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This is an interesting new attempt to set up a grass roots non-party progressive campaign based to some extent on US models such as Moveon.org.
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Nigel Stanley
President Obama’s decision to limit salaries and bonuses may well be worrying Britain’s boardrooms.
This is not because I see much chance of the same thing happening here (though it should). But remember the standard defence of executive excess in UK boardrooms. This is an international market for talent we are told. Even – in a strange borrowing of trade union language usually mocked by these very people – we must pay the rate for the job.
So now there will be all these hugely talented US bank directors on the international job market. Watch out UK CEOs.
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Adam Lent
Stephanie Flanders (BBC Economics Editor) has posted a worrying entry on her blog arguing that the Great Depression was caused by a collapse in global demand not by protectionism. Flanders is clear she is not a protectionist, she just wants to set the historical record straight. She argues that it was attempts by nations to shrink domestic demand for imports in order to protect their gold reserves that really caused the Depression rather than US tariff barriers. But I think this is to draw a very narrow definition of protectionism. Any unilateral action by a government to protect its own economic or financial position at the expense of others can be protectionist, or can at least amount to a “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy. Such policies presents a very high risk of global economic decline if everyone pursues the same approach. So to argue that protectionism did not cause the Depression because the evidence suggests that US tariff barriers did not cause the Depression is misleading.
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Barack Obama today kicked off a campaign to dramatically limit bonuses for top executives at failed banks and companies. The US president will issue rules limiting executive pay to $500,000 (£347,000) a year for companies getting taxpayer bailout funds. The move has prompted calls for similar limits in the UK, where banks – and last month, car manufacturers – received billions of pounds in government funds to stay in business.
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Brendan Barber
Exactly what has happened over the Lindsey refinery construction contracts is still far from clear. Undoubtedly too, the motives of the protesters and strikers are not all the same. Unions see the action as a defence of negotiated standards and a call for UK-based workers to have a fair chance of applying for jobs. Some – though it looks like a small minority, given the way that the BNP were marched off the site – see it through a Eurosceptic or even xenophobic lens. Others will simply see what is happening as deeply unfair, and will follow whoever offers the most convincing explanation and solution.
Yet for all the confusion on the ground, the big issue at stake could not be clearer. This is a battle for the future shape of globalisation. Indeed it is a continuation of the centuries-old battle over how the benefits of a market economy are distributed, which has existed since the first trade unions were formed with their mission to regulate the wages and conditions of the great mass of ordinary people dependent on getting a job to earn a living.
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Owen Tudor
There has been a lot of coverage for the dispute at Lindsey Oil Refinery in Lincolnshire, and the websites of the relevant unions (GMB and Unite) have covered their positions – our comment is here. Much of the media coverage has reported wildly different ‘facts’ about the numbers of workers involved, terms and conditions, contract conditions and so on, suggesting if nothing else a lack of openness, which is of course one of the reasons why passions have run high. But the main reason so much attention has focused on a specific dispute is because there are much much bigger issues involved. Johann Hari has begun teasing these out in his latest column in the Independent, but he makes the mistake of blaming the workers involved for other people’s actions.
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"We have to reverse many of the policies towards organized labor that we've seen these last eight years, policies with which I've sharply disagreed. I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem, to me it's part of the solution. We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests, because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement. "
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Vince Cable adds his two penneth to the corporate tax avoidance debate, with a call for tax simplification, stricter enforcement and EU co-operation.
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Nigel Stanley
Over at Labourlist there’s an entertaining spat between Derek Draper and the Tax Payers Alliance, and rightly they commend Vince Cable in the Guardian today (on day two of their excellent tax series.)
But I can’t help feeling that this is just a bit superficial. As one of the commenters reminds us there is a difference between tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (legal, if sometimes pushing at boundaries). Tax avoidance is to some extent therefore a battle between the tax authorities and creative accountants and to another extent a set of activities tolerated by the government. Richard Murphy has rigorously documented UK government collusion with tax haven secrecy and has too many examples where the Treasury has given into big business lobbying on tax – a big contrast with President Obama.
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Paul Sellers
I’ve just had a phone call from an employee whose boss told him that he would be treated as “absent without leave” yesterday, even though he had phoned his workplace and left a message saying that he would not be able to get to work because there were no buses running throughout the city. This took place on a day when the London Weather Centre had issued a warning to people to stay at home unless their journey was absolutely necessary.
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Nigel Stanley
I’m not convinced by all those lining up to condemn anyone in sight for failing to deal with the weather.
Doubtless there are lessons to be learnt, but the basic point is that we don’t have weather like this more than once every 20 years. If it happened every year then we should have gritters on every corner and fleets of municipal snow-ploughs. But we don’t – and I’d rather the money was spent elsewhere.
And how depressing to hear Ken Livingstone slagging off health and safety bureaucrats on Channel Four news.