It’s very strange in today’s neo-liberal world. To use the old expression ‘to smell a rat’, there is so much malfeasance, manipulation and malpractice going on that whilst it’s obvious that there is a rat, or many rats, stinking to high heaven, they are not so easy to see and nail down.
I was watching Max Keiser earlier in the week and he and Stacy Herbert took issue with David Cameron’s assertion that profit is not a dirty word. In neo-liberalism, profits feed bonuses and stock options, they are manipulated by companies to give the best return for feeding the greed of stockholders, CEO’s and the like and that is the kind of profit that Cameron is all about. What these profits do not do is feed economic growth and as such they are essentially nothing to do with the governance of the country or anything to do with Cameron other than to expose his economic illiteracy. Well, he is nothing if not a man of the profiteers.
Business old style was all about ploughing profits back into the business, maintaining and upgrading plant, expansion and taking on more staff. That is no longer the case and as such Cameron is failing real business and high streets just as he has failed as an MP entrusted with the governance of a nation. It’s all of a piece with privatising the NHS, schools and vital services; everything is for profit as the nation struggles to recover from the Bankers crimes and the crisis they caused. It’s why Osborne took the EU to court and won, to protect the bonuses of the banks from being capped.
The trickle down effect does not exist, to pretend for a moment that paying wages at minimum rate is part of a trickle down effect is naive in the extreme. In reality, workers are exploited so that the profit for their labour rises to the top and stays there. There is no growth in that, only exploitation. Osborne’s predictions for recovery have been pushed further and further back. He recently trumpeted his success, saying theUKeconomy is ‘turning a corner’ and yet warned it is still in the early stages. Of course it is, he is not investing in the real economy, jobs are not being created and homes are not being built. He is still pursuing bottom up policies to rob, and blame, the poor to reward the rich.
When Cameron talks about making theUKprofitable, the question always has to be, for whom? He is not doing what he ought to be doing by investing in the real economy, he is promoting business as usual in rip off Britain as fuel prices are set to increase with winter ahead and in the real economy that means many more people will suffer this winter, but we can be sure that won’t be fuel company profits when they get reported next spring.
https://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/episode-509-max-keiser-049/
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f54735a-25f6-11e3-8ef6-00144feab7de.html
https://www.faireconomy.org/research/TrickleDown.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24011795
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24475868
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
