Austerity map UK

Cuts to welfare payments will hit the local economies of northern towns and cities as much as five times as hard as the Conservative heartland southern counties, according to research commissioned by the Financial Times into the impact of austerity.

The government's radical reform programme, aimed at reducing one of the largest fiscal deficits among OECD nations by moving people off benefits and into work, is taking £19bn a year out of working-age social security between now and 2015.

The Financial Times interactive map shows, for example, that the annual impact per working-age adult in Colchester is £399 and in Tendring (the Clacton to Harwich peninsula) it is £618.

economics: UK debt, deficit, GDP, etc, in 2012

I tried to get on to the nef and Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) ‘economic mythbusters’ online course in May/June but there wasn’t room. QPSW is now working with nef to make some resources available in due course: maybe course briefings and questions and edited clips of lectures. QPSW also recommended the Earth and Economy newsletter and Quakernomics blog.

So, in the meantime, the marvellous CIA World Factbook and False Economy continue to be my favourite sources of information on economics.

According to the latest (2012) data in the CIA World Factbook, the UK is the ninth largest economy in the world but 36th in GDP per capita.

GDP (purchasing power parity): £1.53 trillion; GDP per capita per year: £24,100. This has barely changed since 2010.  But there was a huge drop between 2008 (£28,330) and 2009 (£23,200) due to the banking crash.

Budget: revenues: £654bn less public spending £780bn = budget deficit £126bn. (This tallies with the other way that the budget deficit is expressed, ie as 7.7% of GDP.)

Public debt is 88.7% of GDP (2012 est.) which is £1.35 trillion.

Other key stats are

• GDP - composition by sector: agriculture 0.7%; industry 21.1%; services 78.2% (2012 est.)
• Unemployment rate: 7.8%
• Population below poverty line: 14% (2006 est.)
• Household income or consumption by percentage share: lowest 10%: 2.1%; highest 10%: 28.5% (1999). 

And finally a report from www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborne-imf-austerity:  The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said on Thursday 18 April that the poor performance of the British economy had left her with no alternative but to call on George Osborne to rethink his austerity strategy.

NVC and "power concedes nothing without a demand"

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) suggests a way to create a world where everyone’s needs matter and are met. It is based on a (quite small) number of assumptions about human nature, including that human beings are social animals who enjoy contributing to one another's well-being (usually in situations where their own needs are being met). See www.connecttolife.co.uk/about-compassionate-communication.html for an outline by Clare Palmer.

Marshall Rosenberg, who formulated NVC in the 1960s and 1970s, rooted it in the tradition of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. His choice of name, Nonviolent Communication, rather than, say, Compassionate Communication, is a homage to Gandhi’s example.

One of the tenets of NVC is that by making requests rather than demands of one another, we are all more likely to create a world where everyone’s needs are met.  This contrasts with the view, widely held on the Left, which I find compelling, that “power concedes nothing without a demand”, as Frederick Douglass put it. Gandhi himself was not one who merely made requests. He demanded incessantly – and nonviolently, of course – that the British Raj quit India.

I wholeheartedly support the philosophy and process of NVC and can testify to the difference it has made to me in my personal life and connection with other people. (This is due in large part to my good fortune in being married to Clare Palmer.) But what puzzles me about the assumption about requests rather than demands, is whether this particular tenet really has a place outside of personal relationships and communication. At the political level, from the town council up to international conflict, I agree with Douglass that “power concedes nothing without a demand”, and those of us who want social change must make loud and incessant (and nonviolent) demands, not mere requests, for the changes we want to see in the world.

Update: 21/04/13

Clare has helpfully reminded me that, in NVC, the difference between a request and a demand is only revealed after it has been made. If a person does not get the response they want and moves to blame or punish or force the other to do what they want, that reveals that they were making a demand all along. That explains why Gandhi was, in NVC terms, making requests, rather than demands. Though he would never accept any other answer than for the British to quit India, he did so in a way that didn’t resort to blame or punishment or force.

The Ancient Meaning of Christmas

Jesus was a Sun King (maybe like Mithras of Persia and Osiris of Egypt before him). You can tell by the way he is usually depicted with a halo of sun rays shining out from around his head. He is the latest in a long line of symbols of our sun worship that is many thousands of years old. The most important date in the solar worship calendar is the winter solstice: usually 21st December. This is when the sun 'dies' and is soon 'born again'. It is when its midday zenith (its highest point in the sky) stops descending and starts ascending. The rate of descent/ascent for a few days around the solstice is so slow that it is imperceptible to the naked eye. Not until telescopes were perfected by Galileo in the seventeenth century could astronomers see the infinitesimal changes in the sun's zenith either side of the solstice. Before that they had to work it out logically as Ptolemy did in ancient Greece by recording the sun's zenith through December and January and calculating the time of the solstice after the event. For thousands of years people saw the sun reach its lowest ebb and 'die' until, on the third day, it slowly began its re-ascent towards the summer solstice, bringing with it the promise of new life, another spring and another summer. They created the myth of the sun resurrecting itself on the third day.

