103,000 people and that 36.1 percent

 a con, Dharavi, greed, injustice, KatrinaNation, wealth  No Responses »
Jun 252011
 

KatrinaNation knocked me sideways with this particular tweet just now:

In 2010,World Wealth Report estimated 103,000 people of 7 bn. on planet controlled 36.1 percent of world’s wealth.Taxing richest off table!?

I am, for a change, quite speechless – or, perhaps, that should be wordless.

Aren’t you?

Meanwhile, just take a look at how some of the almost 7 billion others are judged by the unintentionally patronising eye of Western journalism to be engaged in a victory of poverty over Indian injustice.  The story of micro-entrepreneurs – as couched in this piece – does kind of allow us to turn a blind eye to the 36.1 percent concentrated in the hands of the richest among us, who themselves barely deserve the description afforded the slum-dwellers.  For yes, the latter are entrepreneurs – absolutely true.  But they are driven not by reasonable necessity – that necessity which leads admirably to invention – so much as a disgraceful imbalance of resources between those at the top of the pyramid and those at the bottom.

They are not imaginatively creative but desperately imaginative.  And it is by our acts that we have put them where they are.

Let us never lose sight of this – even as we like to brush aside the intellectual incoherence which resides in believing that out of our systemic lack of equality the rest of the world will somehow find its salvation.

The shock and awe of an EU referendum

 a con, Eastern Europe, EU referendum, Europe, European Parliament, private bureaucracy, state bureaucracy  No Responses »
Jun 252011
 

Those demanding that we have a referendum on the European Union are playing the shock-and-awe card once again.  This from the Sun today:

All the PM has to do now is give us that referendum on Europe he promised and we can all tell Brussels where to get off.

They seriously forget the lessons of the 19th and 20th centuries, where Europe was a battlefield of envy and hubris.  They think, as many of us did in Iraq, that anything has to be better than the situation as it stands.  But you can’t dismantle successfully without having a plan for reconstruction in place before you start.  If we have learnt anything from recent history, this is surely the lesson which stands out the most.

And if those who propose dismantling without prevision believe – for whatever reason – that international commerce and private bureaucracies, all of a self-interested kind, can automagically bind together nation states in a way that they might argue state bureaucracies have not, they really should think again.  I suspect that there is as much waste in the private sector as in the public: the only real difference being that it doesn’t see the public light of day – not only because workforces are bound by confidentiality agreements not to reveal it but also because the principles of democracy are generally reserved only for the poor.

Just remember the trillions of pounds which the public sector has had to pump into the private financial services industry – and you’ll remember exactly what I mean.

Self-interest leads to war, sooner or later.

Which is why I fear a shock-and-awe request for an EU referendum of the type we have seen today will, some day, in some way, not far down the line, lead to the kind of conflicts we really thought Europe had managed to learn how to avoid.

If we don’t want real war on the battlefields, with all its tragic spilling of blood, we must acquire the ability to accept and tolerate its figurative equivalent in the debating chambers across the Continent – as well as understand why we need to pay for it to the extent that we are being asked.