Easter has sort of sneaked up on us quietly this year, hasn’t it? I mean, sure, crème eggs appeared in Tesco as soon as they’d sold off the last of their Christmas biscuits and tinsel, but all things chocolatey and egg-shaped seem to have stayed confined to one aisle in the supermarkets and last time I walked past Clintons I wasn’t assaulted by anything yellow, fluffy or bearing two rabbit ears so it seems they’ve kept a bit of a lid on their usual Easter mania too. Which means, for once, as an atheist I’m not feeling too guilty about not buying into the whole over-hyped bonkersness that surrounds Easter. What the heck is the point of Easter anyway? Christmas is different; it’s the one time of year when we’ve all got a good excuse to get together with friends and family, spoil them rotten with presents and food, and have a bit of a party and good cheer at the darkest time of year. Easter, on the other hand, seems to have turned into a festival of chocolate, whose meaning is lost to all except those who go to church every Sunday.
Don’t get me wrong, I love chocolate as much as the next red-blooded female, but I seriously wonder about the effect the consumer culture has had on Easter. One thing in particular has, especially in recent years, made me think twice about why we buy each other Easter eggs. We’ve all come across Fairtrade products on our weekly shop; goodness knows I’ve banged on about them on here enough in the past. Lots of us now opt for Fairtrade-certified tea, coffee, bananas, pineapples, sugar, and chocolate. Recently, both Cadbury’s and Nestle have switched to Fairtrade-certified suppliers of Cocoa for their Dairy Milk and Kitkat bars, which would tend to suggest that these big multinational companies see sufficient consumer demand for Fairtrade chocolate to start promoting their most popular products as Fairtrade-certified. So....where are all the Fairtrade-certified Easter eggs?
Ok, fair enough, there are some. Green & Black’s Maya Gold Easter eggs are Fairtrade- certified, and incidentally the most devilishly delicious I-could-eat-this-forever-and-not-get-bored chocolate ever to exist in the known universe. Divine chocolate also usually come out with a whole range of egg-shaped fairtradiness. But your average supermarket shelf is still dominated by Smarties and Creme eggs, neither of which is Fairtrade-certified, even though apparently consumer demand for Fairtrade chocolate is increasing. This is especially galling when you remember that Easter is still a very Christian festival, yet apparently Christian principles of charity and fairness are still missing from the Easter tradition of giving out chocolate eggs to each and every acquaintance. However, if you look to major Christian establishments such as the respective Churches of England and Scotland, as well as the Catholic Church, it soon becomes clear how concerned they are about issues such as the environment and Fairtrade. As difficult as it is to get a straight answer out of your average bible basher, if you do a bit of pressing you find that most religious folk agree, at least in principle, that Fairtrade is better than rob-them-blind trade. Both Christian Aid and Cafod have close ties to Anglican and Catholic churches in the UK, and these two organisations are right up there with Oxfam in terms of how much work they put into overseas aid and development, so it is not as if the Christian faith happily turns its back on the poverty caused by biased trade agreements and wildly fluctuating market commodity prices.
So all these colourful boxes in the confectionary aisle, have they actually got anything to do with the real meaning of Easter? Apart from the fact their contents are egg-shaped, probably not. So, why do we always buy so many each year? Because Nestle, Cadbury’s, and Kraft amongst others, have got us hooked on their rich, sweet chocolatey goodness. This year, however, I’m defiantly going to be thinking about where my Easter eggs came from. I’ll give you a clue – I’m pretty sure it’s not the Easter bunny. Buy as many Creme eggs as you want – just don’t pretend you’re buying them “because it’s Easter”.
xx
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Friday, 12 March 2010
If someone said to you, “I know how to get $400 billion to help tackle poverty, climate change and national budget deficits”, you would say....?
