food speculation update

Back in October 2011, I published a feature on food speculation (i.e. the gambling with vital commodities on international financial markets, which can leave real people unable to buy the food they need to survive), so I was pleased to hear yesterday that the EU is now taking action, as it sealed a deal on the reform of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), which sets new regulation for financial markets.

As always when the EU does a good thing, the UK government is fighting hard to stop it, but I understand it only succeeded in watering it down a bit, and campaigners from the World Development Movement are claiming the EU decision as a win for their fight against food speculation.

Here are the reactions from:

WDM: EU takes historic step to stop banks betting on hunger

Oxfam: EU deal on curbing food speculation comes none too soon

Friends of the Earth: New finance directive lays out improvements, but loopholes remain

See also this report from the Guardian: EU moves to curb food price bets by traders

Photo: WDM.

what the frack

I've avoided the topic of shale gas for a while, seeing that the stupidity of digging up fossil fuels that we can't afford to burn should be obvious to all, but as the UK government seems to have given up on renewable energies and embraced fracking, and we've had some lively protests this summer, I wrote a feature about the recent developments, mainly in Europe, where the responses range from an outright ban on fracking (in France) to enthusiastic support (Poland).

My feature is out today:

Dash for gas leaves Earth to fry

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 20, R901-R904, 21 October 2013, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.10.006

Free access to

HTML text

PDF file

A poster that appeared in the New York City subways a few years ago warned of the impact of fracking on the city’s water supplies. The state has since imposed a moratorium on fracking. (Used with permission from Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, produced with Center for Urban Pedagogy and graphic artists, Papercut.)

not buying that

Here comes a draft list of some companies I prefer (or ideally would prefer) not to support with my custom. Additional suggestions welcome

last updated 04.03.2016

food

TESCO supermarkets - notorious for their treatment of suppliers, and I also find the speed of metastasis quite scary, there are now half a dozen of them within easy cycling distance of my home. (I’ve also seen Tesco stores in Hungary and in the Czech Republic.) Support your local co-op store instead. As a member, you get profit shares, so if you pay too much the excess flows back into your pockets, not into those of some zillionaire shareholders.

A Tesco express at Budapest, Hungary.

Asda - owned by Walmart, which is the US equivalent to TESCO.

Nestle - there was a wave of boycotts and protest back in the last century, mainly based on the company’s aggressive marketing of infant formula milk in developing countries, where a lack of clean drinking water means that persuading mothers to replace breastfeeding with formula milk can actually cause additional deaths. I don’t think the company has resolved this issue in any satisfactory way, as a few local boycotts from recent years have highlighted, even though the global attention has faded. Also, coffee, chocolate etc. are product ranges where it is easy to find good quality FairTrade products, so there is no reason to buy unethical stuff.

Cadbury’s - OK, I know that they have now started to use FairTrade products (better late than never - but see what the BBC Watchdog programme says about their FairTrade aspirations!), but I seem to remember that they lobbied the EU to water down their definition of "chocolate" to allow the inclusion of soy fat instead of cocoa butter, and I still resent that. Currently, I buy either Divine Chocolate or Co-op own brand - which is also made by Divine.

books

A reader has nominated Amazon for being "union busters and tax dodgers". I agree with that argument, and I also would like to keep physical bookshops in business. However, as I'm normally after books that high-street bookshops would never dream of putting on their shelves, I couldn't do without a big online trader. As an author, I am also faced with the dilemma that amazon sells my books while most high-street bookshops don't.

I was interested to learn, however, that the website localbookshops.co.uk enables customers to order books online and have them delivered to their local bookshop. Which I guess helps to save the shops and stops all the cardboard packaging from piling up at our home. So I'll try that soon.

Update 2016: A piece in the Guardian on alternatives to amazon.

money

The big four high street banks: RBS/Natwest, Barclay’s, HSBC, Lloyds TSB - their failings have been well publicised in the context of the government bailouts for RBS and Lloyds, which were deemed “system-relevant and too big to fail.” Until recently, I wasn’t aware that there are alternatives, but it turns out one can find more ethical banks (e.g. the co-operative bank), and there are also a few credit unions in the UK (not as many as in the US) and a few building societies that survived the 1990s wave of demutualisation. Visit the Move Your Money website for more info.

