Time for a revolution? (Updated November2011)

Update-November 1st 2011.

Tell them to fuck off! Luckily they have done this before any of that $1.4Trillion changes hands.

Possible agreement to let Greece default on 50% of its debt! Why? This is not an African country,after Greece, Italy, Portugal....Who stumps up the money? The banks, that were held up by our governments. For god's sake let Greece fall. Once again we should remind ourselves that in Athens it is estimated that only 10% of income tax is collected.
$1Trillion(!!) bailout plan announced from European nations. This is total madness. 
Default yes, but with the bankruptcy that goes with it, containing the contagion. To join both the EU and the Euro, member countries agreed to maintain a manageable level of debt proportional to GDP, if this was not kept to expulsion was expected .
 R,Jones
The way I see it, the money that was used for these bailouts doesn't exist (although the countries associated with those banks will foot the bill - the banks make it up out of thin air - and are just figures, and make profit. The banks get to, once again, make massive transfers of wealth while breaking yet another country. It is the fiat currency system that is causing many of the problems, and their many derivatives. Go back to a finite base lending system, based on actual reserves, like gold. And emergence of a global currency is even worse if it is proposed.
 Christopher Mercer
I agree Rob,but whereas Western Europeans have been paying their taxes for years at the same time as their pensions have decreased and working age increased,their kids now having to pay extortionate fees for education that has not been the case for Greece. People in the UK saved all year round and worked long hours for 2 weeks in the sun.The amount spent by those tourists should have made Greece rich. Having lived and worked in Greece,I was always amazed how easy life was there,idyllic even. Get up late,drink coffee for a few hours,have a kip and then have an all night dinner with family and friends. It is time to pay the piper.Have less money,be less focused on the mighty dollar,but the state needs to tighten up its practices.Greece is a basket case and should be set free to enjoy a simple life in the sun.
THIS IS THE ANSWER-and not only about the Greeks. Business and especially large corporations are directly helped by National Governments holding up debt,and the effects of the banking crisis.Why should taxpayers continue to pay.Get your fucking cheque books out-Apple,Microsoft,Mcdonalds......
Absolute bastards. Unemployment is creeping up and up in the UK, mainly due to the twat coalition's policies of punishing the poor for the mistakes of the rich. The banks are directly responsible for putting so many on the dole, now they punish them. BRING DOWN THE WALLS!
Chancellor must change strategy and enact emergency measures to avoid a double-dip recession, experts say
Trading in nothing!

Chris Mercer 6.10.10
How to really fix the economy.
The more I think about this, the angrier I get. One hundred years ago, when the gap between the rich and the poor was also as wide as it is today there was revolution. But as George Orwell predicted, our society has become sanitised, our voices drowned out by the state. Big Brother is watching us, and we know it, and we accept it. We don't have the choice of rising up against the system anymore. The proletariat have been silenced.
We have a situation where the whole of society will have to pay dearly for the mistakes of just a few. This week in the UK, the government gave the go ahead for universities to begin charging students £10,000 for tuition. As it stands a degree will no more ensure a successful career than an O level would 30 years ago. This means students from poorer families will have to be saddled with student debt well into their 30s. Why are they paying when the generations before them benefitted so much from universal education, free and topped up by government help?
Government services are being scaled back at an unprecedented level, but yet taxes continue to rise. Hospitals, schools, police , emergency services, the list goes on, are all facing dramatic reductions in their ability to function. Today the taxation system is everywhere, it is a part of everything we do. V.A.T increases the cost of necessities, car tax, road tax, inheritance tax, fuel duty, alcohol duty, property tax/stamp duty, Council rates/tax, and of course income tax. These taxes are paid by everybody. In the UK V.A.T was not supposed to be levied upon children's goods, but ask any parent about the cost of flights,books and clothes-today there is no difference between adults and children. Taxation systems throughout the world are now efficient and the long arm of the taxman is very difficult to avoid. This means that governments' revenues are enormous. The majority of this windfall is paid for by normal people, 'upper middle class, middle class, working class, and even the great unwashed, those at the bottom of the tree.
Yet the return that normal people get back from that system is dwindling. The shortfall is the crux. The shortfall means that people have less to spend on leisure, consumer goods, luxuries. People only have enough to survive, to sustain themselves, to pay the myriad of government and utility charges they are burdened with. As this group represent a very large majority of the population, the knock-on effect is drastic. No purchasing power for goods and services, no sales, no jobs, less tax revenue, more unemployed to share that revenue. An ever decreasing circle, and if we listen to the idiots charged with getting us out of this, a very bleak future indeed.
Some things do have to change. We are living longer and stronger, we must work longer too. We cannot continue to let people rot away in the welfare system, deserving or not. There are ways to deal with long term unemployed, but non more successful as making sure they have jobs to go to. How can we not have enough manpower to help the elderly, to sweep the streets, to clean the beaches, to paint the fences, to teach our children, and to build our homes? We have to find a way, to get everything done that needs to be done with the people that we have. That means of course paying a decent wage. We can't escape big government, we just have to pay for it.
Back to the beginning though, and back to the reason for my anger. There are many reasons for the collapse of the world's economy, from the greed of banks that didn't care about the credit that they gave, that created a false sense of security based completely in the 'never-never'. The arrogance and fraud of the markets and financial institutions take your breath away. Surely we cannot let them continue to produce nothing, and trade only in imaginary goods. To think that these people spend their days pressing buttons on keyboards, gambling with the wealth of nations, for no apparent reason is staggering to the extreme-how stupid are we to let this go on?
Thatcher's idea that everyone should own their own home was seriously misguided, and still is. In the frenzied race that followed, the prices of those homes rose to way beyond the means of normal people. A run of the mill 2 bedroom house in the UK(outside London) now costs 20-30 year's salary!! I mean, really! That is unsustainable. It was great while it lasted for those able to buy and sell during those years, but now it's time to come back to earth.
Service is prompt in Birkenhead's only Starbucks.