So, banks. How evil are they? Considering the only reason such institutions exist in the first place is to look after people’s money, they’ve been really forgetting their place in the world of late. In case anyone had forgotten, banks effectively caused the current recession. The whys and the wherefores of this are complicated; but a lot of it has to do with stuff that goes on behind the scenes, behind deliberately closed doors. Hands up if you actually think you have a well-informed understanding of the so-called credit crunch and banking crisis, aside from the astronomical amounts of public money that was spent to bail them out? Yeah, my hand’s down...
What I do know is that a lot of what went on was actually the result of deals and transactions that took place between banks and other financial institutions. In business circles, it is common belief that half the reason the Royal Bank of Scotland got into trouble was because it paid way too much money for the ownership of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. This was a business decision; a decision by one bank to buy another, smaller bank, in order to expand its operations. A decision taken by a bunch of suits in a boardroom, whose only motivation for this decision was to increase profit and market share. It went wrong. We, us ordinary, hard working, tax-paying citizens, have been left with the bill.
Recently, Greece has found itself in a lot of financial hot water. At the end of January, it was reported by the Guardian that Greece’s economy is €300 billion in the red. Greece’s Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has highlighted, to Mr Obama no less, the role that speculative trading has had in making Greece’s bad debt problems a whole lot worse. Speculative trading, as I come to understand it, is basically more suits sitting in offices trading bets with each other about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, in the financial markets. This sounds harmless enough, until you realise that it’s the future of the Euro, or the Pound, that they are speculating on. So, if enough traders speculate that the Pound or Euro will depreciate against the Dollar tomorrow, what effect would this speculation have on whether the Pound or Euro actually does depreciate against the Dollar? Might this depreciation actually happen just because enough suits in offices speculated that it would happen? Would there then be an actual, tangible financial reason for this depreciation, if it occurred or would this depreciation be triggered by what a bunch of suits speculated yesterday? If there was an actual financial reason for this depreciation, might the depreciation itself be made worse than it might otherwise have been, simply because the suits speculated that it would occur in the first place? Sorry f I’m making you dizzy, but as you might have gathered, speculative markets are very shady, little understood by Mr & Mrs Average Joe, and highly morally dubious. More to the point, this speculation is exactly what is exacerbating Greece’s debt problems. Mr Papandreou told an audience in Washington that "Unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/09/greek-pm-meet-barack-obama), which in turn makes it harder for Greece to secure loans, and also has a negative impact on the value of the Euro. Well, the Euro zone is officially out of recession, so they should be able to cope, right? Er, nah. Spain, Portugal and Ireland are all still in recession, quite severely so. Meanwhile, the German government is suffering from a severe superiority complex, with Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank refusing to discuss a bailout package for Greece, German politicians suggesting that Greece sell off some of its islands, artwork and historical artifacts to make up the Greek deficit and the German newspaper Bild suggesting that Greeks “get up early and work all day”. Hmm, did someone have sauerkraut for breakfast, by any chance?
Anyway, let’s save Disunited Europe for another day. My point is that banks have got a heck of a lot to answer for. Not only did they cause the financial crisis, but it seems that they might actually be making it worse, after having raided public finances and looted the coffers of many a treasury around the world. When the financial crisis first hit, and Gordon Brown handed out £37 billion to the RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS, it happened with the promise of change, with control over management, and with Sir Fred Goodwin’s empty boardroom chair. I put it to you that nothing, absolutely nothing fundamental about the way banks conduct business has changed. All that matters, at the end of the day, is profit profit profit. No matter how many bets they place on Greece not being able to afford to pay its doctors and nurses next month, so long as those bets are making a profit it’s all good. It is time the banks realised who it is they really answer to. You may have gathered I’m a little bit miffed about all of this.
