Tag Archives: profit

How money goes from the poor to the rich – Gary’s Economics

Rent, profit and interest are all the same, according to economist Gary Stevenson.

Not literally – they work in different ways – but they are all payments from poor people to rich people.

Here’s Gary to explain:

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So you have to pay money to the owners of the resources, in all three situations – you have to work for that money, in order to let these people have it for no effort. They can then use the money to buy more assets.

We know that those of us who pay mortgages are only able to do it later in life, because it takes longer to accumulate the money to even think about a down-payment. This means that, by the time we’re 40, whereas our grandparents may have been nearly finished paying off their mortgage, and our parents around halfway through, we might have just started paying – and the amount we’re paying is more, plus interest.

This feeds in to Gary’s claim that each generation is getting progressively poorer than the last.

You can read more about that here.


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If rich people can profit from huge crises, why can’t the rest of us?

House prices: they’re high, despite interest rates also being high, because rich people have been given huge amounts of money by the UK’s Tory government. They’re using it to buy assets.

Gary Stevenson’s latest video discusses the reasons for house prices staying high even though interest rates have been high also. TL:DR – It’s because rich people have lots of cash to splash around.

The question raised in This Writer’s mind is: if rich people can take advantage of the crises we’ve suffered over the last few years to get richer, how can the rest of us manipulate events to make ourselves richer too?

There has to be a way, don’t you think?

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Here’s the video:


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Mone admits profiting from PPE sale – and lying – but plays the victim. Narcissism?

Ill-gotten gains? Michelle Money posed on the deck of her husband’s £6 million yacht, ‘Lady M’ – which may have been bought with government money that was used during the Covid crisis to pay for PPE equipment – that didn’t work.

Let’s have a quick reminder of the Michelle Mone/Medpro PPE saga:

That clip was made a while ago. Ms (is she still a baroness?) Mone has since appeared in a BBC interview, in which she admitted lying to the press, and therefore the public, about her involvement with PPE Medpro and the Tory government’s ‘VIP lane’ fast-track procurement system.

Here‘s The Guardian:

Mone said she “wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes” and had not told the truth about her involvement to protect her family from press attention. When it was put to her that she had admitted lying to the press, Mone replied: “That’s not a crime.”

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Maybe not, but she is facing a criminal investigation:

The National Crime Agency is conducting an investigation into alleged criminal offences in the procurement of the contracts by the company.

The couple [Mone and husband Doug Barrowman] were facing criminal allegations of conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation and bribery. They both deny wrongdoing.

They both deny wrongdoing.

We could discuss the strange deference of the BBC in sending a camera crew to whichever foreign country Mone is using as a hiding-place, just to get her side of the story.

But isn’t it far more interesting to discuss the mentality of a person who has admitted being involved in an illegal government procurement system, admitted profiting from it (if by proxy, according to her statement), but still insists that she has done nothing wrong?

Referring to the yacht, ‘Lady M’, that was allegedly bought with £6 million of PPE Medpro money that had come from the government, here’s what Mone had to offer:

Mone said: “It’s not my yacht. It’s not my money. I don’t have that money and my kids don’t have that money, and my children and family have gone through so much pain because of the media. They have not got £29m.”

Mone was pressed on why she did not mention PPE Medpro in her register of financial interests as a member of the House of Lords. She said the Cabinet Office had advised her that she did not need to.

It’s always somebody else’s fault. “So much pain because of the media.” “The Cabinet Office had advised her that she did not need to.”

Isn’t that the behaviour of a narcissist?

According to Simply Psychology,

A narcissist cannot accept being anything less than perfect. To continue living in their fantasy, they have to deny any shortcomings and wrongdoings. They do this by projecting any undesirable traits or behaviours onto other people – known as narcissistic projection.

So any wrongdoing is the fault of the Cabinet Office, or the media, or anybody else as long as it isn’t the fault of Michelle Mone.

One might suggest that this alone is enough to undermine her defence. Wouldn’t you?


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Sewage-dumping water company pays dividend bigger than its profits. What?

Clean water: but in United Utilities’ catchment area, the money seems to be as dirty as Lake Windermere.

