Qwertycoatl posted:

If I'm on the way back from Scotland and I have a Scottish tenner I buy a packet of crisps or something at a railway station shop.

jabby posted:

I don't know if it's comforting or not, but medically the vast majority of miscarriages and stillbirths happen because the genetics of the baby were simply not compatible with life. We know it from examining fetuses that unfortunately didn't survive.

Those genetics are fixed from the moment of conception. So nearly all the miscarriages that happen are inevitable from the very beginning. That very first cell managed to put together the instructions to get so far, but there were critical problems that would ultimately prevent it
going all the way. We're just in the tragic position of being blindsided by an outcome that was unfortunately set in stone months previously.

I dunno. Mother nature is heartless, but if anything it proves that absolutely nobody should be blaming themselves for a pregnancy outcome that ultimately rests of a miracle of cellular genetics.

Coohoolin posted:

Lmao eddie Dempsey wrote a whinge about owen jones for daring to criticise his racist Brexit poo poo

https://medium.com/@eddiedempsey/a-reply-to-owen-jones-keep-it-comradely-32e034eeaa49?_referrer=twitter&_branch_match_id=576476693199428299

Like jesus christ wtf. First there's a load of "I'm an Irish immigrant, I can't possibly be racist", then there's this:

quote:

Even in my incredibly diverse community in south London, I personally know people from Irish or black backgrounds joining DFLA, EDL or Free Tommy demonstrations. Owen seems intent on branding these people “textbook fascists” and has been repeatedly doing so on the internet.

Goddamm.

Pesky Splinter posted:

jabby posted:

Also, what the gently caress has happened to the FT recently? Did we finally activate our sleeper agents or something?

https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1174083640420179969

Jose posted:

Lol she's getting slammed in the replies. She really is extraordinarily poo poo

Guavanaut posted:

At least they put hazard diamonds after their name so that you know.


check out the fish and frogs.

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Lord Ludikrous posted:

So a few weeks ago I excitedly announced in this thread that I was going to be a dad.

I am not going to be a dad. Baby didn’t make it.

ROFLBOT posted:

Am I completely off-base in thinking the Queen might not grant royal assent in light of the amount of fuckery this has created?

"Jeremy Corbyn posted:

Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are threatening to drive our country over a no-deal cliff edge in six weeks’ time. He has no mandate for that and is opposed by a majority of the public. Since he became prime minister in July, Johnson has been defeated on every vote he has put to parliament. Now his undemocratic manoeuvrings and his decision to close down parliament and avoid accountability are being challenged in the supreme court. Johnson’s visit to Luxembourg on Monday was a further humiliation. The prime minister went to Europe with no plan and no proposals, and did his best to hide from scrutiny while he was there.

Three years ago Johnson backed Brexit because he thought it would boost his political career – writing one article in favour of remain and another backing leave. Now he’s backing no deal because he thinks it’s politically expedient – to win back votes from the Brexit party and keep his Tory Brexit ultras on board. At the same time he needs to look like he’s trying for a deal to hold his cabinet and parliamentary party together.

There is nothing new in Johnson’s shenanigans. Theresa May signed up to contradictory red lines on Brexit to keep the Conservatives from falling apart, and David Cameron called the referendum in the first place to see off the threat from Ukip.

The Brexit saga of the past few years has been a litany of Tory failures, as one Conservative prime minister after another has put their own and their party’s interests before the interests of the people and our country. Now we face crashing out of the EU next month without a deal, just to save Johnson’s job. We know from Amber Rudd, who resigned from his cabinet this month, that there is little effort going into securing a deal with the EU – in fact it is hard to see any sign of real effort at all. That came after leaked reports that the prime minister’s negotiations are a “sham” and no deal is the real goal.

In the teeth of No 10 resistance, parliament secured the release of the confidential Yellowhammer papers, setting out the government’s preparations for no deal. The government’s own analysis found the UK would be at risk of food and medicine shortages, and face chaos at key ports. It also exposed that ministers had deliberately misled the public. They told us there would be no food or medicine shortages, when their own internal reports showed that there would be.

Yellowhammer has raised the stakes even higher. Johnson’s reckless no-deal Brexit would threaten jobs and living standards and increase food prices. And it would pave the way for a one-sided trade deal with Donald Trump that could only be negotiated from a position of weakness.

It would not be a no-deal Brexit, but a Trump-deal Brexit, with a race to the bottom in our rights and protections sold to US corporations.

Nor would no deal be a “clean break”, as some imagine. It would not mean we could “just get on with it”. In reality it would be the start of a whole new period of confusion and delay, as a string of new agreements would have to be hammered out with the EU – but this time against a backdrop of rising unemployment, deepening poverty, and entire industries moving offshore.