Aviva insurances - just how much did they pay their bosses?

media

The Sun, The Times - I would never buy a copy of any newspaper owned by the Murdoch family, for obvious reasons. When I see one in a bin or on the ground I might pick it up, just to make sure the paper gets recycled. If I’m feeling very generous I might even flick through the pages.

Sky satellite TV – well, ideally.

Broadband providers – horrible people, but there are co-operatives springing up offering phone and broadband. Will try one of these soon and report back.

Google is among the companies passing on data to the NSA, so I'm now a happy user of DuckDuckGo. If for whatever reason I still need google, DuckDuckGo will run my google search anonymously for me in https mode. Still staying faithful to google's blogspot platform.

energy

Energy providers – as the main energy providers are selling the same electricity and the same gas through the same infrastructure, they can’t really compete properly, they can only trick people by offering cheaper rates in the short term, which will then revert to normal rip-off rates long term. – There are now a number of regional energy co-operatives, plus the co-operative energy operating across the UK, so, again, any excess flows back to the customers, not to the shareholders.

travel

Back in the days I used to book air travel via expedia, until I found out that they weren't offering any flights to Cuba. One can of course book directly from the airlines. In the UK, Co-operative travel is an alternative I'll try out the next time.

British Airways cancelled a return flight ticket when we had to change plans and couldn't use the outbound flight. They did so without telling us - even though they emailed about less important thing prior to the flights. The warning that they "may" do so is somewhere in the countless pages of small print you have to approve on booking, but it doesn't say they will do without warning. Here is a published report of a similar case. Not going to use them again.

ecce torpet probitas

by sheer coincidence I recently stumbled upon a song from the Carmina Burana which seems to sum up this week’s scandalous events quite nicely – it’s all about how honesty lies in a coma (the title), greed rules the world, people bend the rules to get rich quick, etc. Isn’t it amazing how prescient people were in the 12th century? Or alternatively, have we fallen back to the dark ages?

Latin text below the video, Latin text with English translation here (song no. 4, on page 5).

1.
Ecce torpet probitas,
virtus sepelitur;
fit iam parca largitas,
parcitas largitur;
verum dicit falsitas,
veritas mentitur.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad res illicitas
licite recedunt.

2.
Regnat avaritia,
regnant et avari;
mente quivis anxia
nititur ditari,
cum sit summa gloria
censu gloriari.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad prava quelibet
impie recedunt.

3.
Multum habet oneris
do das dedi dare;
verbum hoc pre ceteris
norunt ignorare
divites, quos poteris
mari comparare.
Omnes iura ledunt
et in rerum numeris
numeros excedunt

4.
Cunctis est equaliter
insita cupido;
perit fides turpiter,
nullus fidus fido,
nec Iunoni Iupiter
nec Enee Dido.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad mala devia
licite recedunt.

5.
Si recte discernere
velis, non est vita,
quod sic vivit temere
gens hec imperita;
non est enim vivere,
si quis vivit ita.
Omnes iura ledunt
et fidem in opere
quolibet excedunt.

move your money

Last week saw the UK launch of the "Move your Money" campaign, which aims to encourage people to move their accounts from the big casino banks to other institutions that operate more sustainably and for the benefit of the communities they serve, such as credit unions or the co-operative bank. There is an excellent overview of the options available to UK customers in last Saturday's Guardian:

Unhappy with big banks? You could move your money

You can find more info on the campaign sites of:

Move your Money (UK)
Move your Money (US)
Bankwechselkampagne "Krötenwanderung jetzt!" (Germany)

I've been slightly ahead of the (UK) wave and started moving my finances in November, though there are still some things left to move like insurances. (I have to admit though I was stung into action by hearing from someone who switched their finances to a credit union 20 years ago.)

