How Much Money is There on Earth? David Cameron hands bankers who fuelled credit crunch £1.9billion tax break. Chancellor George Osborne’s decision to cut corporation tax for big businesses has gifted fat cat City firms another £300million at the same time David Cameron has handed bankers who fuelled the credit crunch a £1.9billion tax break, the Government’s own figures show. The Prime Minister’s levy on the banks has brought in £1.6billion less than he promised over the last two years. And Chancellor George Osborne’s decision to cut corporation tax for big businesses has gifted fat cat City firms another £300million at the same time. The shocking figures come after Mr Osborne slashed income tax for the super-rich from 50p to 45p while hitting the poor and needy with benefit cuts. Shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie, who unearthed them, said it was outrageous that the Tories are rewarding their mates in the City while families struggle. The Labour MP is set to tackle ministers about the bankers tax break in the Commons tomorrow.
Every welfare cut listed: how much a typical family will lose per week | News. A march in protest at government cuts passes parliament in London on its way to Hyde Park. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images This list of 42 benefit changes, compiled by the the charity Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), gives a clear sense of the vast scale and complexity of the Coalition's welfare reform programme, which is aimed at saving £18bn a year from the social security budget by 2015. The government's reform of welfare started in 2010. But the six come into effect on or after 1 April include some of the biggest and most high profile cuts, such as the Bedroom Tax, the household welfare cap, and the abolition of council tax benefit.
These new reforms will take £2.3bn a year out of the pockets of some of Britain's poorest households in 2013-14 alone. According to CPAG: The £2.3 billion figure represents how much is cut from support for how income households compared to last year (2012/13). Alison Garnham, Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said: Data summary NEW!
If Britain is 'broke', it has been for most of the last 300 years | Tom Clark and Howard Reed. Before 2008, an avowedly modernising Conservative party committed to match Labour's public spending totals. However, two weeks after Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, George Osborne took to the rostrum at his party's conference and reverted to Tory type, sternly announcing that "borrowing is out of control", and – recalling an establishment phrase from the Depression – promising to "put sound money first". There is something ironic in this ancient echo, for – as we will show – the Osbornian claim that Britain is broke is dependent on eschewing the long view. By the time the coalition was created, the early stirrings of a debt crisis in southern Europe lent superficial credibility to fears that Britain was teetering on bankruptcy.
And so the cutting began, with the squeeze disproportionately concentrated on capital outlays, such as building projects. The defining narrative remains that There Is No Alternative, because Britain is "broke". Cameron rebuked by UK Statistics Authority over debt lies. Last week I reported that Labour's Rachel Reeves had issued a complaint to the UK Statistics Authority after David Cameron falsely stated in a Conservative Party political broadcast that the coalition "was paying down Britain’s debts". Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the stats authority, has now replied to Reeves, confirming that there was no basis for Cameron's claim.
He rightly points out that the national debt has risen from £811.3bn, or 55.3 per cent of GDP, to £1,111.4bn, or 70.7 per cent of GDP, since the coalition entered office. This is hardly surprising. For debt to fall, the government would have to run a budget surplus, something unthinkable at a time of economic stagnation. But that hardly excuses Cameron's myth-making. The PM doesn't need to be told the difference between the deficit and the debt (although Dilnot helpfully reminds him anyway), he just chooses to use the latter as a synoym for the former because it's a more familiar concept to voters.
Letter to Rachel Reeves by. A roll call of corporate rogues who are milking the country | Seumas Milne. 'Only the little people pay taxes," the late American corporate tax evader Leona Helmsley famously declared. That's certainly the spirit of David Cameron and George Osborne's Britain. Five years into the crisis, the British economy has just edged out of its third downturn, but construction is still reeling from government cuts and most people's living standards are falling. Those at the sharp end are being hit hardest: from cuts to disability and housing benefits, tax credits and the educational maintenance allowance and now increases in council tax while NHS waiting lists are lengthening, food banks are mushrooming across the country and charities report sharp increases in the number of children going hungry.
All this to pay for the collapse in corporate investment and tax revenues triggered by the greatest crash since the 30s. At the other end of the spectrum though, things are going swimmingly. Not that many of them pay anything like that, even now. Top Bank of England director admits Occupy movement had a point - UK Politics - UK. In a glowing appraisal of the movement’s achievements, Andrew Haldane, executive director of financial stability, said Occupy protesters had been “both loud and persuasive”, and had attracted public support because “they are right”. “Some have suggested … that Occupy’s voice has been loud but vague, long on problems, short on solutions. Others have argued that the fault-lines in the global financial system, which chasmed during the crisis, are essentially unaltered, that reform has failed,” Mr Haldane said in a speech tonight. “I wish to argue that both are wrong – that Occupy’s voice has been both loud and persuasive and that policymakers have listened and are acting in ways which will close those fault-lines.
