Archive for April, 2010

Does Greece have a Tea Party?

26th April, 2010

Dear readers….this is my latest Huffington Post.

“The humiliating surrender of Greece’s economic autonomy came just last Friday, 23 April, 2010. The democratically elected Prime Minister, George Papandreou transferred to unelected officials in Brussels and Washington the power to determine Greece’s fiscal policy. In other words, decisions about taxation, and how tax revenues should be spent.

In a 26 April interview with the Financial Times on the island of Rhodes, the Prime Minister, George Papandreou admitted his country had accepted “a partial surrender of sovereignty”.
“Our struggle” he went on to say, “will be to recover our autonomy and liberate Greece from the surveillance imposed by the forces of conservatism”.

Back in 1765 Bostonians such as James Otis and Samuel Adams regarded “taxation without representation as a form of tyranny”.

Today, a nation that served as the cradle of western democracy will effectively be governed by remote, invisible and unaccountable officials. Read post »


Banksters for Parliament?

6th April, 2010

I wrote the piece below  for the Labour Party site Labour List but it got bumped across to Left Foot Forward.  While waiting for its publication I did some superficial research on the use of the term ‘banksters’.

It is a term in wide use in the US, where it is associated with progressive political forces, and where the debate pits ‘Wall St’ against ‘Main St’, or ‘Wall St’ against ‘the little guy’ or ‘taxpayer’.  See for example, this piece by the wonderful Rolling Stone writer on finance, Matt Taibi, and the associated cartoon.

Two Irish authors, David Murphy and Martin Devlin have written a book titled ‘Banksters – how a powerful elite squandered Ireland’s wealth’. So the Irish are not precious about the term.

But here in the UK the word is not widely used. Its use tends to be associated with the far right, and their anti-Semitism.

Which might explain British nervousness with the term. On the other hand our fastidiousness may just reflect the collusion of our various elites – political, media and otherwise – with the finance sector, and the excessive deference bestowed on bankers, sorry banksters.

Anyway, here follows the piece on how banksters are standing as parliamentary candidates for the Conservative Party.

Read post »


A moral economy: interest, usury and Islam

8 April, 2010

This is a piece written for a conference on Islamic finance to be held on 29th April in Edinburgh.

The notion of the moral economy is intrinsic to all the major faiths, each of which has placed ethical boundaries on the behaviour of those active in the market.

The ten commandments of the Jewish Torah or Christian Old Testament laid down an ethical boundary – or regulation – for work:

“for six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

The Qu’ran lays down clear ethical boundaries for lending and borrowing, and for trade.

These boundaries have been vital in the maintenance of great civilisations. As  Karl Polanyi, the great economic historian argued (in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation”) – the regulation of the conduct of human affairs by law  is vital to the maintenance of civilised society, and to the market, because

“robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation….neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed”.

So one of the great contradictions we in the West face today is this: law – or regulation –  needs boundaries, in particular ethical boundaries; but also geographical and political boundaries.

However markets, in particular financial markets, abhor boundaries.

How do we reconcile therefore, the ethical boundaries/regulation advocated by the world’s great religions with the resistance of, in particular financial markets, to these boundaries? Read post »

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