While I'm not sure whether the gambling boys up there in the upper floors of those shiny skyscrapers actually notice what we're doing down here in the real world, I think it is important to withdraw their apparent legitimation, the pretence of doing a useful service to the real economy. If they are just left with their casino operations, it will be easier to legislate against them and to let them crash.




So while they are busy with the bonuses, and incidentally we're also celebrating the international year of the co-operatives, move your money now!

year of the co-operatives

The UK launch of the UN-supported International Year of the Co-operatives is today, so watch out for activities up and down the country. I've joined the Mid-counties Co-operative a couple of years ago - think it was after writing this piece about bees problems and their "Plan Bee" initiative, which drew my attention to their membership info, which has a nice honeycomb design (as has my membership card).


(our local co-op foodstore)

Last year I also switched my energy supply to the newly founded cooperative energy, and started moving my finances from a bailed-out bank to a cooperatively owned one. Still a few thing left to switch (such as insurances), but I find it hugely comforting in these scary times that we can actually stop feeding the fat cats and support the existing alternatives to predatory capitalism, including cooperative businesses and fairtrade products.

ten fatal flaws of the financial markets

The cover story of this week’s Spiegel (issue 50, page 40) is a lengthy but very enlightening report on the role of “the markets” in the whole mess we’re in, culminating in a list of ten things that are catastrophically flawed in the global financial system. As I didn’t find an English version I could link to, here’s my own summary:

1. The trillions circulating in the parallel universe of complex finance products (exceeding the turnover of the real world economy of goods and services by more than an order of magnitude) tend to multiply in ways that produce speculative bubbles.
2. These funds go looking for returns that would be unrealistic in the real world markets, thus sucking more and more money out of the real markets into the parallel world.
3. Banks keep inventing new finance products which tend to be opaque and often carry high risks.
4. Banks operate with insufficient levels of own (real world) funds.
5. Financial markets are intransparent and their risks unknown.
6. Concentration in these markets has produced mega banks that are too big to fail and thus a risk to the whole system.
7. Computerised trading encourages herding effects which lead to positive feedback loops, hence, disaster.
8. Interconnectedness of financial markets via derivatives synchronises them, another positive feedback loop that puts oil on the fire of any crisis in one market.
9. Financial markets resist attempts at regulation or supervision, evading into even more opaque systems.
10. Financial markets undermine conventional market economy and democracy.

The article concludes that of these 10 “monstrous” dangers, the G20 countries are currently addressing a grand total of 2, namely No. 5 transparency and No. 4 the minimum capital of banks. (Well done to our politicians – even I as a complete lay person in all things financial was aware of at least three of these! OK, only since I wrote the feature on food speculation this summer).

Now I’m really scared.

I’m beginning to realise that anything we do down here in the real world will have no effect whatsoever on this monster that’s probably going to eat us some time soon. Somebody should develop a clever algorithm that stops all these problems, for instance by introducing negative feedback and punishing herding behaviour. Trouble is, most of the people clever enough to do this are bound to be very busy making the problems worse.



The €ye of the storm ... European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

don't play with food

Following the deregulation of the finance markets in the early 00s (whose bright idea was that?), finance people have discovered food commodities as a new toy to play with, and the prices have become unpredictable and decoupled from the real world parameters such as supply and demand. While the guilty parties deny that their gambling has any impact on the real world, experts increasingly believe that speculation does drive real people into real hunger.

For more info about this scandalous situation (and some of the science behind it, including, again, herding), read my feature in today's issue of Current Biology:

Don't play with food
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 19, pages R795-R798, 11 October 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.037

summary and free access to pdf file

On the same issue, the World Development Movement (also mentioned in my feature) have today issued a press release:

450 economists call on G20 finance ministers to stop speculation fuelling hunger

when, where, and why people riot

I've rounded up some experts to explain the science behind the "English riots" that happened in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and some other cities at the beginning of August. Geography, social issues, crowd psychology, network science all have something to say about it, though detailed research, such as the Guardian's collaborative effort with the LSE, Reading the Riots, is only just beginning.

My feature about all this is out in Current Biology today:

Why do people riot?

Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 18, R673-R676, 27 September 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.015

FREE access to full text and pdf file

PS: Results of the detailed study of the 2011 riots are published here.

broken britain 2011

budapest globalised

The next thing I noticed about Budapest (after the red trolleybuses) was how thoroughly Western brands have taken over the place. It's not just the fast food outlets and coffee shops that you find everywhere in the world. The supermarkets are called Tesco and Spar, the banks are German, the phone booths (rusty and red, like the trolleybuses) were decorated in the livery of German Telekom (of T mobile fame) and had their trademark pinky-purple receivers:



Add to that the German-built cars that block the roads (traffic is a bit of a nightmare on the main routes through the city, but amazingly, drivers very willingly stop to let pedestrians cross), and you'll come to the conclusion that the profits of virtually every economic activity that goes on around there (with the possible exception of haircuts) will be skimmed off by somebody in the west. Oh well.

Funny that after 18 years in the UK, finding the German logos in Hungary is just mildly amusing. It's the Tesco branches, ranging from "expressz" to "hipermarket" that really annoyed me. From our experience here we know that these spread like Japanese knotweed.

why the state should fund universities

I never thought this needed explaining, but seeing that the government releases details today of what they admit is a move "to shift a greater proportion of [Higher Education] funding from the taxpayer to the individuals who benefit" (quote from the comprehensive spending review, page 51, last bullet point), it may be time to spell out the blatantly obvious.

The three words "individuals who benefit" are the most insiduous piece of misleading political propaganda that I've come across in a long time. So, for the benefit of the individuals who are busy wrecking higher education:

* giving people as good an education as their brains can soak up is not primarily to benefit the individuals, it is in the best interest of society. We all, i.e. society, need well-educated scientists, medical doctors, even lawyers and accountants. These days, we need more of these than of people who can stack shelves without complaining.

* yes it is expensive to educate people, but the benefit to society outweighs the cost by a large factor. Imagine the talented people who would normally study decided to work as bar staff instead. In the words of one ex Harvard president: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance"

* on top of the benefit that academically educated people offer society by doing intelligent work, they also earn more more on average, so pay more taxes (disproportionately so in a progressive tax system), so they also are "the taxpayer" who funds their studies.

* even when the state pays the full cost of tuition, students still have their bills to pay for the duration of the study, and often make a sacrifice in terms of what living standard they could afford if they went to work straight after leaving school.

* Burdening students with the cost of their tuition on top of that will definitely scare away some talents (no matter how clever the payback arrangements) - especially if they have the opportunity to study elsewhere for free.

* Furthermore, I am worried that the "market solution" will turn degrees into commodities. If students are regarded as paying customers and have to pay close to the full cost of their education, they could very easily get the idea that with the payment they have purchased the right to get a degree regardless of their talent or effort.

These are the reasons why in civilised countries the state does (and should continue to) fund higher education, collecting at most a small nominal fee from students to avoid abuse of the facilities offered. It's not that difficult to understand, is it?



(protest posters seen in Oxford last week)

I'm pleased to report that we have a very active protest group here, the Oxford Education Campaign, which has already managed to scare away business secretary Vince Cable (the fact that the business secretary is in charge of HE tells you a lot about what's wrong here!). You can look up OEC on facebook or email oxfordunicuts@gmail.com to find out more.

A nationwide demo against HE cuts will take place on Wednesday 10.11. 11.30am at London, starting at Horse Guards Avenue - more details here.

PS: More about today's government announcement in the Guardian.
Also, my blog entries now get a tweet button, please use it generously (noting that both the button and the counter refer to the URL shown at the top of the browser, so if you're looking at a page with several blog entries, you'll have to click a specific blog entry first to get a specific tweet and counter result for it):

Tweet

C'est la lutte finale

I had a crazy week, but finding this made my day:

The illustrations by Gerhard Seyfried with the German lyrics of the Internationale were originally a poster typically found on the toilet walls of shared student flats in the late 70s. Hitching his cartoons up to a recording is a brilliant idea. And of course there is plenty of stuff in there that fits this week's events in the UK amazingly well.

how greed wrecked our economy

I don't care much about money, so it takes exceptional circumstances to get me thinking about the state of the economy, but I have a feeling that the time has come to look at these things more closely than I normally do. What I'm particularly struggling to understand right now is why and how politicians (especially in the UK!) have allowed finance to run wild without realising that this would result in the systematic destruction of the real-world economy, i.e. of the companies that actually produce useful things but only yield modest profits.

