Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest
It's the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul's cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.
What is this thing? Ostensibly it's the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, "among local authorities the City of London is unique". You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.
There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London. To become a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen. You're most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: medieval guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery. How do you join a livery company? Don't even ask.
To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff, and you "must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery". You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a "contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year." This is, in other words, an official old boys' network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy within the City of London.
The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group, which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation's unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.
The Lord Mayor's role, the Corporation's website tells us, is to "open doors at the highest levels" for business, in the course of which he "expounds the values of liberalisation". Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it "handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City", such as banking reform and financial services regulation. It also conducts "extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services." But this isn't the half of it...
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George Monbiot @'The Guardian'
Free Alaa الحرية لعلاء عبد الفتاح
أصدرت النيابة العسكرية يوم ٣٠ أكتوبر قرار بحبس الناشط والمدون علاء عبد الفتاح 15 يوما بعد التحقيق معه كمتهم في أحداث ماسبيرو. علاء عبد الفتاح مارس حقه في عدم الخضوع للتحقيق أمام النيابة العسكرية أولا لكونه مدنيا لا يجوز التعامل معه من خلال مؤسسة عسكرية وثانيا لأن تولي القضاء العسكري التحقيق في
Via
Asylum seekers drown on way to Australia
Six asylum seekers including two children have drowned after their boat bound for Australia sank, Indonesian authorities said.
The West Java Anti-People Smuggling Task Force says about 18 asylum seekers are missing after the boat, carrying about 70 people, sank off the coast of Java.Police Commissioner Fatma Noer says 46 others have been pulled from the water and rescue boats are still searching for the missing passengers.
She says the boat was allegedly heading towards Christmas Island.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says the deaths of the asylum seekers are awful.
She says the situation shows how desperate asylum seekers are.
"What this clearly shows is that we need to be offering safer pathways for people to reach protection and to ensure that they can seek asylum in a safe way," she said.
Meanwhile, the Federal Government has confirmed another boat carrying 92 asylum seekers has arrived at Christmas Island.
The President of the Christmas Island Shire, Gordon Thomson, says the boat arrived this morning and is in Flying Fish Cove with people still onboard.
He says Navy personnel are with the boat.
@'ABC'
Fugn WOW!!!
A 40 minutes Feature documentary will be available on November 11 for download on my video blog sebmontaz.com.
You're welcome to watch 14 minutes of the final film on sebmontaz.com.
This feature documentary was shot last summer.
I have been filming the Skyliners on an incredible exploration into the world of free flight.
Tancrède, Julien, Seb and Antoine are pioneers in ‘highlining’ - a vertiginous combination of climbing, slackline and tightrope walking.
We travelled from our home in Chamonix to our training ground in the Verdon gorge, testing the limits for our ultimate goal...
We rigged highlines on the skyscrapers of Paris, and finally came to the spectacular cliffs and fjords of Norway.
Months of training led the Skyliners team to attempt their dream of complete freedom... the freedom of flight !
More about the Skyliners team: facebook.com/pages/Skyliners/270006826367436
My Face Book page: facebook.com/pages/Seb-Montaz-Video-blog/149892381710213
Director/Editor: Sébastien Montaz-Rosset
Sound design: by talented Michael Denny michaeldennymusic.com/
Song used: The Rural Alberta Advantage. Frank, AB
Download the album/track here: amazon.com/Frank-AB/dp/B002A60FN4
Has America Become an Oligarchy?
At first, the outraged members of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York were mainly met with ridicule. They didn't seem to stand a chance and were judged incapable of going up against their adversaries, Wall Street's bankers and financial managers, either intellectually or in terms of economic knowledge.
"We are the 99 percent," is the continuing chant of the protestors, who are now in their seventh week of marching through the streets of Manhattan. And, surprisingly, they have hit upon the crux of America's problems with precisely this sentence. Indeed, they have given shape to a development in the country that has been growing more acute for decades, one that numerous academics and experts have tried to analyze elsewhere in lengthy books and essays. It's a development so profound and revolutionary that it has shaken the world's most powerful nation to its core. Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those fortunate enough to belong to the 1 percent, made up of the super-rich, stand on one side of the divide; the remaining 99 percent on the other. Even for a country that has always accepted opposite extremes as part of its identity, the chasm has simply grown too vast.
Those who succeed in the US are congratulated rather than berated. Resenting other people's wealth is viewed as supporting class struggle, which is something very frowned upon.
Still, statistics indicate that the growing disparity is genuinely overwhelming. In fact, the 400 wealthiest Americans now own more than the "lower" 150 million Americans put together.
Nearly two-thirds of net private assets are concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of Americans. In comparison, the upper 5 percent of Germany hold less than half of net assets. In 2009 alone, at the same time as the US was being convulsed by mass layoffs, the number of millionaires in the country skyrocketed.
Indeed, if you look at the reports it compiles on every country in the world, even the CIA has concluded that wealth disparity is greater in the US than in Tunisia or Egypt...
"We are the 99 percent," is the continuing chant of the protestors, who are now in their seventh week of marching through the streets of Manhattan. And, surprisingly, they have hit upon the crux of America's problems with precisely this sentence. Indeed, they have given shape to a development in the country that has been growing more acute for decades, one that numerous academics and experts have tried to analyze elsewhere in lengthy books and essays. It's a development so profound and revolutionary that it has shaken the world's most powerful nation to its core. Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those fortunate enough to belong to the 1 percent, made up of the super-rich, stand on one side of the divide; the remaining 99 percent on the other. Even for a country that has always accepted opposite extremes as part of its identity, the chasm has simply grown too vast.
Those who succeed in the US are congratulated rather than berated. Resenting other people's wealth is viewed as supporting class struggle, which is something very frowned upon.
Still, statistics indicate that the growing disparity is genuinely overwhelming. In fact, the 400 wealthiest Americans now own more than the "lower" 150 million Americans put together.
Nearly two-thirds of net private assets are concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of Americans. In comparison, the upper 5 percent of Germany hold less than half of net assets. In 2009 alone, at the same time as the US was being convulsed by mass layoffs, the number of millionaires in the country skyrocketed.
Indeed, if you look at the reports it compiles on every country in the world, even the CIA has concluded that wealth disparity is greater in the US than in Tunisia or Egypt...
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Thomas Schulz @'Der Spiegel'
Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating
"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."
"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"
"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."
Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.
"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"
"Well," he said, "it's just, their protests are all about... You know..."
"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."
"Whatever," he said, shrugging.
These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing...
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Matt Taibbi @'Rolling Stone'
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