Which is why I got interested when I heard about the Robin Hood Tax campaign. (See my shiny new banner? Put it there myself!) This is a campaign to gather support for a Financial Transactions Tax, or FTT, also known as the Tobin Tax. First proposed by the aforementioned Nobel prize-winning Mr Tobin about 30 years ago, this tax would be a tax on all those behind-the-scenes-hush-hush financial transactions that are partly responsible for the state of things today, for example, the previously ranted-about speculative trading, amongst other derivatives. This particular campaign suggests that by taking an average of 0.05% from each financial transaction between financial institutions, we could raise up to $400 billion globally every year. There are a few problems with this idea, of course – for such an amount to be raised, the tax would have to be implemented and regulated thoroughly, not to mention the fact that you’d have to get every single country on Earth to actually completely explicitly agree on something for once, otherwise the banking industry would simply retreat to those enclaves which would not have a financial transactions tax. However, the adoption of such a tax would send a signal to the banking sector that both people and government are no longer willing to prop up an industry which does nothing but cost us money and damage our economies. It would perhaps encourage slightly more responsible behavior amongst bankers, who might think twice about placing a speculative bet on Greece’s supposed future financial failure, if doing so would cost them money. It would remind suits in boardrooms and offices who it is they really serve; whose money it is they look after day after day, and whose money bailed out their greedy mistakes when the debt collector came calling last year.
So, what would we use $400 billion for? I should probably mention that Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs, who supports the idea of a financial transactions tax, has said himself that even if implemented globally he doubts such a tax would raise this much money. However, even if we implemented this in the UK alone, we’d have a bit more cash to pour into that big black several-hundred-million-pound hole in the Treasury. The Robin Hood campaign suggest using half of the money raised to support frontline public services, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, hospitals, schools, all of which, whilst not being particularly well funded in the first place, are now staring down the barrel of the prospect of future cuts. The remaining half, the campaign argues, should be split between international aid and fighting climate change. Yep, that’s me sold. So go oooooon, have a read of their website, sign the petition, maybe make a pest of yourself and email your MP from their “Do Something” page.....maybe dress up in some tights after and run around your local wood with a bow and arrow. Or just stick on the DVD and oogle a young Kevin Costner and air guitar to Bryan Adams. Kevin Costner’s still got a bald patch in this one though. Do you think Kevin Costner was born with a bald patch? I mean, seriously, I’ve never seen him without one...
xx
http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/
What I do know is that a lot of what went on was actually the result of deals and transactions that took place between banks and other financial institutions. In business circles, it is common belief that half the reason the Royal Bank of Scotland got into trouble was because it paid way too much money for the ownership of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. This was a business decision; a decision by one bank to buy another, smaller bank, in order to expand its operations. A decision taken by a bunch of suits in a boardroom, whose only motivation for this decision was to increase profit and market share. It went wrong. We, us ordinary, hard working, tax-paying citizens, have been left with the bill.
Recently, Greece has found itself in a lot of financial hot water. At the end of January, it was reported by the Guardian that Greece’s economy is €300 billion in the red. Greece’s Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has highlighted, to Mr Obama no less, the role that speculative trading has had in making Greece’s bad debt problems a whole lot worse. Speculative trading, as I come to understand it, is basically more suits sitting in offices trading bets with each other about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, in the financial markets. This sounds harmless enough, until you realise that it’s the future of the Euro, or the Pound, that they are speculating on. So, if enough traders speculate that the Pound or Euro will depreciate against the Dollar tomorrow, what effect would this speculation have on whether the Pound or Euro actually does depreciate against the Dollar? Might this depreciation actually happen just because enough suits in offices speculated that it would happen? Would there then be an actual, tangible financial reason for this depreciation, if it occurred or would this depreciation be triggered by what a bunch of suits speculated yesterday? If there was an actual financial reason for this depreciation, might the depreciation itself be made worse than it might otherwise have been, simply because the suits speculated that it would occur in the first place? Sorry f I’m making you dizzy, but as you might have gathered, speculative markets are very shady, little understood by Mr & Mrs Average Joe, and highly morally dubious. More to the point, this speculation is exactly what is exacerbating Greece’s debt problems. Mr Papandreou told an audience in Washington that "Unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/09/greek-pm-meet-barack-obama), which in turn makes it harder for Greece to secure loans, and also has a negative impact on the value of the Euro. Well, the Euro zone is officially out of recession, so they should be able to cope, right? Er, nah. Spain, Portugal and Ireland are all still in recession, quite severely so. Meanwhile, the German government is suffering from a severe superiority complex, with Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank refusing to discuss a bailout package for Greece, German politicians suggesting that Greece sell off some of its islands, artwork and historical artifacts to make up the Greek deficit and the German newspaper Bild suggesting that Greeks “get up early and work all day”. Hmm, did someone have sauerkraut for breakfast, by any chance?
