Tag Archives: crisis

What really caused the inflation crisis? Here’s Gary to explain why rich people have your money

The real cause of inflation: the super-rich sucked up government cash that was given out to keep working- and middle-class people alive during the Covid crisis – by being the providers of the services and supplies everybody else needed. But that was a crisis and it should be time to normalise the situation. Why won’t politicians do it?

According to Gary Stevenson, governments like those in the UK and US caused the post-Covid inflation crisis by giving away thousands of pounds to keep us all going when the economy was locked down.

The problem was that those of us who normally work for a living had to then use that money to pay our bills (that’s not including This Writer; I just carried on writing Vox Political all the way through and lived on the money I earned from it, plus savings – those were happier days) while the rich, who issue the bills that we have to pay, just sucked up all the cash.

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They then started using that cash to buy what they could – not luxury items, because they were forbidden from doing it due to the shutdown of the economy, but so-called economic assets like houses. This stopped the rest of us from being able to buy them by keeping prices high – as Gary has discussed in previous clips.

Notice: he doesn’t say there was anything wrong with governments spending the money in the way they did; people needed cash to survive and it was inevitable that providing it to them from the Treasury, rather than the economy, would increase the national debt and massively increase wealth inequality between the poor who spent the cash and the rich who received it.

But because the circumstances were extraordinary, and the result was an unbalanced economy (increased inequality), the government should then have taken action to re-balance the economy by using the levers available to it to re-distribute the wealth.

It should have taxed the money back off the rich. Logically, the government could have got away with calling it a windfall tax because that’s what it would have been.

That hasn’t happened.

And neither of the ‘Big Two’ political parties – Labour and the Conservatives – are even considering such a rebalancing of the economy. Instead, they are both planning to bake it into our lives for a long time to come.

So we can say that Labour and the Tories both intend to increase wealth for the richest and poverty and debt for everybody else – and that includes those of you who are middle-class, sitting there smugly thinking you’ll be all right (you won’t).

There’s only one answer, but This Writer doubts many people will take it up.

You have to think for yourself.

That’s right; you have to get details of the political plans of every candidate standing in your constituency in the general election and you have to work out which of them – if any – intend to re-balance the economy to prevent us all falling into this debt trap.

How do you fancy that?

And politicians? Here’s a challenge for you:

Are you going to produce manifesto commitments to tax the money back off the super-rich – who don’t need it, remember – and re-balance the economy or are you too scared of them to dare upsetting them?


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2023: year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis

Heat death: This Site reported in 2020 that the far north had experienced its hottest temperatures ever, with fires breaking out across the world.

As far as This Writer is concerned, the case for climate change was proved when I woke up on Christmas morning and discovered the temperature was 10C.

That’s more like spring, or early autumn, than the depths of winter!

Now we see scientists saying last year – 2023 – was the time when human beings proved we can’t tackle the climate crisis responsibly.

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According to them, as quoted in The Guardian:

“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

That should be enough to prove that bribable politicians need to be taken away from the issue.

After what was probably the hottest July in 120,000 years, [former NASA scientist James] Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years.

“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.

Scientists are still processing data from this blistering year. The latest to state it will be a record was the Japanese meteorological agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53C above the global average between 1991 and 2020.

This was far above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures were 0.35C above that average. Over the longer term, the world is about 1.2C hotter than in preindustrial times.

Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly prove to have been 1.5C higher than preindustrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is probably only a matter of time before the world overshoots the most ambitious of the Paris agreement targets.

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.

Source: World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say | Climate crisis | The Guardian


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Tories can’t prove £259 BILLION of public procurement was spent ‘wisely’

This is your money – squandered mostly on Covid-related contracts, from the look of it.

Here’s some detail:

The findings follow heavy criticism of government procurement particularly during the Covid pandemic, including the use of a VIP lane for potential suppliers of personal protective equipment who had links to politicians or government officials. A court ruled last year that the priority lane set up to collate PPE bids was unlawful because it failed to comply with public contract regulations.

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About those Covid contracts…


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Do voters really want Labour – or not?

Keir Starmer: his promises constantly turn out to be lies but people seem determined to vote for his party, even though its only confirmed policies are already being inflicted on us by the Tories.

The people of the UK seem to be in two minds about the party that still claims to lead the Labour movement, despite being led by Keir Starmer, a man who has betrayed most of the promises he has made to party members and is soon likely to turn his back on the rest.

A poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies suggests that almost two-thirds of people do not trust Starmer’s party to handle the cost-of-living crisis (and nobody can blame them, when he offers us absolutely no policies with which to do so):

But polling for Channel 4 News shows Labour would have a landslide victory with around 460 seats if a general election took place now:

Why are people saying they’ll vote for Starmer’s party, even though they don’t trust him to do anything to help them?