Labour will do everything necessary to stop a disastrous no deal, with all the chaos, disruption and job losses it would lead to – and the serious threat it would pose to the Northern Ireland peace process. That’s why we worked with other parties across parliament to pass a law to stop us crashing out at the end of next month.

But as soon as no deal is off the table, and the prime minister has complied with the law, we need a general election to get rid of Johnson’s Tory government. That election will be about much more than Brexit. It will be a choice between a Labour government that will put wealth and power in the hands of the many, and Johnson’s born-to-rule Conservatives who will look after the privileged few. It will be about who will truly end austerity and deliver the change Britain needs, invest in every region and nation of our country, and rebuild our public services, communities and industry.

The people of Britain deserve to have their say in a general election. Only a Labour government would end the Brexit crisis by taking the decision back to the people. We will give the people the final say on Brexit, with the choice of a credible leave offer and remain.

A Labour government would secure a sensible deal based on the terms we have long advocated, including a new customs union with the EU; a close single market relationship; and guarantees of workers’ rights and environmental protections. We would then put that to a public vote alongside remain. I will pledge to carry out whatever the people decide, as a Labour prime minister.

We are the only UK-wide party ready to put our trust in the people of Britain to make the decision. Johnson wants to crash out with no deal. That is something opposed by business, industry, the trade unions and most of the public – and even by the Vote Leave campaign’s co-convener Michael Gove, who said earlier this year: “We didn’t vote to leave without a deal.”

And now the Liberal Democrats want MPs to overturn the referendum result by revoking article 50 in a parliamentary stitch-up. It is simply undemocratic to override the decision of a majority of the voters without going back to the people.

Labour is the only party determined to bring people together, and give the people the final say. Only a vote for Labour will deliver a public vote on Brexit. Only a Labour government will put the power back into the hands of the people. Let’s stop a no-deal Brexit – and let the people decide.

Junior G-man posted:

Yeah, this is on the heels of that US Business Roundtable (chaired by Jamie Dimon of all people) announcing that capitalism shouldn't just be about shareholder value, but also employees, the environment etc.

Capitalism is clearly smelling its own blood in the water and is willing to concede (some) ground to keep itself alive. Also, I think even they are realising that the current system of inequality is bad for business and will lead to bad outcomes. It's an interesting process to watch, but never to trust.

Junior G-man posted:

Quoting myself, but Martin Wolff in the FT just wrote a giant front-page piece about the dangers of rentier capitalism and why it must be dealt with. It's pretty good but a long thing to post (though happy to do it if there's interest).

This is an interesting plot twist that's going on.

quote:

Martin Wolf: why rentier capitalism is damaging liberal democracy
Economies are not delivering for most citizens because of weak competition, feeble productivity growth and tax loopholes

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.”

With this sentence, the US Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 181 of the world’s largest companies, abandoned their longstanding view that “corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders”.

This is certainly a moment. But what does — and should — that moment mean? The answer needs to start with acknowledgment of the fact that something has gone very wrong. Over the past four decades, and especially in the US, the most important country of all, we have observed an unholy trinity of slowing productivity growth, soaring inequality and huge financial shocks.

As Jason Furman of Harvard University and Peter Orszag of Lazard Frères noted in a paper last year: “From 1948 to 1973, real median family income in the US rose 3 per cent annually. At this rate . . . there was a 96 per cent chance that a child would have a higher income than his or her parents. Since 1973, the median family has seen its real income grow only 0.4 per cent annually . . . As a result, 28 per cent of children have lower income than their parents did.”

So why is the economy not delivering? The answer lies, in large part, with the rise of rentier capitalism. In this case “rent” means rewards over and above those required to induce the desired supply of goods, services, land or labour. “Rentier capitalism” means an economy in which market and political power allows privileged individuals and businesses to extract a great deal of such rent from everybody else.

That does not explain every disappointment. As Robert Gordon, professor of social sciences at Northwestern University, argues, fundamental innovation slowed after the mid-20th century. Technology has also created greater reliance on graduates and raised their relative wages, explaining part of the rise of inequality. But the share of the top 1 per cent of US earners in pre-tax income jumped from 11 per cent in 1980 to 20 per cent in 2014. This was not mainly the result of such skill-biased technological change.

If one listens to the political debates in many countries, notably the US and UK, one would conclude that the disappointment is mainly the fault of imports from China or low-wage immigrants, or both. Foreigners are ideal scapegoats. But the notion that rising inequality and slow productivity growth are due to foreigners is simply false.

Every western high-income country trades more with emerging and developing countries today than it did four decades ago. Yet increases in inequality have varied substantially. The outcome depended on how the institutions of the market economy behaved and on domestic policy choices.

Harvard economist Elhanan Helpman ends his overview of a huge academic literature on the topic with the conclusion that “globalisation in the form of foreign trade and offshoring has not been a large contributor to rising inequality. Multiple studies of different events around the world point to this conclusion.”