There was an interesting comment by Andrew Simms in yesterday's Guardian, explaining how several British corporations originally founded with an agenda committed at least partially to moral principles (e.g. by Quaker families) came to be corrupted and wrecked by corporate finance. Some quotes I highlighted:

Twinings' fate highlights the quietly corrosive, long-term effect of the excessive privilege given to finance. Over decades its hypnotic hunger for unrealistic profit has corrupted or wrecked many other eminent corporations in Britain – often companies that, like Twinings, helped define our national identity.

Glib dismissals that this is the way of the world, the inevitable outcome of otherwise efficient markets, ignore the fact that indulging the lords of finance has wrecked the productive economy, just as much as it bankrupted the public finances.

If the corporation is to have a future, the public sphere will have to demand a redesign – and return finance to its proper, subservient role of supporting the wider economy.

On a related note, in a comment published last week, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang challenges the notion that deregulated finance helps the economy overall. In the long term, Chang argues, the economy was doing better in the "bad old days" of the 1960s and 70s, when regulations were much tighter.



This charming little beast guards the boundary of the City of London, I think it may be telling us something about what's going on in the square mile!

obscure search terms will find ... me!

My blog enjoys a reasonably good ranking in Google’s PageRank system, which decides which sources appear at the top of a list of search results. This means that from time to time, Google does actually send people my way. Naively, I might have thought that those googlonauts who touch down on my site would have started their voyage with search terms relating to the big issues that I write about, such as nanotechnology, genomics, autism, bioethics, etc. On second thoughts, however, one realises that such topics are also well-represented on sites that are still a few rungs higher up on the ranking ladder, including those of the BBC and major newspapers. The traffic that’s left for me is looking rather different and possibly more interesting.

When I realised that my visitors had typed in things like “philosophy of greed” or “think logarithmically” rather than biochemistry or nanotechnology, I started a month-long observation of the Google searches leading to my blog, of which I can now reveal the results. The only words I have excluded from the ranking are prose and passion – their presence in the title of my blog means that I get ranked highly in searches involving these words, even though people who look for prose pieces about cancer will not be very happy with the results my blog can offer. (I think the over-representation of “Prose of …” searches actually reveals a real flaw in Google’s algorithms; people setting up such things should realise that the title of a blog may be chosen in a roundabout way and may not literally specify the content of the site.)

So here comes the countdown:

In 6th place, Oxford – typically in combination with more unusual terms, including “Parson’s pleasure” which is the title of this blog entry. One customer’s search for “naked dons parson’s pleasure” led to the same entry, of course.

5th, an eternal favourite, and one that alerted me to the eccentric qualities of the search terms that lead people my way, is “greed philosophy” (or, more rarely, greed combined with other terms, such as “How is greed Neanderthal”). The relevant blog entry doesn’t really answer any deep philosophical questions about greed – it is in fact a short appreciation of a book by Naomi Klein.

4th, Sale el Sol – fair enough, that’s a video of a live appearance by Shakira which I embedded in my blog here. Oh, and there have been reports that this will also be the title of the album to be released later this year, so no wonder there are lots of searches.

3rd, another eccentric favourite, is “shark images” and other shark-related stuff. All I did was to write a blog entry about the Headington shark, an Oxford landmark somewhat off the beaten tourist track.

2nd, various members of the Strada family, including Katharina Strada (mistress of emperor Rudolph II), lumped together under Strada searches, and presented here.

And the unlikely winner is …

the Spanish painter Ana Medem, sister of film director and auteur Julio Medem. Ana died very young, and Julio used her paintings in the film “Caotica Ana,” which I reviewed here.