This should be self-explanatory.

But does the payout make any sense to anybody at all?

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The human cost of high energy bills? Nearly 5,000 have died in damp, cold homes

Nearly 5,000 more people died in 2022-23 because their homes were damp and cold. That was the winter when energy bills skyrocketed.

While the energy firms made billions of pounds in profit, Rishi Sunak’s Tory government claimed to be doing all it could to ensure that ordinary people would not freeze.

It seems whatever Sunak did, it was not enough.

Here’s the Morning Star, which had the earliest report I’ve found so far:

Almost 5,000 people in Britain died last year as a result of living in cold and damp homes, an analysis of official data revealed today.

The figures, compiled by the End Fuel Poverty Coalition… calculated that of the 21,890 excess winter deaths in 2022-23, 21.5 per cent were caused by living in cold homes.

It comes as a report card by the Warm This Winter campaign on the government’s progress against its eight key measures to tackle the energy bills crisis, including providing financial support for those most in need, has revealed that on half of these, ministers are making no progress.

The report card found that on one measure, the government has taken backwards steps that will deepen the country’s reliance on expensive fossil fuels by failing to reduce Britain’s gas exports.

We all knew that we couldn’t rely on the Tories to protect vulnerable people against rampant corporate profiteering, and this is exemplary of what happens when they are asked to try.

Tories are rabid social Darwinists anyway; they probably think the deaths of your relatives and friends are a good thing for the country. But:

Every time you hear about energy firms’ profits, remember they are built on the deaths of 5,000 people.

Source: Nearly 5,000 people in Britain died last year due to damp and cold homes, analysis finds | Morning Star


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Isn’t it time we treated the pollution of our rivers by private water firms as government policy?

Rivers of Shit: isn’t it time we admitted to ourselves that it is government policy to let privatised water company shareholders pump untreated sewage into our rivers and seas and take the money saved from not treating it – along with money that should have been used to modernise the water and sewage infrastructure – as profit, while blinding the regulators that are supposed to monitor and penalise these transgressions so that we cannot know the extent of the harm?

This Site has been quiet about the ongoing crisis of the UK’s waterways being polluted with thousands of tonnes of untreated sewage lately. The reason is simply that individual stories – snapshots – don’t give you a chance to appreciate the full horror of what is happening.

The following video clip might help, though.

In it, Professor Jamie Woodward points out that not only has the government allowed privatised water firms to dump all that toxic waste into the local ecosystem, but it has slashed the budget of the regulator that is supposed to monitor any such pollution, down to one-third of what it used to be – and some may say that this wasn’t enough in the first place:

With only limited means of monitoring pollution by water companies, the regulator has no way of knowing the level of harm being done. This could then be flung in all our faces by the government if we try to complain that we’re being pelted with you-know-what so that these firms can make a profit. It could be used as an excuse to do nothing.

In fact, the following suggests that it is currently being used as such an excuse:

But with no meaningful enforcement from the Environment Agency or the government, there is no reason for the water companies to stop polluting the UK.

It’s a lot more profitable than actually doing their job, which is to treat our sewage so that nothing harmful escapes into the environment at all.

The upshot of all this is that we get warnings like this:

Also this:

One water company – Thames Water – seemed to be facing re-nationalisation because its business plan was not only harmful to the environment but had brought it to the brink of bankruptcy…

And what happened?

That’s right – shareholders promised to invest, in order to keep the money flowing to them and the crap flowing at us.

And it seems that while we’ve been gagging on the crap they’re pumping at us, Thames Water bosses have been gagging their own employees:

Then we discovered that the firm is planning to increase its bills, to save itself from collapse. There is not even the slightest hint that any of that money will be used to purify the water it pumps into our rivers.

And what use is purified water when the pipes through which it runs are made of lead – and are therefore toxic – because the water companies haven’t replaced the infrastructure, as they were expected to?

The infrastructure is also leaking around 1.1 TRILLION litres of water out of the system every year, according to Ofwat. Then the water companies tell us we have to have hosepipe bans. They are telling us to go without the service we deserve so they can have the profit they don’t.

