do you support?

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Arsenal: The club is worth around £1.5bn – the sixth most valuable club in Europe. Their owner. Stan Kroenke, owns more than two-thirds of the club, is also the owner of assorted American teams, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA and the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL. He launched a new TV channel in the UK (MyOutdoorTV) dedicated to bloodsports, hunting and killing potentially endangered species, like lions and elephants, for the pleasure and glorification of stupid idiots with big guns. Minority owner, Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born Russian businessman and former fencer, made his money out of mining. Now he’s the fifth richest person in Britain, according to The Sunday Times. Did time in jail.

Bournemouth: Seventy-five per cent owned by AFCB Enterprises Ltd, behind which is the Opalus Trust, behind which is Maxim Demin. Demin is another Russian businessman. But even more mysterious. Never gives interviews. Remaining 25 per cent largely owned by Matthew Hulsizer, a Chicago financier, and his wife Jenny Just, joint owners of Peak6 Investments in Chicago.

Brighton & Hove Albion: Main man is Tony Bloom, local lad.

Burnley: Mike Garlick, chairman, Burnley born and bred. Head of a project management company.

Chelsea: Roman Abramovich. Oligarch. Russian.
Crystal Palace: Owned by a consortium, British (Steve Parrish) and American (Joshua Harris and David Blitzer).
Everton: Owner, Farhad Moshiri. British, born in Iran, resides in Monaco, former stakeholder in Arsenal, and business partner of Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal). 
Huddersfield Town: Dean Hoyle, based in Huddersfield, founder (together with his wife Janet) of the Card Factory, a chain of greetings cards and gift stores.

Leicester City: Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, Thai billionaire, founder and CEO of King Power duty-free shops. Recently bought a second football club in Belgium.
Liverpool: John W Henry, owner of Fenway Sports. Owns Boston Red Sox. 
Manchester City: Sheikh Mansour. Oil billionaire and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. 
Manchester United: The Glazers. 
Newcastle United: Mike Ashley, founder of Sports Direct. 
Southampton: Katharina Liebherr. The only woman owner of a Premier League team. Swiss. Recently booted off the board of directors in “restructuring”. Rumours of a possible Chinese takeover.
Stoke City: Owner Peter Coates, born in Stoke, chairman of Bet365. Sold the club to an Icelandic consortium then bought it back again.
Swansea: Americans Steve Kaplan and Jason Levien are the majority shareholders, the latter co-owns DC United. The supporters’ trust has a 21 per cent stake.
Tottenham Hotspur:  The club’s owners are Joe Lewis and Daniel Levy. Levy is an Essex boy. Managing director of ENIC, who own a controlling stake. Joe Lewis lives in the Bahamas.
Watford: Gino Pozzo, an Italian, son of a guy who runs clubs in Spain and Italy.
West Bromwich Albion: Owner is a Chinese businessman, Guochuan Lai, property development and construction.
West Ham United:  David Sullivan and David Gold. They made their money out of porn, adult magazines, films.

The North-South Divide

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More young adults are dying before their time in the north of England than the south – and the gap is widening, a study has revealed.
Researchers say that since 1965, about 1.2 million more people have died before the age of 75 in the north of England than in the south, taking into account differences in population. And the team warns that the gap in premature deaths is growing larger – revealing a particularly “alarming growth” among younger adults and those nearing middle-age. 
“Between the ages of 25 and 44 there have been rising inequalities,” said Iain Buchan, professor in public health informatics at the University of Manchester and a co-author of the study. “A sticking plaster might be education, improvement of interventions around alcohol misuse and the other common causes associated with young people’s deaths – but that doesn’t tackle the root cause of the social and economic environment,” he said.
While the authors do not explore the reasons behind the deaths, they note that the most common causes of death among young adults include suicide, poisoning, traffic accidents and liver disease.
Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology at University College London who was not involved in the study, said that the research showed the north-south divide has been amazingly persistent. “It is really astonishing how long it has gone on for,” he said, adding that other research has shown that the divide is worse for those of lower socio-economic status. While Marmot said that it was difficult to link changes in mortality to changes in government policy – not least because it is not known what the lag times might be – he said it was highly likely that the disadvantage in the north was social and economic. 
Richard Wilkinson, co-founder of the Equality Trust and emeritus professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, said he was not surprised by the results, pointing out that inequalities rose during the 1980s, and added that austerity was making the north-south divide worse. “The main cuts are to the cities, the labour areas, which need most,” he said.