Obviously, having all these (relatively) popular search terms included in one blog entry will completely confuse the Google bots. So if you arrived at this entry hoping for insights regarding Ana Medem or one of the other five top topics, please follow the links provided.

For the future, what I really need to do to attract a larger audience via Google, is to cultivate more eccentric topics and to flag them up in my titles. Paradoxical but true. I should start a series about obscure composers right now.

the best things in life are free

I enjoyed Katharine Hibbert's recent piece in the Guardian on how she survived with (virtually) no money in London for a year, living in squats furnished from skips etc. Have to say I like to check skips as well, it's just the permanent moving around from one squatted house to the next, taking all one's possessions along, which would be a little bit tricky for me at this stage of my life.

That piece was extracted from a book which I understand is out today:

Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society by Katharine Hibbert, published by Ebury Press

but obviously, I'll wait and see whether I can get it for free ... Coming soon to a freecycle group near you.

greed is bad for your mental health

It's always been kind of obvious to me, but apparently not to Tony Blair -- that greed doesn't make people happy. Psychologist Oliver James has explained this in a little more detail in his book "Affluenza" which came out a bit over a year ago, and now in a companion volume, which is a bit more academic, and which is called "The selfish capitalist: the origins of affluenza." Basically, James says that countries with a more social-democratic model of capitalism, such as Germany, have half the rate of depression and similar mental illness as the US, UK, and those that follow the "greed is good" philosophy of Blatcherism, so he concludes that a culture based on excessive greed and inequality is bad for people's mental health.

Basically, you'll probably find all the arguments in the works of Erich Fromm from the 60s and 70s already (e.g. To have or to be?), but if you need them spelled out in the modern context, take a look at these:

Affluenza (paperback edition) reviewed by Nicholas Lezard
The selfish capitalist reviewed by Madeleine Bunting
Selfish capitalism is bad for our mental health (an essay by Oliver James)

vultures

Another depressing fact I learned this weekend about the depths our greed-fuelled society has sunk to:

"Vulture funds buy up sovereign debt issued by poor countries at a fraction of its face value, then sue the countries in courts - usually in London, New York or Paris - for their full face value plus interest."

And apparently it's very respectable London law firms that help these vultures to get their pound of flesh out of starving African nations.

source

more vulture news


I think that words like "evil" and "terrorist" are becoming entirely meaningless if they don't include the guys in smart suits that do these kinds of things and probably pick up honours from the queen for their services to finance.

the natural philosophy of greed

More insights from Naomi Klein, as to why greed has become the only game in town:

Thanks a million, Ayn Rand, for setting the greedy free
The trickle-down theory beloved of Greenspan and his ilk is less a philosophy than a handy excuse for avarice

Now she should talk that greed thing through with her agent and publisher, because I would have bought her book if it wasn't so bloody expensive ... :) Oh well, I'll just wait for the paperback.


PS (July 2010) Seeing that this page seems to pop up frequently when people google for the terms "philosphy + greed", I'm thinking of adding some value to it. While I haven't studied the philosophy of greed as such, I have written a (tongue in cheek) piece about the thermodynamics of greed. Specifically, I find it puzzling that, while the third law of thermodynamics states that overall disorder must increase, so all "sorting" activities must be paid for by creating random mixtures elsewhere, the economy tends to be driven by forces that make rich people richer and poor people poorer, so reduces entropy. That piece was published in German in Nachrichten aus der Chemie in April 2007 and will feature in my next German book due to appear in 2011. Might do an English version for the blog, watch this space.

neoliberalism

I've been wondering for a while why this new type of capitalism we see eating away our public services and infrastructures is spreading so aggressively now (while it wasn't happening, say, in the 60s and 70s). Last week George Monbiot published a comment that answered some of my questions:

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

And this week he showed a nice example of how a private/public funding initiative (PFI) wrecked a hospital that would have needed 30 million pounds of public money for refurbishment. Now it needs 30 million pounds every year to service the debt to the private investors. Madness or what ?


This great free-market experiment is more like a corporate welfare scheme

Oh well. I'm wondering how long this whole bubble will last before it all ends in tears ...