The rich have become much, much richer and the poor much poorer, and that is a reality. Those least affected by all of this are the super rich and the rich. They are still paying the same amount of taxes in proportion to their worth as they were before all of this. In fact most of them have become richer. We find that more of the world's wealth is being controlled by a smaller group of people. In the case of the UK, we can also see that large corporations are becoming ever bigger monopolies and duopolies. These companies are able to dictate prices both to consumers and to those who supply them. There are areas of the UK that now remind me of those tumbleweed cowboy towns after the gold rush had moved on. In Hong Kong too, there is a definite danger that too few companies are beginning to strangle the very market that created them. Where is the dynamism, creativity and competition?
It is time to redistribute the wealth again. We don't need communism to do this, again as Orwell pointed out, it doesn't work. We don't even need to give up on capitalism, it's not perfect but it's all we have.
The Americans are terrified of the word socialism, and to be fair it does probably give the wrong idea. Yet in the US right now we have the rise of 'The Tea Party' , which were able to galvanise themselves into existence just because of the fear that arose from Obama's Healthcare reform. The terms Socialism and Communism were bandied around so much, even in relation to Europe that rallies of frightened right wingers soon sprang up. The US has an uphill struggle in trying to even the score out, but after a few years of middle class hardship the tide may well turn.
So, we need capitalism with some very strict controls, with a touch of socialism(not a dirty word outside the US). The controls need to be put on banks, as well as just making a profit, they have a role to play in society. We can't trust them to regulate themselves, so we will have to do it. To begin with, they are more responsible for the mess that we are in than any other group. Even if they didn't take any government money (Barclays, Hsbc), they still created the conditions for the banking collapse. I am not talking about a small levy on their revenues, but quite a hefty one. This levy must be agreed by the WTO, thereby ensuring the banks don't bugger off to avoid it. Also a simple rule that if you do any business here you must pay , no matter where your headquarters are. That should bring a nice hefty sum into government coffers to get started with the real recovery.
Next on the list are the large corporations, to begin with a large increase in business tax, with small and medium sized companies being given a reduction in tax. If the large companies don't like it-so what? Let them go. These commercial tax policies can implemented at least Europe wide, and once again if the companies want access to our markets, they will pay, one way or another.
Next is individual tax, the upper tax rate must be drastically increased, back to the levels of the 60s and 70s. The simple fact is, is that we have to rebuild. If we reduce the wealth of the wealthy, their purchasing power remains the same, they still buy the same things.That money is of much better use to the society that enabled them to gain so much wealth. As things improve this can be reduced again. In the case of the UK, a new law may need to be tabled that even if a citizen in the upper tax bracket was to leave the UK, they would still be required to pay that tax. There are not that many 'tax havens' left in the world, and certainly not many without reciprocal extradition treaties.
These measures alone are enough to balance the huge deficits of Western nations, but they are also sound measures for developing nations as well.
Of course balancing the budget is not enough, that only takes care of governments' needs. It surprises me how the leaders of the world have for some reason forgotten basic economics or are completely ignorant of basic economic principles. It was hearing Warren Buffet today and his views on taxation that gave me hope. I have had the same views on macro economics since school , and have watched the exact opposite happening for the last twenty years. That's why it was so heartening to hear those views repeated by one of the richest men in the world today, and why I felt the urge to write about it.
So back to the matter at hand. Demand also needs to be encouraged. As we have learnt, that demand should not be driven by reckless credit. We need to change society's mindset. The majority of taxation should not be borne by the majority of people. Of course, we should still have a system whereas services are paid for, and only occasionally subsidised(except for health and education which should always be free). Our aim should still be that government, local and national should pay for itself , but that is not a reality yet-only an aim. The majority need to be free from an overwhelming tax burden. Once they are free from that burden, they will have money to spend. These people are the middle classes, and the working classes. As they spend their money in the economy rather than give it to government, the economy grows. This in turn, generates jobs, and reduces the welfare cost to the government, and the cost of poverty to society. Hey presto! We once again have a functioning capitalist economy, built on work, goods and services rather than credit, speculation and the tooth fairy.
Obama understands this but he is at the helm of a very rowdy ship, and his chances of success are very slim. In the UK, we have a coalition of imbeciles who don't understand this, and can only think cuts, cuts, cuts, and oh yeah, more cuts! The money that they will get from these cuts is miniscule, and not nearly enough to address the deficit. They are also blind to the effects that these cuts will have on both the economy and to society as a whole. If they continue on their present track, disaster is nigh. The labour party are no better. All of these politicians are more interested in tabloid headlines, opinion polls and jingoism than thinking outside the box, or of having the guts to really change things.
Hong Kong is run by the corporations and by giant property developers. It, ironically has huge reserves, but won't spend them, it would rather keep the money under the bed. This when its own citizens suffer, when schools and healthcare are woeful, when the elderly sweep the streets and live in cages.