One possibility presents itself. But wouldn’t it be depressing if Starmer’s cynical belief that voters have nowhere else to go apart from his shabby STP (Substitute Tory Party) was proved correct?

Then again, polls carried out when election-time rules on neutral reporting aren’t being enforced have been known to reverse themselves dramatically when those rules come into play.

And Starmer has some serious opposition on what he still claims is his own side:

Damo is right: Starmer seems to be selling policy to the highest bidder while the unions and party members dither over whether to abandon him.

Is it because voters (and the unions) see no alternatives?

There are alternatives, of course – but it seems too many people are buying into that hoary old Liberal Democrat propaganda that voting for anybody other than the party that came second last time will let the Tories back in.

The message from this site is simple:

DO YOUR RESEARCH!

Find out who, in your constituency, is putting forward policies that you actually need and support them.

Any policy at all would be better than what Keir Starmer is offering.

Are you planning to vote Labour at the next general election? If so – why?


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Greedflation: companies are fuelling inflation by overcharging us to build profit

French protesters have stormed the Paris stock exchange: will greedflation prompt the British to do worse?

Whenever the Conservatives tell us wage increases are driving inflation, be aware that they are lying.

Inflation isn’t being driven by wage demands but by greedy companies that are using the cost-of-living crisis to drive up prices and boost their profits.

Take a look at the degree by which food prices have risen:

Claudia Webbe puts the situation – and the reason for it – in a nutshell:

Now read this:

That is what the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank seem to have discovered, according to The Guardian:

The IMF and the ECB wouldn’t put it in these terms, of course, but both support the idea that companies are gouging their customers when they can. The non-technical term for what is going on is greedflation.

Companies [are] doing rather better out of the cost of living crisis than workers… The flipside of steeply rising prices but only modestly higher wages [is] that profit margins [have] “surged”.

Unite, one of the UK’s biggest unions, published a report in March that blamed systematic profiteering across the economy for fuelling the cost of living crisis. Energy companies, supermarkets, shipping companies, car dealers and food manufacturers had all cashed in on drought, war, and strong demand after the pandemic to “push prices and profits through the roof”.

The eurozone’s central bank looked at the contribution of profits to inflation over nearly a quarter of century, and found that between 1999 and 2022, profits were responsible for one-third of the inflation rate on average. In 2022 alone, profits contributed to two-thirds of the rise.

But whereas the ECB – from its president, Christine Lagarde, downwards – is fully exercised by the threat posed by greedflation, policymakers in the UK seem far more relaxed. There have been plenty of calls for wage restraint, most notably from Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, but far fewer for price restraint… Price controls, of the sort used in the 1970s, are seen as to be avoided at all costs.

Instead, inflation is being controlled by increasing interest rates – which sucks demand from the economy and reduces pressure for wage rises by incurring job losses (meaning that, once again, too many jobseekers end up competing for too few jobs and the bosses can pay whatever they want).

But workers who have taken pay cut after pay cut for more than a decade are close to breaking point and something has to give way soon.

Will we see scenes like what has happened in France over pensions, with protesters storming bastions of capitalism like the stock exchange and trashing it? Will we see worse?

It’s a good question. The British have very long tempers and have put up with a lot – so much, in fact, that nobody knows what they might do if those tempers snap.

It seems likely that, if they do not moderate their own rhetoric and curb corporate greedflation soon, the Tories might find out.


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Rishi Sunak lost more cash to fraud than Liz Truss wasted. Why’s HE a safe pair of hands?

The National Audit Office has published a report showing that, in the first year of the Covid-19 crisis, Rishi Sunak allowed up to £58.8 billion of public money to be given away to fraudsters.

And now he’s making absolutely no effort to get it back.

It’s more money than Liz Truss spaffed away when she trashed the economy last year.

And I have to wonder whether its the reason Tories always leave fraud off their figures when they talk about crime levels since 2010.

The big issue is the fact that the Tory government will claw back even the tiniest scrap of cash from the poorest people in society, like people on benefits who make mistakes in their claims because they don’t understand the system (see this article)…

… but they never try to claw back enormous wodges of it that have gone out to rich people. Is it because the beneficiaries are their own toff buddies?

The level of corruption that is implied here is monumental.

Think it through, and you may well come to the conclusion that everybody in a position of power is on the take, and they all fear taking action to shut down anybody else’s scam because it may lead to them being accused, starting a cascade that could topple the Establishment like a rotting house of cards collapsing into dust.