Anyway, let’s save Disunited Europe for another day. My point is that banks have got a heck of a lot to answer for. Not only did they cause the financial crisis, but it seems that they might actually be making it worse, after having raided public finances and looted the coffers of many a treasury around the world. When the financial crisis first hit, and Gordon Brown handed out £37 billion to the RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS, it happened with the promise of change, with control over management, and with Sir Fred Goodwin’s empty boardroom chair. I put it to you that nothing, absolutely nothing fundamental about the way banks conduct business has changed. All that matters, at the end of the day, is profit profit profit. No matter how many bets they place on Greece not being able to afford to pay its doctors and nurses next month, so long as those bets are making a profit it’s all good. It is time the banks realised who it is they really answer to. You may have gathered I’m a little bit miffed about all of this.
Which is why I got interested when I heard about the Robin Hood Tax campaign. (See my shiny new banner? Put it there myself!) This is a campaign to gather support for a Financial Transactions Tax, or FTT, also known as the Tobin Tax. First proposed by the aforementioned Nobel prize-winning Mr Tobin about 30 years ago, this tax would be a tax on all those behind-the-scenes-hush-hush financial transactions that are partly responsible for the state of things today, for example, the previously ranted-about speculative trading, amongst other derivatives. This particular campaign suggests that by taking an average of 0.05% from each financial transaction between financial institutions, we could raise up to $400 billion globally every year. There are a few problems with this idea, of course – for such an amount to be raised, the tax would have to be implemented and regulated thoroughly, not to mention the fact that you’d have to get every single country on Earth to actually completely explicitly agree on something for once, otherwise the banking industry would simply retreat to those enclaves which would not have a financial transactions tax. However, the adoption of such a tax would send a signal to the banking sector that both people and government are no longer willing to prop up an industry which does nothing but cost us money and damage our economies. It would perhaps encourage slightly more responsible behavior amongst bankers, who might think twice about placing a speculative bet on Greece’s supposed future financial failure, if doing so would cost them money. It would remind suits in boardrooms and offices who it is they really serve; whose money it is they look after day after day, and whose money bailed out their greedy mistakes when the debt collector came calling last year.
So, what would we use $400 billion for? I should probably mention that Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs, who supports the idea of a financial transactions tax, has said himself that even if implemented globally he doubts such a tax would raise this much money. However, even if we implemented this in the UK alone, we’d have a bit more cash to pour into that big black several-hundred-million-pound hole in the Treasury. The Robin Hood campaign suggest using half of the money raised to support frontline public services, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, hospitals, schools, all of which, whilst not being particularly well funded in the first place, are now staring down the barrel of the prospect of future cuts. The remaining half, the campaign argues, should be split between international aid and fighting climate change. Yep, that’s me sold. So go oooooon, have a read of their website, sign the petition, maybe make a pest of yourself and email your MP from their “Do Something” page.....maybe dress up in some tights after and run around your local wood with a bow and arrow. Or just stick on the DVD and oogle a young Kevin Costner and air guitar to Bryan Adams. Kevin Costner’s still got a bald patch in this one though. Do you think Kevin Costner was born with a bald patch? I mean, seriously, I’ve never seen him without one...
xx
http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Spare a thought for the poor hamster...
A proper entry soon, I promise - in the meantime, here's something to keep the old grey matter going -
http://www.impossiblehamster.org/
xx
http://www.impossiblehamster.org/
xx
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