In fact, I want to argue that we are in the early stages of a reformation of finance, a reformation which Occupy has helped stir.” Mr Haldane ended with a direct appeal to activists to continue putting pressure on governments and regulators. IMF's epic plan to conjure away debt and dethrone bankers. Modern Work is Mostly a Lie. Modern work is mostly a lie. Especially in the so-called knowledge, information, or entertainment sectors, work has all too often become little more than an arbitrary hierarchy of stupidity fees, ignorance fines, influence peddling, and pathetic popularity plays. It's increasingly an unjustifiable waste of time to set up such pointless and counterproductive relationships in the first place.
It's no wonder that increasingly, many of the most intelligent, creative, and educated simply opt out. Forget value judgments about whether this is Good, Bad, Indifferent, a vast Right-wing or Left-wing conspiracy; the fact that more and more modern work is mostly a lie -- tens of millions of make-work duck-n-shuffle experts at looking busy -- is simply a primary symptom of the overwhelming success of 18th and 19th century industrial era capitalism and the attendant cultural anomie typical of the evolution toward postscarcity. Well, yeah, sort of. Modern work is mostly a lie. Still need convincing? Exceptional upward mobility in the US is a myth, international studies show. The rhetoric is relentless: America is a place of unparalleled opportunity, where hard work and determination can propel a child out of humble beginnings into the White House, or at least a mansion on a hill. But the reality is very different, according to a University of Michigan researcher who is studying inequality across generations around the world.
"Especially in the United States, people underestimate the extent to which your destiny is linked to your background," says Fabian Pfeffer, a sociologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). Pfeffer is the organizer of an international conference on inequality across multiple generations being held September 13 and 14 in Ann Arbor. "Research shows that it's really a myth that the U.S. is a land of exceptional social mobility. " Pfeffer's own research illustrates this point based on data on two generations of families in the U.S. and a comparison of his findings to similar data from Germany and Sweden. The Yearly Cost of Religious Tax Exemptions: $71,000,000,000.
Google pays just £6m UK tax on profits of £3.95bn. Who’s Really Getting Rich From the Benefits System? Email Share Despite claims that welfare spending is ‘out of control’, the Government is handing out billions of pounds to a private sector actively involved in demolishing the welfare state. One example: Atos, the global IT company, currently receives around £100m a year to carry out the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. This crude computer-based assessment is used to determine eligibility for sickness benefits. The system has proved to be a brutal and expensive farce, with hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people being denied benefits and forced into the Job Seeker’s Allowance regime, to face workfare and benefit sanctions. People with life-threatening and even terminal conditions have been found ‘fit for work’ by the company based on a test which ignores the opinions of general practitioners in favour of a crude “tick box” approach.
It’s not just Atos raking in staggering sums under the cover of welfare reform. HMRC tells school children: Tell your teacher if a neighbour is evading tax. One module, headlined “tax responsibilities of a good citizen”, aims to help teenagers “understand the obligations if being a good citizen and discuss what should happen to hose who are not prepared to work under such obligations”. One lesson plan – targeted at 14 to 16 year olds – requires students to “discuss whether it is good to pay the tax we do, considering the benefits we receive. If it is good, then why do people try not to pay?” It continues: “Show class the remaining factfile slides on tax evasion. What do students think of those who refuse to pay tax or try and defraud the benefits system? “Can they think of any example they may have heard of in their local area?” A further “plenary session” asks: “What do students now think about paying taxes? “What do students think about people who try to avoid paying taxes?
The modules were criticised by thinktank Civitas. "We certainly don't use this to collect information on tax evaders from children. Public fury over Treasury's tax morality lecture. Mr Gauke took to the moral high ground on Monday with his comments about the UK's ordinary tax dodgers; the little guy whose tax avoidance "deprives" the public purse of £2bn a year. Mr Gauke told the Telegraph newspaper that getting a discount by paying in cash for paying for a plumber was "morally wrong. It is illegal for the plumber but it is pretty implicit in those circumstances that there is a reason why there is a discount for cash. " His emotive language has certainly hit a nerve, enraging tradesmen and triggering an avalanche of derisive comments. At one point, Mr Gauke even found himself perhaps the first UK treasury minister in history to be "trending" on Twitter - and for all of the wrong reasons.
"I wonder how many MPs are still getting 'Brown Envelopes"" tweeted Jim Paterson after Channel 4 News asked online readers whether cash- for-service was morally wrong. @Channel4News I wonder how many MPs are still getting "Brown Envelops" — jim paterson (@gjpaterson) July 24, 2012. House passes Ron Paul's 'Audit the Fed’ bill. Libor: They all knew – and no one acted - Business News - Business. Click HERE to view 'The missed warnings how us authorities demanded changes... and were ignored' graphic A cache of documents released yesterday by the New York Federal Reserve showed that US officials had evidence from April 2008 that Barclays was knowingly posting false reports about the rate at which it could borrow in order to assuage market concerns about its solvency.
