Cowardly Capitalist
Millionaire Richard Branson demanded compensation for his failed bid to take over the British lottery from incumbent rivals Camelot. Having accused Camelot's Directors of taking the people's lottery money to pay for their bloated salaries, Branson wants to raid the Lottery Commission's raffle-tin for a reported eight million pounds sterling - money that he said should only be spent on worthy causes.
When he lost the bid last year Branson fulminated: 'the Civil Service in Britain wants to take the safe option as often as possible. There is not enough encouragement of risk-taking.' According to investment journalist Daniel Ben-Ami, Branson is right, British capitalism is risk averse - its just that Branson is a classic example. In fact, says Ben-Ami in his new book Cowardly Capitalism, 'the real problem currently threatening global finance is not wanton risk-taking, but excessive risk aversion'.
Big losses in the spring of 1994 brought to light the real character of the capitalist firm, when dependable manufacturers like Proctor & Gamble, Air Products and Chemicals, Metalgesellschaft and Kashima Oil lost $157M, $113M, $1.34B, and $1.45B respectively. These losses were made on the derivatives market, revealing the extent to which industry was in the business of financial speculation. The growth of such speculative investments did not arise out of an irresponsible love of risk, however, but from the desire to hedge against risk in the future. The exponential growth of trading in ever more surreal financial instruments grew out of the perceived need to insure investment against losses. 'American corporations' wrote Gregory Millman 'by and large approach the financial markets not as a source of speculative profits but as a source of insurance' (Around the World on a Trillion Dollars A Day, p157). The difference between those investors and Richard Branson, is that 'risk-averse' does not even want to pay the price of the lottery ticket to collect his millions.
Cowardly Capitalism is published by John Wiley, price £19.99
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471899631/o/qid=981882191/sr=8 -1/026-4512280-4819604
Trafficking in human misery
British Prime Minister Tony Blair demanded French action against 'bogus asylum seekers' crossing the channel, to prevent 'trafficking in human beings'. Though Blair's government has distanced itself from the nationalistic racism of its Tory predecessor, an instinct for middle class respectability is reproducing those prejudices in a contemporary form. The formula of allowing entry from outside the European Union on grounds of political persecution alone means that migrant labour is criminalized, while the intelligentsia is allowed in. That way Britain poses as friend to the persecuted while casting those who need to work to live as being greedy and self-interested. The educated few who are involved in political opposition can be recruited by military intelligence as useful contacts. To get work, migrants are forced to claim persecution to stay, in which way the government makes liars of them.
Standing truth on its head, the government claims that refugees cost sterling 835M, when in fact labour, refugee and otherwise is the source of Britain's economic growth. In fact, to meet labour shortages in schools and hospitals, the British government is recruiting teachers and doctors from New Zealand and South Africa (showing a characteristic preference for white colonials). But those, like broadcaster John Humphries or World Bank economist Nigel Harris, who claim that it would be more useful to capitalism to open the borders, forget that capitalism thrives by imposing order. The system of regulating labour is not one that the government is willing to give up, however badly the policy plays to its more liberal constituency. The cost cited is not the cost of the refugees, but the cost of the system of restraining them against their will. The traffick in human beings would not exist without the restraints imposed by Tony Blair.
-- James Heartfield