The following report actually states in black-and-white that this is what is happening:

Here are a few more barmy ideas – appropriately from the boss of Thames Water – along with appropriate commentary from our friend Feargal Sharkey:

Piling even more insult on top of all this injury, one of the worst-performing water companies was named company of the year at the Water Industry Awards, 2023:

Remember that you have a human right to water, meaning that if one of the privatised companies fails, the state has to pick up the bill to put it right via renationalisation.

So, far from being the salvation of this vital national utility – as it has been described recently by ministers pointing out that investment in water was a very low priority when it was privatised – the sale of water to private shareholders has destroyed our system while the people causing the damage have extracted huge fortunes from it.

And the government that should have been safeguarding the interests of customers who are forced to rely on these large monopoly businesses has deliberately blinded the watchdog organisations.

That is enemy action. Your government – and the water firms – are your enemies; they are charging you a fortune to let them poison you.


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Outrage as banks announce huge profits

The Bank of England: it raised interest rates, supposedly to combat inflation – and now the banks have made a fortune in profits and inflation hasn’t fallen significantly.

After the energy firms, the banks.

Interesting how it goes, isn’t it?

The energy firms put up their prices for no very good reason (remember: the actual cost of gas and electricity is much, much lower than the amount you’re paying for it. The corporations say they keep the price up to smooth out any sudden shocks as the price comes down but they never refund the extra amount that you pay after the final costs are known).

This causes inflation.

The Bank of England then acts to reduce inflation – by increasing interest rates.

This creates a huge profit for the banks.

This profit is also never refunded.

Inflation has remained high.

Cue outrage:

Logically the answer is a windfall tax and curbs on profiteering and executive pay.

I wonder if Rishi Sunak’s new Business Council will recommend that to him?

Who’s on it, again?

SSE, Shell – they’re energy companies; Barclays is a bank…

That’ll be a “no”, then.


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Rishi Sunak is STILL lying to you about inflation. Your wages aren’t responsible for it

Rishi Sunak: corporate whore?

After British Gas posted huge profits, made possible by price-gouging – charging you far too much for the service it provides – Rishi Sunak has appeared on TV to tell you that he’s tackling all the inflation that has been caused by your pay rises.

… Except, of course, that tackling that kind of inflation doesn’t involve any work at all because your pay rises haven’t caused any of the inflation that has been inflicted on us by boneheadedly stupid, economically-illiterate, back-of-a-cigarette-packet policies dreamed up by Sunak and his equally stupid forerunners.

Sunak’s broadcast was an attempt to distract your attention away from the real cause of inflation – the high prices charged by corporate bandits for no reason at all – and to dupe you into thinking that your pay demands are responsible.

You are not responsible for any inflation at all. Sunak and the corporations to whom he whores himself are.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain further:


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The Tory government is helping energy firms rip us off – and you’re STILL not interested in politics?

Bills, bills, bills: British Gas has made nearly £1bn in profits in the last six months because it is price-gouging its customers – charging them much more than they should be paying. Many of those customers are so stupid, they can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

The most eye-watering part of the energy firms’ announcement of eye-watering profits is the fact that so many people in the UK are so keen to say they are powerless to do anything about it.

Tell them that they’re being ripped off because of political decisions by their government and these absolute morons say that, well, they’re not interested in politics because it has nothing to do with them.

They’ve literally just been told that politics is what’s leeching away their ability to feed, clothe and house themselves and their response is that it’s nothing to do with them!

Perhaps it’s time to admit that people like the Tories and the energy firm bosses, who make the decisions to take all the cash away from us, are not the problem.

The problem is the people who prop them up – either by voting for the Tories like mindless drones or by refusing to vote for anyone who will make a difference.

That includes all the “tactical” idiots who would rather replace the Conservatives with a party that has identical policies because “we’ve got to get the Tories out” than even consider supporting anybody with a plan that will actually, you know, help.

It also includes everybody who insists that we should support Keir Starmer’s party, which has surely become the most untrustworthy organisation in the UK. It is currently promising to levy a windfall tax on energy firms’ profits, but the evidence of the recent past tells us that this will not happen if that party – which used to represent Labour – takes office again under its current leadership.