The shift in the location of much manufacturing, principally to China, may have lowered investment in high-income economies a little. But this effect cannot have been powerful enough to reduce productivity growth significantly. To the contrary, the shift in the global division of labour induced high-income economies to specialise in skill-intensive sectors, where there was more potential for fast productivity growth.

Donald Trump, a naive mercantilist, focuses, instead, on bilateral trade imbalances as a cause of job losses. These deficits reflect bad trade deals, the American president insists. It is true that the US has overall trade deficits, while the EU has surpluses. But their trade policies are quite similar. Trade policies do not explain bilateral balances. Bilateral balances, in turn, do not explain overall balances. The latter are macroeconomic phenomena. Both theory and evidence concur on this.

The economic impact of immigration has also been small, however big the political and cultural “shock of the foreigner” may be. Research strongly suggests that the effect of immigration on the real earnings of the native population and on receiving countries’ fiscal position has been small and frequently positive.

Far more productive than this politically rewarding, but mistaken, focus on the damage done by trade and migration is an examination of contemporary rentier capitalism itself.

Finance plays a key role, with several dimensions. Liberalised finance tends to metastasise, like a cancer. Thus, the financial sector’s ability to create credit and money finances its own activities, incomes and (often illusory) profits.

A 2015 study by Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi for the Bank for International Settlements said “the level of financial development is good only up to a point, after which it becomes a drag on growth, and that a fast-growing financial sector is detrimental to aggregate productivity growth”. When the financial sector grows quickly, they argue, it hires talented people. These then lend against property, because it generates collateral. This is a diversion of talented human resources in unproductive, useless directions.

Again, excessive growth of credit almost always leads to crises, as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff showed in This Time is Different. This is why no modern government dares let the supposedly market-driven financial sector operate unaided and unguided. But that in turn creates huge opportunities to gain from irresponsibility: heads, they win; tails, the rest of us lose. Further crises are guaranteed.

Finance also creates rising inequality. Thomas Philippon of the Stern School of Business and Ariell Reshef of the Paris School of Economics showed that the relative earnings of finance professionals exploded upwards in the 1980s with the deregulation of finance. They estimated that “rents” — earnings over and above those needed to attract people into the industry — accounted for 30-50 per cent of the pay differential between finance professionals and the rest of the private sector.

This explosion of financial activity since 1980 has not raised the growth of productivity. If anything, it has lowered it, especially since the crisis. The same is true of the explosion in pay of corporate management, yet another form of rent extraction. As Deborah Hargreaves, founder of the High Pay Centre, notes, in the UK the ratio of average chief executive pay to that of average workers rose from 48 to one in 1998 to 129 to one in 2016. In the US, the same ratio rose from 42 to one in 1980 to 347 to one in 2017.

As the US essayist HL Mencken wrote: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Pay linked to the share price gave management a huge incentive to raise that price, by manipulating earnings or borrowing money to buy the shares. Neither adds value to the company. But they can add a great deal of wealth to management. A related problem with governance is conflicts of interest, notably over independence of auditors.

In sum, personal financial considerations permeate corporate decision-making. As the independent economist Andrew Smithers argues in Productivity and the Bonus Culture, this comes at the expense of corporate investment and so of long-run productivity growth.

A possibly still more fundamental issue is the decline of competition. Mr Furman and Mr Orszag say there is evidence of increased market concentration in the US, a lower rate of entry of new firms and a lower share of young firms in the economy compared with three or four decades ago. Work by the OECD and Oxford Martin School also notes widening gaps in productivity and profit mark-ups between the leading businesses and the rest. This suggests weakening competition and rising monopoly rent. Moreover, a great deal of the increase in inequality arises from radically different rewards for workers with similar skills in different firms: this, too, is a form of rent extraction.

A part of the explanation for weaker competition is “winner-takes-almost-all” markets: superstar individuals and their companies earn monopoly rents, because they can now serve global markets so cheaply. The network externalities — benefits of using a network that others are using — and zero marginal costs of platform monopolies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent) are the dominant examples.

Another such natural force is the network externalities of agglomerations, stressed by Paul Collier in The Future of Capitalism. Successful metropolitan areas — London, New York, the Bay Area in California — generate powerful feedback loops, attracting and rewarding talented people. This disadvantages businesses and people trapped in left-behind towns. Agglomerations, too, create rents, not just in property prices, but also in earnings.

Yet monopoly rent is not just the product of such natural — albeit worrying — economic forces. It is also the result of policy. In the US, Yale University law professor Robert Bork argued in the 1970s that “consumer welfare” should be the sole objective of antitrust policy. As with shareholder value maximisation, this oversimplified highly complex issues. In this case, it led to complacency about monopoly power, provided prices stayed low. Yet tall trees deprive saplings of the light they need to grow. So, too, may giant companies.