Revolution in the end is what is needed, unfortunately a peaceful one, in my opinion.

Don't get your hopes up!

Feel sorry for Hong Kong's rich?

As normal Hong Kong people continue to struggle to even find a decent roof over their heads, and as the elderly still sweep the streets, and young people work for $15 per hour Henry Cheng asks us to spare a thought for the rich! It is time that landowners and property giants are forced to give back more to society.
Housing and education costs continue to spiral beyond most people's financial circumstances.The quality of that education in government schools steadily falls below the requirements of the city's future needs. Yes, the government needs to invest more, but there is a huge amount of wealth now owned by a very few people and a handful of companies. It is time to pay the piper!

From RTHK http://bit.ly/do8LE4
Govt 'to blame for hatred of rich'
07-10-2010

The Managing Director of New World Development, Henry Cheng, says the government should bear more responsibility than the business sector for what he called a phenomenon of public "hatred towards the rich". Mr Cheng said companies had to do their best to make profits in the interest of their shareholders. The government, he said, should set out long-term policies and use its huge reserves to alleviate poverty and improve people's livelihoods.

Warren Buffett says TAX THE RICH, TAX ME!

Governments need to listen to this man. It's not rocket science, those who made the biggest gains during the boom, should now pay the biggest price.Not the Middle classes, not those with mortgages, but the very rich.That includes the biggest corporations.if everyone taxes them, they have nowhere to run.



"We're going to need 20 per cent or thereabouts of GDP to fund the kinds of things that we all believe are right to have in this country, and we've got to get it from somebody," the world's third-richest man told a gathering of high-powered women at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington. "If you're not going to get it from guys like me, why should you get it from the guy who serves lunch to them?"
Warren Buffett -

Warren Buffett said it's time to raise taxes on the 'very rich' -- and perhaps cut them for the rest of the population.
http://bit.ly/9PcD1y
Buffett, the billionaire investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), said Tuesday at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington that the nation's tax code "has gotten distorted to a huge extent," by levying higher taxes on secretaries and janitors than on CEOs and private equity whiners.

Tax rates: heading higher?
He called, as he has in the past, for policymakers to redress that iniquity by raising taxes on the rich. Buffett said taxes will have to rise in general in coming years if we want to dig our way out of a giant budget deficit.
"We are not taking in enough money at the federal government level," he said. He said tax collections (see chart, right) will have to rise back into the 18-20% range from below 15% lately.
But Buffett also added a new twist in an interview after his appearance with CNNMoney.com's Poppy Harlow: He said it's time to cut taxes on those outside the top tax brackets.