… Oh, you don’t think so?

Then when may we expect the first recovery, or prosecution?


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Families bereaved in Covid-19 crisis are being put off the inquiry into it by Tory-linked PR firm

Conflict of interest: why would companies that helped run the government’s publicity campaign about Covid-19 ever want to contact people who lost loved ones because of failures in that campaign?

People who lost loved ones while the Covid-19 pandemic raged through the UK are being put off contributing to the inquiry into what happened – because a PR firm that was hired to manage the government’s response to the crisis has been hired to help run it.

23Red, which worked on government messaging including hand hygiene advice and the “Stay at home” slogan, has been sub-contracted by the Tories’ favourite advertising firm, M&C Saatchi, to run part of the Covid inquiry’s “listening exercise”.

Apparently its role will be to “help the inquiry reach those most affected by the pandemic, so that they can share their experiences”.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group has pointed out the flaw in that argument: because 23Red worked for the government in its efforts to control Covid-19, the group says, it will either screen out people with the most harmful stories to tell, or those who were most affected will be put off participating.

In the Guardian report (link above), group spokesperson Susie Flintham is quoted as saying:

The fact is ‘many of those worst affected’ will question 23red’s motivations and integrity, and won’t feel comfortable engaging with a process they’re involved in.

“The fact that these PR companies have rebranded the listening exercise ‘every story matters’, suggests they don’t have a clue on how to reach those ‘most affected’.”

“Why is the inquiry paying a hefty sum of taxpayers money, during a cost of living crisis, to a company whose involvement will put people off participating in it? It feels self defeating and like a clear waste of resources.

“If the inquiry is serious about listening to those worst affected by the pandemic then it must give them a meaningful voice, which at the very least means allowing them to speak at each day of the hearings.”

The group’s concerns were raised at the inquiry by their counsel, Pete Weatherby KC, after reporting on the matter by the website Open Democracy:

The correct response to these concerns is to remove the companies from any involvement in the inquiry.

That has not happened.

Instead, the team carrying out the inquiry has said that no conflict of interest will arise because “M&C Saatchi and 23red do not have a decision making role with the inquiry, and they have no direct access to the inquiry’s legal team or the wider work of the inquiry.

“Additionally, M&C Saatchi and 23red will not be carrying out any of the listening or have any access to the experiences shared with the inquiry’s listening exercise. Their role is only to help the inquiry reach those most affected by the pandemic, so that they can share their experiences.”

I’m not convinced. You should not be convinced either.

In an inquiry that exists to collect the strongest evidence of the worst effects of the government’s response (or lack of it) to the Covid-19 pandemic, efforts to seek out the most important stories are paramount.

Yet the inquiry team has hired companies that were intimately linked with the government’s public relations campaign during that time – Boris Johnson’s efforts to play down the seriousness of the situation and to pretend that Tory policies were succeeding when they weren’t.

More than 200,000 people have died of Covid-19 – and most of those deaths could have been avoided if Johnson, Matt Hancock and their cronies had acted more quickly and in a more responsible way (rather than diverting vast amounts of money to hastily-set-up companies run by their friends, for equipment that did not work, for example).

And the number of deaths is still increasing, as I understand it.

It is not in the interests of these companies to seek out the most damning stories of government failures when they were responsible for even part of the government’s publicity campaigning.

I fear the Covid-19 inquiry is just another Tory sham.


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Where is our money that the government spent – and do you know why it matters?

Spaffer: Boris Johnson splurged hundreds of billions of pounds during the Covid crisis and his successors have continued the trend. It all went to people who were already rich and has caused huge hardship to the poor, and nobody in government wants to re-balance the situation. Why?

It’s time to follow up on Gary Stevenson, the former City trader who became an economist and anti-inequality campaigner.

Last time, I shared Gary’s contributions to the BBC’s Politics Live via a YouTube clip that became extremely popular, with more than 140,000 views as I type this. Rest assured, there will be more content on YouTube in the future!

Now, Gary himself has shared what he himself took from his experience on the show, with which I’d like to couple his more recent clip, What is money? Together, I think they may explain why it’s so important that we find out who has the £700 billion that Boris Johnson’s government has splurged, and find a way to get them to spend it back into the economy or tax it off of them.

Here’s the first clip:

So: an enormous amount of money has been transferred from the government to the richest people in the UK, leading to a huge increase in government debt which triggers austerity, and a big increase in cash accumulation by the richest, leading to inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. The reasons for that are below.

Nobody in government seems to know where the money has gone – £14,000 for every adult in the UK. I don’t have 14 grand. Do you? Who’s got it, then? And what are they doing with it? They don’t want to say it has gone to the richest people in the country.