Some might argue, complacently, that the “monopoly rent” we now see in leading economies is largely a sign of the “creative destruction” lauded by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. In fact, we are not seeing enough creation, destruction or productivity growth to support that view convincingly.

A disreputable aspect of rent-seeking is radical tax avoidance. Corporations (and so also shareholders) benefit from the public goods — security, legal systems, infrastructure, educated workforces and sociopolitical stability — provided by the world’s most powerful liberal democracies. Yet they are also in a perfect position to exploit tax loopholes, especially those companies whose location of production or innovation is difficult to determine.

The biggest challenges within the corporate tax system are tax competition and base erosion and profit shifting. We see the former in falling tax rates. We see the latter in the location of intellectual property in tax havens, in charging tax-deductible debt against profits accruing in higher-tax jurisdictions and in rigging transfer prices within firms.

A 2015 study by the IMF calculated that base erosion and profit shifting reduced long-run annual revenue in OECD countries by about $450bn (1 per cent of gross domestic product) and in non-OECD countries by slightly over $200bn (1.3 per cent of GDP). These are significant figures in the context of a tax that raised an average of only 2.9 per cent of GDP in 2016 in OECD countries and just 2 per cent in the US.

Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations shows that US corporations report seven times as much profit in small tax havens (Bermuda, the British Caribbean, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland) as in six big economies (China, France, Germany, India, Italy and Japan). This is ludicrous. The tax reform under Mr Trump changed essentially nothing. Needless to say, not only US corporations benefit from such loopholes.

In such cases, rents are not merely being exploited. They are being created, through lobbying for distorting and unfair tax loopholes and against needed regulation of mergers, anti-competitive practices, financial misbehaviour, the environment and labour markets. Corporate lobbying overwhelms the interests of ordinary citizens. Indeed, some studies suggest that the wishes of ordinary people count for next to nothing in policymaking.

Not least, as some western economies have become more Latin American in their distribution of incomes, their politics have also become more Latin American. Some of the new populists are considering radical, but necessary, changes in competition, regulatory and tax policies. But others rely on xenophobic dog whistles while continuing to promote a capitalism rigged to favour a small elite. Such activities could well end up with the death of liberal democracy itself.

Members of the Business Roundtable and their peers have tough questions to ask themselves. They are right: seeking to maximise shareholder value has proved a doubtful guide to managing corporations. But that realisation is the beginning, not the end. They need to ask themselves what this understanding means for how they set their own pay and how they exploit — indeed actively create — tax and regulatory loopholes.

They must, not least, consider their activities in the public arena. What are they doing to ensure better laws governing the structure of the corporation, a fair and effective tax system, a safety net for those afflicted by economic forces beyond their control, a healthy local and global environment and a democracy responsive to the wishes of a broad majority?

We need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy. Fixing this is a challenge for us all, but especially for those who run the world’s most important businesses. The way our economic and political systems work must change, or they will perish.

dispatch_async posted:

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson_MP/status/1173943640349126667

Jose posted:

Lol she's getting slammed in the replies. She really is extraordinarily poo poo

https://twitter.com/joswinson/status/1174211328971595777?s=19

Rarity posted:

Even the FBPEs are putting her on blast

Junior G-man posted:

Eh, gently caress it:

the article posted:

In such cases, rents are not merely being exploited. They are being created, through lobbying for distorting and unfair tax loopholes and against needed regulation of mergers, anti-competitive practices, financial misbehaviour, the environment and labour markets. Corporate lobbying overwhelms the interests of ordinary citizens. Indeed, some studies suggest that the wishes of ordinary people count for next to nothing in policymaking.

Guavanaut posted:

Jose posted:

Truly excellent timing on this tweet

https://twitter.com/wesstreeting/status/1174092797529509889?s=19

Stormgale posted:

What was the delted wes streeting tweet?



This one

thespaceinvader posted:

He was quoting Owen Jones about Labour Students and snarking.

Stormgale posted:

What was the delted wes streeting tweet?



This one

Junior G-man posted:

Jo Maugham is off on a real one:

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1174214645382602752?s=20
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1174215381336154113?s=20

J_RBG posted:

Wait what

How does he go from 'Corbyn doesn't oppose brexit' to 'therefore he is an autocrat'

Rarity posted:

Nah, this is bullshit and I think quite unempathetic considering the circumstance. When you or a partner are expecting you may not be a parent yet but you're already building up a relationship with your child in your head. You're thinking about the future and imagining what kind of life they might have and then all of that is ripped away from you. You lose all those hopes and dreams and you don't even get the joy of meeting your child. It's awful and it's got gently caress all to do with the pro-life crowd.