So we get this:

Here’s that increase in money terms:

Sadly, we won’t get what we need under the party that Richard Burgon represents – the Substitute Tory Party that used to be called Labour.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has the same idea – because it is the right one:

But of course he has been kicked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for having ideas that are far too sensible to ever be considered by Starmer and his Blue Labour layabouts.

The only answer that will break the deadlock is to support alternative parties and independent candidates who actually have policies that will bring wealth back to the majority of the people, rather than siphon it off into the hands of people who already have too much.

Ah, but then we run into all those idiots who think Starmer’s identikit Tory policies are an alternative, the morons who reckon tactical voting in favour of whichever party came second last time will get the Tories out next time, and the lunatics who will still believe none of this affects them while their house is being repossessed.

These are the reason the UK is in such a hopeless position. What are you doing about it?


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NHS in danger on 75th anniversary as politicians compete to attack its founding principle

Tony Blair and his ventriloquist’s dummy Keir Starmer: they’re both demanding that more private companies should be allowed to take money from the National Health Service in profit. These are NOT the natural inheritors of Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee’s legacy.

The UK’s National Health Service is 75 years old today (July 5, 2023) – and the anniversary is being used by profiteers to demand that it be hollowed-out and turned into a vehicle for the sickness industry.

Today’s attack came from former New Labour prime minister Tony Blair. According to The Guardian,

Blair backs the private sector playing an expanded role, including in the provision of high-volume, low-complexity services, such as dermatology.

More people will resort to private healthcare unless the NHS banishes long treatment delays, Blair predicts.

In fairness, the piece quotes Dr John Puntis, the co-chair of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, who made it clear:

The Blair years demonstrated that with increased investment, NHS performance and patient satisfaction improved. On the other hand, use of the private sector undermined NHS services, and independent sector treatment centres pushed up costs

So the answer is more investment in NHS treatment and less in the private sector, according to expert opinion.

Sadly, current Labour leader Keir Starmer seems to agree with Blair – he wants to put more investment into private healthcare in a betrayal of his own mother, it seems. You can read his Mirror article here, if you really think it will illuminate you. He doesn’t say anything at all about what Labour would do to restore the health service.

But we do know what he would do, because he has let it slip in a TV interview. Blair’s words are an echo of Starmer’s new New Labour policy:

The bright idea is that the politicians – Tory and Labour – defund the NHS so it becomes unable to tackle the ever-increasing waiting list of patients that health-reducing political policies are creating (sewage dumping, anybody?) – and this pushes people towards the private, profit-making sickness industry.

The private companies set their prices for particular treatments low, so patients are surprised at not being asked to pay the fortune they expected. They tell their friends, who also go private, until we reach the point at which the government (Labour or Tory, it doesn’t matter which) can say private treatment is the answer and shut down the NHS altogether.

Then healthcare prices skyrocket.

What would Starmer get out of it?

Well, I don’t know.

I do know he’s getting something from private health right now:

Wow: £12,500. That’s more than some people earn every year.

Ironically, this appeared on my Twitter feed at the same time as the Starmer clip:

How sad that This Writer has to link a tweet about MPs pretending to care about the NHS with the current and former leaders of the political party that brought it into being. What a betrayal of the people of the UK!

Thankfully, there are still some in the Labour Party who support the principles on which the NHS was founded. Sadly, Richard Burgon is being kept far from any position of power by Starmer and his cronies. This may be the reason:

Starmer isn’t the only one with a story about how the NHS changed his life. But members of the commenting public are tying theirs to the decline in investment over the last 13 years of Tory and Tory-led rule:

And then there’s the issue of wasted money – raised by this caller to Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 Live show:

Former Countdown numbers expert – the respectable one – Carol Vorderman has also spoken out about government decisions to give money that should have helped the NHS to their know-nothing friends (via an illegal ‘fast track’ funding lane):

I notice also a clip from an organisation called European Movement UK, reminding us all that we were told Brexit would make £350 million per week available that could be put into the NHS:

Where is that money?

The answer is obvious: it was fictional.

As is the story of private health businesses being of any benefit at all to the National Health Service.


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