An unnamed Barclays employee told a New York Fed analyst, Fabiola Ravazzolo, on 11 April 2008: "So we know that we're not posting, um, an honest Libor. " He said Barclays started under-reporting Libor because graphs showing the relatively high rates at which the bank had to borrow attracted "unwanted attention" and the "share price went down". The verbatim note of the call released by the Fed represents the starkest evidence yet that Libor-fiddling was discussed in high regulatory circles years before Barclays' recent £290m fine. Last month Barclays was fined £290m for rigging Libor between 2005 and 2008. FR: Mm hmm. This cruel welfare system is steadily crushing lives – where is the anger? | John Harris. If you want a sobering flavour of where Britain is heading, set aside banking, the Leveson inquiry, our relationship with Europe and whatever else – and consider a Guardian story by Patrick Butler that appeared last week.
It was about food banks, the charitable set-ups that supply emergency parcels to people who have fallen between society's cracks. FareShare, a charity that sits at the heart of all this, says it is experiencing "ridiculous growth" in demand, and expects that trend to continue for at least five years; over the last 12 months, it claims to have sent out 8.6m meals. Spend any time around a food bank – and I have, in Inverness and Liverpool – and it quickly becomes clear that their core constituency is based around two groups of people: refugees who have either recently arrived in the UK or opted to go underground; and people who have suddenly had their benefits stopped. In the context of the firms' returns, all this leaves an impossibly nasty taste.
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress. The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy.
And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. ‘Change Their Votes’ The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. 9 Trillion Dollars Missing from Federal Reserve. Return to capitalism 'red in tooth and claw' spells economic madness | Robert Skidelsky | Business. As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the global recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (pdf).
Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called "technological unemployment" – that is, "unemployment due to the discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour".
Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. But its emergence, he thought, was a cause for hope, rather than despair. At the same time, "technological unemployment" has risen. Basic income — The only real solution to ‘unemployment’ The Poverty Maps of England. High Pay Commision Report. Global Rich List. Osborne allows tax avoiders to get away with murder – while you pick up the tab. HMRC cock up takes money off pensioners (while the Chief lets Goldman Sachs off £10m)
Hester’s £3.3m wages not enough, say RBS investors - Top stories. Met Police spent £35,000 on 115,000 calls to the speaking clock. Global Collapse Explained. Society Pending. TED Talks refuses to publish income inequality speech. Occupy Wall Street Our One Demand. David Icke - Essential Knowledge For A Wall Street Protestor.
Education & Lectures. Solutions. Housing benefit cuts will put 800,000 homes out of reach, according to study | Society. 500,000 to lose disability benefit. A third of parents of disabled children took out loans to buy basics last year | Society. We can't grow ourselves out of debt, no matter what the Federal Reserve does | Charles Eisenstein. Iceland, a country that wants to punish the bankers responsible for the crisis. Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness in Best Recovery Story. More Icelandic bankers arrested. Why Do Banks Make So Much Money? 97% Owned: New Documentary. How Fractional Reserve Banking Works. Money scam, debt,banks. Tax avoidance schemes unjustified even if legal, admits leading business lobby | Business. Tony Blair and the £8million tax 'mystery'
RBS - Inside The Bank That Ran Out Of Money. Apologies Of An Economic Hitman | Full Documentary (Greek Subs) Inside Job, Narrated by Matt Damon (Full Length HD) The Crisis of Credit Visualized - HD. David Stockman on Crony Capitalism. The Economic Hitmen – How It Is Done!
Eurozone. The World Economy. Storm alert for world economies. European Unemployment Rate Rises to Highest in Almost 15 Years. National Debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush - Political Hotsheet. Rothschilds Want Iran’s Banks. 47 Signs That China Is Absolutely Destroying America. Half of Britons think euro will fail by summer. Greece euro exit to hit Spain and Italy hardest – experts. European Central Bank stops its loans to Greece. Greeks withdraw $894 million in a day: Is this beginning of a run on banks? St of Greek exit from euro put at $1tn | Business. Goldman Sachs pays £4.1m tax on £1.9bn profit - Tax - Money. What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe - Business Analysis & Features - Business. Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs. JP Morgan's $2bn loss was an 'accident waiting to happen’
JPMorgan Chase Has Lost $20 Billion On Its Bad Trade, Taking Into Account Share Price. JP Morgan traders’ losses double to £4.4bn - London. Why do we take economists so seriously? | Guardian UK. The missing billions | UK Uncut. Moneytruth.org.