UK Inequality Carries On

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A booming City and rising house prices provided a double boost to Britons holding assets in 2016 as they pushed the nation’s wealth through the £10tn mark, according to a new survey.
Lloyds Bank’s private banking arm said total household wealth in the UK increased by £892bn last year – with the property and financial markets each responsible for half the rise.
News of the 9% jump in the value of the assets from £9.6tn to £10.5tn during 2016 is likely to rekindle the debate about the UK’s wealth inequality. Previous surveys have shown that a tenth of adults own half the nation’s wealth, while 15% own nothing or have negative wealth.
Lloyds said the value of assets had risen far faster than prices or incomes over the past decade. The £3.9tn increase in the value of residential property and financial assets owned by UK residents represented a 59% rise, whereas prices rose by 39% and gross household income was up 37%. Other surveys have come up with higher estimates of total household wealth, but Lloyds said its figure excluded non-residential property and assets held by charities and other non-profit institutions.
The survey said average house prices rose by 4.9% during 2016 and an additional 183,000 homes were added to the stock of private properties to buy and rent. This resulted in housing wealth contributing an estimated £431bn to the overall increase in wealth. The total value of financial assets – such as bank and building society deposits, government bonds, shares in companies, life assurance and pensions held by households – increased by a £461bn, or 8%.
The Bank of England has acknowledged that the richest 10% of Britons gained most from the money creation programme known as quantitative easing, since the increase in the supply of credit boosted demand for financial assets. Since the better off held a greater proportion of these assets, 40% of the gains of rising share and bond prices went to the richest 5% of households.
The Social Market Foundation said more than 14 million working age adults were not saving at all, and more than 26 million adults did not hold adequate rainy day or pension savings.
Russell Galley, the managing director of the Halifax bank, said, “The rise in the employment level by 175,000 in the three months to May helped push the unemployment rate down to 4.5%, the lowest since June 1975. However, this improvement in the jobs market has not, as yet, boosted wage growth, resulting in earnings rising at a slower rate than consumer prices,” he said.

“DOCTOR, WHO CARES?” (A Fantasy, Part 1) - weekly poem

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“DOCTOR, WHO CARES?” (A Fantasy, Part 1)

Some Feminists are rejoicing that the 13th 'Dr Who'
will be a woman as, with their limited perspective,
they view this trifle as a revolutionary breakthrough.

The new Dr Who is a woman!
Or in sexist parlance, 'a gal';
He's now been transgendered,
His cojones dismembered,
He is, chaps, no longer a male!
The trend could have repercussions,
Will actors adopt the new creed?
A musical play,
About Mrs May,
Could star Brian May in the lead! (1)

A brand new production on Hitler,
That's filmed at his Berlin retreat;
Might feature Miss Rudd, (2)
As the failed Nazi dud,
Bunkering down in defeat.
Could Ann Widdecombe play a Dalek?
Or a male space-monster instead?
And could Catholics cope,
If she plays the Pope,
With nun Tony Blair in 'theys' bed?! (3)

These follies are feasible if,
Non-binary gender holds sway; (4)
With some men in drag,
Wayne Rooney a WAG,
And Prince Charles, the Queen of the May!
This is the most faux revolution,
Since Tsarism's Petrograd fell;
But for minds that ain't small,
It's a load of old ball,
And a load of old 'ballcocks' as well!

(1) Queen guitarist.

(2) Amber Rudd, home secretary.

(3) The latest Feminist fad is for woman to self-identify as being
of 'non-binary gender', i.e. something other than a man or
woman who insist others refer to them as 'they' rather than 'she'.

(4) If, according to Feminists, gender is ‘non-binary’ then
it is a spectrum applicable to the entire human species.

© Richard Layton

Another Paris Failure

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Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years. Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.
But air-sampling programmes that record actual levels of gases, such as those run by the UK and Switzerland, reveal omissions.
In 2011, Swiss scientists first published their data on levels of a gas called HFC-23 coming from a location in northern Italy. "Our estimate for this location in Italy is about 60-80 tonnes of this substance being emitted every year, then we can compare this with the Italian emission inventory, and that is quite interesting because the official inventory says below 10 tonnes or in the region of two to three tonnes," said Dr Stefan Reimann, from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.
Carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002. But Dr Reimann explained, "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year. That is something that shouldn't be there. There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."
China's approach to reporting its overall output of green-house global warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions. Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.
Back in 2007, China simply refused to accept, in official documents, that it had become the largest emitter of CO2.
"I was working in China in 2007," said Dr Angel Hsu, from Yale University. "I would include a citation and statistics that made this claim of China's position as the number one emitter - these were just stricken out, and I was told the Chinese government doesn't yet recognise this particular statistic so we are not going to include it."
A report in 2015 suggested one error in China's statistics amounted to 10% of global emissions in 2013.
"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London. "In the air, we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."
 Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris is the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything. So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."

Meanwhile, Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead. Rather  “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”. The term “reduce greenhouse gases” is blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. While, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.