Most people today know that the Christian church took over the pagan rebirth festivals of Yule and Easter and incorporated aspects that they couldn't erase. One important detail, mentioned several times in the Gospels and featured in the Eucharist or Mass, is how Jesus’ death is followed by his resurrection on the third day. Although Christianity has woven the myth of the resurrection on the third day into the rebirth festival of Easter rather than the birth festival of Christmas, it is nevertheless an example of Christianity building its myth on the ancient sun-worshipers' meaning. The Meaning of Christmas and of Yule before it is that, even in the darkest time, there is hope for the future.

As the Beatles said, "Here comes the Sun King, everybody’s laughing, everybody’s happy ... "

Yule log

The meaning of the Yule log, as I understand it, is that is a log that comes, not completely burned, from last year's Yule celebration, in order to be burned in this year's Yule celebration,  Thus it provides continuity from one year to the next. Obviously, next year's Yule log, which is to be set aside for from this year's Yule fire, is unlikely to be the same one as this year's. It is likely to be one that was only partially burned in this year's Yule celebration.

Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith

I've posted before about Chomsky's reading of Adam Smith: see The invisible hand of Adam Smith. Chomsky also frequently quotes Smith saying "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." In a speech in September for the Center for Popular Economics, entitled, "Who Owns the World?" he said: 

"Who Owns the World?" Actually, a good answer to this was given years ago by Adam Smith, someone we’re supposed to worship but not read. He was—a little subversive when you read him sometimes. He was referring to the most powerful country in the world in his day and, of course, the country that interested him, namely, England. And he pointed out that in England the principal architects of policy are those who own the country: the merchants and manufacturers in his day. And he said they make sure to design policy so that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to. Their interests are served by policy, however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England.
But he was an old-fashioned conservative with moral principles, so he added the victims of England, the victims of the—what he called the "savage injustice of the Europeans," particularly in India. Well, he had no illusions about the owners, so, to quote him again, "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." It was true then; it’s true now.

Complete transcript at www.democracynow.org/2012/10/26/who_owns_the_world_noam_chomsky

Three approaches to the eco-crisis

There are broadly three points of view on the ecological crisis. The political mainstream of Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour recognise it and hope to deal with it one day but not now while we are in difficult economic times which require us to create growth and jobs in the traditional way.

Next are the Greens who maintain that the juggernaut of our globalised economy can be turned around in time to avert ecological catastrophe. Measures such as the Green New Deal or One Million Climate Jobs, for example, can solve the economic crisis in a way that is environmentally sustainable.

The third point of view is that it is already too late to avert the most important ecological problem, which is global warming or man-made climate change. So, for example, there is nothing we do now can stop the polar ice caps from melting into the sea. Some projections are that this will happen in decades, some in centuries. Estimates are that sea levels will rise by several metres if the Arctic melts and by several tens of metres if Antarctica melts. Coupled with projections about extreme weather and storm surges, the worry is that islands, low-lying countries and coastal cities will all be flooded and uninhabitable. The nuclear power stations that are by the sea, as most of them are, will be under water along with their radioactive material, contaminating marine life and the food chain.

Many people, I'm sure, worry about this and say nothing. For how do you prepare for a post-catastrophe world? Don't have children? Flee to high ground? Learn survival skills? Enjoy what we have while it lasts and let tomorrow be damned?

Where are the leaders with ideas and strategies about what to do? By promoting traditional growth, the mainstream is just setting us up for a bigger crash when it happens. As to the Green New Deal, etc, I don’t know if it will make any difference: If you fall out of a plane and someone has given you a parachute that is fine, but if all they gave you was an umbrella, it wasn’t worth having.  I'm still looking for what people are saying about how to prepare future generations for a post-catastrophe world.

To end on a positive note, Rupert Read www.rupertread.net has a helpful outlook based on optimism of the will over pessimism of the intellect, while Joanna Macy www.joannamacy.net has a helpful philosophy of The Great Turning. That is what keeps me going for now. Any other helpful thoughts, please let me know …

Austerity

In a remarkable trick, a crisis that began with the failures of private banks has been transformed into a crisis of public debt. The government would have us believe that a period of austerity – wage freezes, job cuts, and cuts to public spending – is essential. But as the economy has plunged back into recession, these policies are under increasing attack.

Austerity is not working, so why are we still being promised years of it to come? The truth is that the leaders of all the major parties are committed to austerity, not because it’s good for us, but because it’s good for them and their wealthy friends.  The highest earners are making a killing while the rest of us face job insecurity and cuts to pay, pensions, services and benefits.
The millionaires in government and the media want us to focus on the ‘lazy’ unemployed, lone parents, immigrants, and disabled people. But even their own figures for benefit fraud are infinitesimal compared to tax avoidance and evasion – and the vast sums spent on bailing out the banks.

from Brighton Benefits Campaign 20 Sep 2012