And they definitely don’t want to admit that their decision to hand over that money has forced you into extreme poverty!

That money could be put to good use, if the people who have it spend it back into the economy, one way or another. What did we get for it? Was it worth the cost? If not, something needs to be done.

Here’s the other clip:

Money is created by central banks and loaned out to others – so for every penny anybody has, there is a penny of debt somewhere; the total amount of money, minus the total amount of debt, always equals zero.

So if one group of people – like a government – goes heavily into debt, somebody else must be accumulating money or credit.

(The government then has to pay interest on the debt, and in a closed system, that means taxing more out of the economy than it put in; this is a way of regulating the money supply, of course. Commercial banks that borrow from the central bank would charge higher interest than it does when they make loans, in order to make their profit – meaning they rely on the system putting you into debt.)

We know that the government spent – splurged – £700 billion during and after Covid – £14,000 per UK adult. But every UK adult hasn’t had £14,000 from the government; somebody else had it.

People who are in debt – including governments – need to get money back from people who are in credit, otherwise they can’t balance their books. Until they can manage such a feat, that debt creates austerity – it harms public sector pay and public services don’t get the investment they need.

The problem is that only a small number of people are in credit, while the government – representing all of us – and a lot of others are in debt. There’s an imbalance between the large number of people owing money and the small number who have it, and (by the way) can lend it, and can therefore demand interest from the people to whom they lend it, in the same way a bank can.

So now, not only do we have a huge amount of government debt to pay off, but we may have private debt as well, because the cost of living has risen.

And why has the cost of living risen?

As Gary said, there has been a massive increase in asset prices: both gold and shares have hit (by now, I think) an all-time high, and that’s because rich people have been buying them up, with a view to profiting on them – because they have so much money, it won’t hurt them to invest much of it.

This creates scarcity, and that pushes up prices, meaning that ordinary people cannot afford to buy as much as they could before. The amount of resources available within the economy is the same, more or less, but fewer people can take advantage of it because the redistribution of money means they can’t afford it.

We have seen a resource run low – gas – and that has simply piled extra pressure on the poor.

We have a government that is not interested in resolving its £700 billion debt. Instead, it is planning to spend even more. So prices will continue to rise and living standards – for the majority – will continue to fall.

And that is why the current Conservative government has presided over the largest increase in inequality in UK history.

It occurs to This Writer that pushing huge debt onto the vast majority of the population may have been government policy all along.

Expect (probably) a video clip in the near future, explaining why.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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‘Every action becomes a TRANSaction’: the cost of living crisis is putting a price tag on everything

High energy costs have forced 6.7 million homes into fuel poverty – expected to rise to 8.4 million homes in April.

It means increasing numbers of households are checking their smart meters before doing anything that might cost money.

Campaigners are calling for the government to introduce a special “social energy tariff” to make it easier to afford heating:

And there has been a knock-on effect: shop sales over the Christmas period are down – by around 50 per cent in some cases:

It’s only to be expected.

If you starve working people of cash, as the government has by cutting real-terms wages, and then charge them a fortune for the basic necessities of life, then they won’t have any spare readies for non-essential items.

Shops are going to go out of business, worsening the current recession, and overbalancing the economy into collapse.

But the Tory government doesn’t seem to care.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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The Tories are causing the NHS crisis because lower wages make it attractive to privatisers

One of the most consistently-reliable critics of Tory government health policy appeared on a social media politics programme – and explained the policy behind the current NHS crisis and staff strikes that Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay don’t want you to know.

Dr Bob Gill explained on the Not The Andrew Marr Show that the NHS has too few staff because people don’t want to work for the increasingly-lower wages the Tories are offering – and the Tories are cutting wages because a lower wage bill will make the health service much more attractive to private health firms when the Tories finally offer its constituent parts up for sale.

Apart from that, the main takeouts from this interview are firstly that a public-private partnership – in health or any other public service area – never works. Private firms will simply cherry-pick the most lucrative and least risky elements of the service to provide themselves, but they will be motivated by profit, meaning they’ll cut corners in service provision and mess up the procedures they carry out – and the public purse will have to pay to put matters right.

Secondly, Labour are as little to be trusted as the Tories, now that the party is rotting under the leadership of Keir Starmer. He’s as New Labour as they come, and under Tony Blair, that organisation went through with the Private Finance Initiative for the provision of hospitals, that led to a huge number of NHS beds being closed – and now the NHS is in crisis because there aren’t enough beds for the number of patients.

Here’s the clip:

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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Health Warning: Government! is now available
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HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook