Budget 2014 Takes Doublespeak to New Depths

Casual readers of the budget might wonder whether it had been written by chancellor George Osborne or George Orwell. A garden city built in a quarry and growth built on a reinflated housing bubble are hardly reassuring evidence of the economy based on "more economic security and economic resilience" that Osborne claims to be his objective.

Most shockingly, the freezing of the carbon tax and the reduction in the rate of air passenger duty for long-haul flights makes it plain that the chancellor has no understanding of what resilience means, and how our failure to tackle climate change threatens it.

Resilience has followed hard on the heels of that much-abused concept 'sustainability' in helping to define the key characteristics of a sustainable society. Unlike the financial system, which cracked when it came under pressure, a resilient system would be able to bounce back even in the face of unexpected challenges; unlike the railway line at Dawlish, resilient infrastructure is based on built-in redundancy that means there is always an alternative when a system comes under pressure from an unpredictable event. It is exactly this sort of resilience that has been designed out of our economy and society by years of lean management and just-in-time production systems. From computer systems to food supply chains, the globalised market-place has left us less resilient than we have ever been.

So what would a budget for resilience and security actually look like? Let's start with finance. A resilient model for banking would insist on the breaking up of the consolidated megabanks so that banks were no longer 'too big to fail', and no one bank would be large enough to bring down the whole system. Mr Osborne could pop across to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) and have a word with his colleague Vince Cable who operates RBS on behalf of its owners, us, the citizens of the UK. He might subtly suggest that he break it up into a system of local community banks, which could be required to actually act like banks, building supportive relationships with the local businesses that a resilient economy requires, rather than acting like casinos.

While on the issue of finance, we should also tell George that his desperate attempt to reinflate the housing bubble through extending the life of Help to Buy is storing up exactly the sort of catastrophic financial collapse that put us in this economic mess. It also does nothing for those who are most in need of reasonably priced housing, since it will only support mortgages they cannot afford and encourage house prices to rise even further beyond their reach.

The most fundamental cause of social insecurity in modern Britain is the failure of the housing market to provide affordable, comfortable homes to those who need them. Here the chancellor could act swiftly to bring in rent controls which would simultaneously reduce the massive amount of public money being wasted on housing benefit. He could also raise the borrowing limits on local authorities to enable them to build houses for those on their lengthy and growing waiting lists.

The greatest source of insecurity we all face is the unpredictable consequences of climate change, and it is here that Osborne's words ring most hollow. Here we see clearly the government's back-tracking on this most vital issue, building on the earlier folly of reducing green levies on energy companies, now further decreasing incentives to business to reduce their carbon emissions by freezing the carbon price floor. He has learned nothing about resilience from the winter's devastating storms and floods, but the urgent need for a consistent policy on climate change is now more evident than ever.

Real energy security comes from demand reduction as a result of improved energy installation in homes, combined with local generation from renewable energy sources. This government's mixed messages on renewable tariffs and taxes has undermined several proposed investments in wind generation, destroying jobs in my own home region of the South West. A higher rate of feed-in tariff limited to small-scale and community-owned electricity generation projects would be the best policy in the budget to ensure real energy security.

With a budget that achieves the exact opposite of the objectives the chancellor has set himself we are all wondering what will come out of the Ministry of Truth next. A Localism Act that centralises planning perhaps; or a Big Society that cuts benefits for the poor and vulnerable?

Written by  Molly Scott Cato Professor of Green Economics at Roehampton University and Green candidate in the European Elections

First published at The Huffington Post

Follow Molly Scott Cato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MollyScottCato

Boris, the super rich and pay inequality

Jenny Jones AM is leader of the Green Party on the London Assembly and Green Party Mayoral candidate for 2012

Nobody could be surprised by Boris Jonson's latest column defending bankers and the rest of London's super-rich elite.

He’s an expert in baiting the left on subjects like bankers’ pay, then switching his ground to promote the living wage. But he isn’t just a newspaper troll. He is also the Mayor of London, and he is using this position of considerable power and influence to help the elite reshape London, with real world consequences.

Did you know, for example, that the only time the Mayor has travelled to Brussels in person was to lobby for the hedge funds?

His advocacy of the wider financial services sector is incredibly one sided, without any consideration of their role in the wider London economy.

He has talked about their tax contributions, but not their tax avoidance and subsidies. He calls them the engine of our economy, but doesn’t seem too concerned that (so the New Economics Foundation tell me) only 6p of every pound deposited with RBS/Natwest goes into British businesses. He has lobbied against the bankers’ bonus cap, the Financial Transaction Tax and a number of other modest reforms of the banking industry.

His advisors, his research, the evidence he draws on are all aligned with the needs of the elite he defends.

Where does the Mayor imagine the 1 per cent make all of their money, and hold all of their wealth? What about the mis-selling scandals, the continued exploitation of workers in shakily built factories, the naked profiteering of the big six energy companies? He doesn’t want to look at the damage done by an unequal society to London’s economy and Londoner’s living standards.

The 1 per cent lobby against a mandatory living wage, saying it would mean job losses, while their pay rose 14 per cent in a year. Yes, some of that extra pay will go towards their sizeable tax returns. But one result of 700,000 Londoners earning less than a living wage is a £700 million annual subsidy from taxpayers to employers. Why not cut out the taxman and share the profits more fairly in the first place?

The Mayor champions a voluntary living wage, but in the same breath defends the right of employers to pay their employees poverty wages.

The 1 per cent are driving up property prices in the capital, exacerbating a housing crisis that has no end in sight. London is already the most unequal city in the developed world, with the wealthiest tenth of the population amassing 273 times the wealth owned by the bottom tenth. Most wealth at the top lies in pension funds, investments and property.

This is bolstered by taxpayer subsidies like Help to Buy and housing benefit, policies the Mayor supports that avoid the root causes of our housing crisis and instead help ordinary people scrape by to the benefit of the 1 per cent.

The Mayor is their champion, supporting the construction of incredibly expensive tower blocks that are often build on the site of demolished council housing.

What’s really infuriating is that the Mayor actually has a good news story on pay, but he doesn’t give it any attention.

I’ve tracked the difference in pay between the highest and lowest paid staff in the different bodies the Mayor oversees – City Hall (the GLA), Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police Service and the London Fire Brigade. Since he became Mayor, pay has actually become slightly more equal across all bodies except TfL. This is both because top pay has slightly dropped and bottom pay has risen.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say everything has been rosy in these organisations over the past five years. But I doubt the Mayor would say it has been a disaster. He just doesn’t want to look at whether he can replicate this move towards equality across London at large.

Why can’t he get on and make London more equal, a place where getting a job really does pay enough to build a life on, rather than a city where more and more of us feel like we are just sweated by a global elite?

First published at Left Foot Forward

IPCC Report Summary - 95% Caused by Human Activity

Headline messages in the IPCC report:

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.
• Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
• Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0-700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.
• Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence).
• The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence). Over the period 1901–2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.19 [0.17 to 0.21] m.
• The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification.
• Total radiative forcing is positive, and has led to an uptake of energy by the climate system. The largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1750.
• Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
• Climate models have improved since the AR4. Models reproduce observed continental-scale surface temperature patterns and trends over many decades, including the more rapid warming since the mid-20th century and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions (very high confidence).
• Observational and model studies of temperature change, climate feedbacks and changes in the Earth’s energy budget together provide confidence in the magnitude of global warming in response to past and future forcing.
• Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes. This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
• Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900 for all RCP scenarios except RCP2.6. It is likely to exceed 2°C for RCP6.0 and RCP8.5, and more likely than not to exceed 2°C for RCP4.5. Warming will continue beyond 2100 under all RCP scenarios except RCP2.6. Warming will continue to exhibit interannual-to-decadal variability and will not be regionally uniform.
• Changes in the global water cycle in response to the warming over the 21st century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be regional exceptions.
• The global ocean will continue to warm during the 21st century. Heat will penetrate from the surface to the deep ocean and affect ocean circulation.
• It is very likely that the Arctic sea ice cover will continue to shrink and thin and that Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover will decrease during the 21st century as global mean surface temperature rises. Global glacier volume will further decrease.
• Global mean sea level will continue to rise during the 21st century. Under all RCP scenarios the rate of sea level rise will very likely exceed that observed during 1971–2010 due to increased ocean warming and increased loss of mass from glaciers and ice sheets.
• Climate change will affect carbon cycle processes in a way that will exacerbate the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (high confidence). Further uptake of carbon by the ocean will increase ocean acidification.
• Cumulative emissions of CO2 largely determine global mean surface warming by the late 21st century and beyond. Most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 are stopped. This represents a substantial multi-century climate change commitment created by past, present and future emissions of CO2.

First published at Climate and Capitalism 

Interview with Naomi Klein - Big Green in Hock with Big Business

During your career you’ve written about the power of brand names, populist movements around the world, and free market fundamentalism. Why now a book and film on climate change?

You know, The Shock Doctrine, my last book, ends with climate change. It ends with a vision of a dystopic future where you have weak infrastructure colliding with heavy weather, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina. And rather than working to prevent future disasters by having lower emissions, you have all these attempts to take advantage of that crisis. At the time, it seemed to me that climate change was potentially going to be the biggest disaster-capitalism free-for-all that we’ve seen yet. So it was quite a logical progression for me to go from writing about disaster-capitalism in The Shock Doctrine to writing about climate change. As I was writing The Shock Doctrine, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina. There are chapters in that book on both of those events. Then I came to the idea that climate change could be a kind of a “people’s shock,” an answer to the shock doctrine – not just another opportunity by the disaster capitalists to feed off of misery, but an opportunity for progressive forces to deepen democracy and really improve livelihoods around the world. Then I came across the idea of “climate debt” when I was doing a piece on reparations for Harper’s magazine. I had a meeting with Bolivia’s climate negotiator in Geneva – her name is Angélica Navarro – and she put the case to me that climate change could be an opportunity for a global Green Marshall Plan with the North paying climate debts in the form of huge green development project.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy you wrote about the potential of a “people’s shock.” Do you see that it’s happening, a global grassroots response to some of the extreme weather we’re experiencing?

I see a people’s shock happening broadly, where on lots of different fronts you have constituencies coming forward who have been fighting, for instance, for sustainable agriculture for many, many years, and now realize that it’s also a climate solution. You have a lot of reframing of issues – and not in an opportunistic way, just another layer of understanding. Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies. But the fact that it’s also ruining the planet adds another layer of urgency. And it’s that layering of climate change on top of other issues that holds a huge amount of potential.

In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful, grassroots responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right from the beginning, where Occupy Sandy was very strong, where new networks emerged. The first phase is just recovery, and now as you have a corporate-driven reconstruction process descending, those organized communities are in a position to respond, to go to the meetings, to take on the real estate developers, to talk about another vision of public housing that is way better than what’s there right now. So yeah, it’s definitely happening. Right now it’s under the radar, but I’m following it quite closely.

In a piece you wrote for The Nation in November 2011 you suggested that when it comes to climate change, there’s a dual denialism at work – conservatives deny the science while some liberals deny the political implications of the science. Why do you think that some environmentalists are resistant to grappling with climate change’s implications for the market and for economics?

Well, I think there is a very a deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right on all counts. Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do lower emissions. So I think it’s a really important question why the green groups have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical conclusions. I think the scientists Kevin Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre have been the most courageous on this because they don’t just take on the green groups, they take on their fellow scientists for the way in which neoliberal economic orthodoxy has infiltrated the scientific establishment. It’s really scary reading. Because they have been saying, for at least for a decade, that getting to the emissions reduction levels that we need to get to in the developed world is not compatible with economic growth.

What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late 60s and in the 70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called “command-and-control” pieces of legislation. It was “don’t do that.” That substance is banned or tightly regulated. It was a top-down regulatory approach. And then it came to screeching halt when Regan was elected. And he essentially waged war on the environmental movement very openly. We started to see some of the language that is common among those deniers – to equate environmentalism with Communism and so on. As the Cold War dwindled, environmentalism became the next target, the next Communism. Now, the movement at that stage could have responded in one of the two ways. It could have fought back and defended the values it stood for at that point, and tried to resist the steamroller that was neoliberalism in its early days. Or it could have adapted itself to this new reality, and changed itself to fit the rise of corporatist government. And it did the latter. Very consciously if you read what [Environmental Defense Fund president] Fred Krupp was saying at the time.

It was go along or get along.

Exactly. We now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, "sue the bastards;" it’s, "work through corporate partnerships with the bastards." There is no enemy anymore.
More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. That’s the model that has lasted to this day.

I go back to something even like the fight over NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Big Green groups, with very few exceptions, lined up in favor of NAFTA, despite the fact that their memberships were revolting, and sold the deal very aggressively to the public. That’s the model that has been globalized through the World Trade Organization, and that is responsible in many ways for the levels of soaring emissions. We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.

It’s not that the green groups were spectators to this – they were partners in this. They were willing participants in this. It’s not every green group. It’s not Greenpeace, it’s not Friends of the Earth, it’s not, for the most part, the Sierra Club. It’s not 350.org, because it didn’t even exist yet. But I think it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.

At least in American culture, there is always this desire for the win-win scenario. But if we really want to get to, say, an 80 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions, some people are going to lose. And I guess what you are saying is that it’s hard for the environmental leadership to look some of their partners in the eye and say, "You’re going to lose."

Exactly. To pick on power. Their so-called win-win strategy has lost. That was the idea behind cap-and-trade. And it was a disastrously losing strategy. The green groups are not nearly as clever as they believe themselves to be. They got played on a spectacular scale. Many of their partners had one foot in US CAP [Climate Action Partnership] and the other in the US Chamber of Commerce. They were hedging their bets. And when it looked like they could get away with no legislation, they dumped US CAP completely.
The phrase win-win is interesting, because there are a lot of losers in the win-win strategy. A lot of people are sacrificed in the name of win-win. And in the US, we just keep it to the cap-and-trade fight and I know everyone is tired of fighting that fight. I do think there is a lot of evidence that we have not learned the key lessons of that failure.

And what do you think the key lessons are?

Well one of them is willingness to sacrifice – in the name of getting a win-win with big polluters who are part of that coalition – the communities that were living on the fenceline. Communities, in Richmond, California for instance, who would have been like, “We fight climate change and our kids won’t get as much asthma.” That win-win was broken because you get a deal that says, “OK you guys can keep polluting but you’re going to have to buy some offsets on the other side of the planet.” And the local win is gone, is sacrificed.

I’m in favor of win-win, you know. The book I am writing is arguing that our responses to climate change can rebuild the public sphere, can strengthen our communities, can have work with dignity. We can address the financial crisis and the ecological crisis at the same. I believe that. But I think it’s by building coalitions with people, not with corporations, that you are going to get those wins. And what I see is really a willingness to sacrifice the basic principles of solidarity, whether it is to that fenceline community in Richmond, California or whether it’s with that Indigenous community in Brazil that, you know, is forced off their territory because their forest has just become a carbon sink or an offset and they no longer have access to the forest that allowed them to live sustainably because it’s policed. Because a conservation group has decided to trade it. So these sacrifices are made – there are a lot of losers in this model and there aren’t any wins I can see.

You were talking about the Clean Development Mechanism as a sort of disaster capitalism. Isn’t geoengineering the ultimate disaster capitalism?

I certainly think it’s the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that’s the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn’t threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be scaled up.

[There is a]willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of climate change that I find really chilling. I don’t think we have the language to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to stop and we’re choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like "genocide," and the European and North American delegates get very upset and defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want you to disappear; we are doing this because we don’t care essentially. We don’t care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That’s a side effect of collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the disappearance it doesn’t make a difference whether there is malice to it because it still could be prevented. And we’re choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of the crises that we’re facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves.

You’ve said that progressives’ narratives are insufficient. What would be an alternative narrative to turn this situation around?

Well, I think the narrative that got us into this – that’s part of the reason why you have climate change denialism being such as powerful force in North America and in Australia – is really tied to the frontier mentality. It’s really tied to the idea of there always being more. We live on lands that were supposedly innocent, “discovered” lands where nature was so abundant. You could not imagine depletion ever. These are foundational myths.

And so I’ve taken a huge amount of hope from the emergence of the Idle No More movement, because of what I see as a tremendous generosity of spirit from Indigenous leadership right now to educate us in another narrative. I just did a panel with Idle No More and I was the only non-Native speaker at this event, and the other Native speakers were all saying we want to play this leadership role. It’s actually taken a long time to get to that point. There’s been so much abuse heaped upon these communities, and so much rightful anger at the people who stole their lands. This is the first time that I’ve seen this openness, open willingness that we have something to bring, we want to lead, we want to model another way which relates to the land. So that’s where I am getting a lot of hope right now.

The impacts of Idle No More are really not understood. My husband is making a documentary that goes with this book, and he’s directing it right now in Montana, and we’ve been doing a lot of filming on the northern Cheyenne reservation because there’s a huge, huge coal deposit that they’ve been debating for a lot of years – whether or not to dig out this coal. And it was really looking like they were going to dig it up. It goes against their prophecies, and it’s just very painful. Now there’s just this new generation of young people on that reserve who are determined to leave that coal in the ground, and are training themselves to do solar and wind, and they all talk about Idle No More. I think there’s something very powerful going on. In Canada it’s a very big deal. It’s very big deal in all of North America, because of the huge amount of untapped energy, fossil fuel energy, that is on Indigenous land. That goes for Arctic oil. It certainly goes for the tar sands. It goes for where they want to lay those pipelines. It goes for where the natural gas is. It goes for where the major coal deposits are in the US. I think in Canada we take Indigenous rights more seriously than in the US. I hope that will change.

It’s interesting because even as some of the Big Green groups have gotten enamored of the ideas of ecosystem services and natural capital, there’s this counter-narrative coming from the Global South and Indigenous communities. It’s almost like a dialectic.

That’s the counternarrative, and those are the alternative worldviews that are emerging at this moment. The other thing that is happening … I don’t know what to call it. It’s maybe a reformation movement, a grassroots rebellion. There’s something going on in the [environmental] movement in the US and Canada, and I think certainly in the UK. What I call the “astronaut’s eye worldview” – which has governed the Big Green environmental movement for so long – and by that I mean just looking down at Earth from above. I think it’s sort of time to let go of the icon of the globe, because it places us above it and I think it has allowed us to see nature in this really abstracted way and sort of move pieces, like pieces on a chessboard, and really loose touch with the Earth. You know, it’s like the planet instead of the Earth.

And I think where that really came to a head was over fracking. The head offices of the Sierra Club and the NRDC and the EDF all decided this was a “bridge fuel.” We’ve done the math and we’re going to come out in favor of this thing. And then they faced big pushbacks from their membership, most of all at the Sierra Club. And they all had to modify their position somewhat. It was the grassroots going, “Wait a minute, what kind of environmentalism is it that isn’t concerned about water, that isn’t concerned about industrialization of rural landscapes – what has environmentalism become?” And so we see this grassroots, place-based resistance in the movements against the Keystone XL pipeline and the Northern Gateway pipeline, the huge anti-fracking movement. And they are the ones winning victories, right?
I think the Big Green groups are becoming deeply irrelevant. Some get a lot of money from corporations and rich donors and foundations, but their whole model is in crisis.

I hate to end a downer like that.

I’m not sure that is a downer.

It might not be.

I should say I’m representing my own views. I see some big changes as well. I think the Sierra Club has gone through its own reformation. They are on the frontline of these struggles now. I think a lot of these groups are having to listen to their members. And some of them will just refuse to change because they’re just too entrenched in the partnership model, they’ve got too many conflicts of interest at this stage. Those are the groups that are really going to suffer. And I think it’s OK. I think at this point, there’s a big push in Europe where 100 civil society groups are calling on the EU not to try to fix their failed carbon-trading system, but to actually drop it and start really talking about cutting emissions at home instead of doing this shell game. I think that’s the moment we’re in right now. We don’t have any more time to waste with these very clever, not working shell games.


Jason Mark is editor of Earth Island Journal. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

First published at Earth Island Journal

The Green Party takes on the banks

This is a guest post by Daniel Key who is an ex member of Haringey and of Tower Hamlets Green Party. He is a member of the Policy Committee of the Green Party of England and Wales. He tweets at @danieloliverkey.

Last weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales made history by joining the United States Green Party in calling for an end to the private creation of money by banks. After a debate on the motion at the Autumn Conference in Brighton, the Green Party has collectively decided to instead place this power with a democratically accountable National Monetary Authority at the Bank of England. This represents a huge change in Green Party policy, as we are now calling for full reserve banking, alongside other radical policies such as a citizen's income, land value tax and of course the decarbonisation of the entire economy as we move to a post carbon and equitable world.

           
To recap: currently private banks create money as debt when they make loans. This electronic bank money now represents 97% of the UK money supply, with only 3% being created debt-free by the government in the form of notes and coins (a good place to start to understand the UK money system is the one hour documentary 97% Owned. This money is allocated by the lending decisions of the high street banks, and so we see money pumped into the housing market (putting house prices way beyond the means of young people) instead of small businesses, as banks receive collateral if mortgage holders default on their loans. This is massively undemocratic, as control of the banks' power to create money is in the hands of its board members, who are only accountable to the bank's shareholders.

 Money creation is pro-cyclical – too much is created in an economic boom, whereas we are currently living through a period where lending is restricted and money is therefore destroyed when debt is paid down. This is why the Bank of England has introduced quantitative easing to indirectly get money into the economy, and the government has introduced the Help to Buy scheme to encourage the public to take on more debt, creating a housing bubble in the process.

 From an environmental perspective, the biggest problem with the current money system is that the level of debt is constantly growing. This in turn means the economy is compelled to grow, even when this leads to environmental destruction. This is the engine behind such environmentally damaging innovations such as planned obsolescence (designing products with a limited useful life to perpetuate consumption), as Michael Rowbotham recognised in his book The Grip of Death over a decade ago. The current debt-based system of creating money is incompatible with the goal of a sustainable, steady-state economy, as pointed out in the recent green economics book Enough is Enough.

To achieve a steady state economy we must eliminate the growth imperative that is built into the existing banking system.

Full reserve banking is recognised as the missing link in the move to a sustainable economy by a number of leading green economists and thinkers. These include:

Herman Daly (grandfather of green economics and the author of Steady State Economics)

As Caroline Lucas points out in this video, the best way to use the debt-free money created as a result of these reforms (estimated at £1 trillion over 20 years) would be to spend it on the Green New Deal in an effort to build the green economy. This way we can get unemployed people into labour-intensive jobs, with more taxes paid by a larger workforce, creating a virtuous circle for government revenues and society as a whole.

The potential transition scenario to a full reserve banking system, as well as the finer details of the reforms, are laid out in the book Modernising Money. We have adapted these proposals to suit Green Party principles.

With the Icelandic parliament looking into the potential of introducing full reserve banking[3], we may have a working example of these reforms in the years to come. As the proposer of the motion, Andrew Waldie, puts it, “This motion strikes a blow at the heart of financial capitalism by removing from banks their power to create money”. We may have improved our policies, but the real battle will be taking this power back from the banks when our movement reaches a critical mass.

Read the Green Party Banking Reform Motion here - http://2joz611prdme3eogq61h5p3gr08.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Green-Party-C%CE%A903-Banking-and-Monetary-Reform-Composite.pdf

Read the Background Paper to the motion here - http://2joz611prdme3eogq61h5p3gr08.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Banking-reform-motion-GP-Conf-Autumn-2013-Background-Paper-submitted.pdf

Check out some Frequently Asked Questions about full reserve banking here -
http://www.positivemoney.org/faqs/

UK is urged to invest £50bn in a greener economic recovery

Campaigners have warned that Britain is hurtling towards a new economic crisis, and call for a £50bn "Green New Deal" to create more sustainable growth and better-paid jobs and equip the country for a low-carbon future.

After two quarters of better-than-expected GDP growth and a batch of positive economic indicators – including rising house prices and upbeat business surveys – the coalition is hoping the summer economic bounce will turn into a longer-term recovery. But five years on from their first demands for a radical reworking of Britain's business model, the Green New Deal group, which includes Green party MP Caroline Lucas, economist Ann Pettifor and tax expert Richard Murphy, says the need for an alternative approach is greater than ever. In a report published on today, it argues that recent growth has been based on unsustainable rises in consumer spending and house prices and could end in "the mother of all credit busts".

"Recovery is an interesting word to apply to an economy that is marked by rapidly rising personal debt, highly insecure and often low-paid work, and rising underlying carbon emissions. What we're calling a recovery is poor, divided, indebted and polluting," said Andrew Simms, chief analyst at thinktank Global Witness and an author of the report.

Central banks have poured cheap money into financial markets to drive down interest rates and prevent deflation and depression. But Green New Deal says this is a dangerous gamble: "Given the choice, they prefer to have the problem of asset prices going through the roof than the problem of deflation. If they are wrong and the bubble bursts before the recovery arrives, it will be the mother of all credit busts," it says.

Under an alternative plan in the Green New Deal report, the government would invest £50bn into expanding green technologies over five years, building low-cost housing, and employing a "carbon army" to insulate hundreds of thousands of homes and reduce energy use.

The authors say these measures would create more, and better-paid, jobs than the current debt-fuelled bounce, which Pettifor described as an "Alice in Wongaland" recovery. Lucas, who is the MP for Brighton Pavilion, said a grassroots workforce could be trained to lag Britain's chilly lofts "within weeks". "Ministers want to cut a nice big ribbon on a new nuclear power station – but this would be far more effective in getting our emissions down quickly," she said.

Real incomes have continued to fall over the past year, as above-target inflation has outpaced pay growth, in what the TUC has described as the greatest wage squeeze since the 1870s. Green New Deal argues that if more workers were paid a living wage it would help to create more sustainable consumer demand. Frances O'Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, which begins its annual congress in Bournemouth on Sunday, supported the Green New Deal initiative, saying: "The green economy already employs nearly a million people, in areas from electric-car manufacturing to wind-turbine installation. Implementing some of the ideas in this report could help these industries create more of the skilled and well-paid jobs we need if we are to build a sustainable recovery."

The authors suggest their pro-growth policies could be paid for by scrapping the controversial HS2 rail project; cracking down on tax evasion; and launching a fresh round of quantitative easing.

Instead of using electronically created money to buy government bonds from City investors, as the Bank of England has done with almost all of the £375bn-worth of QE it has undertaken since 2009, the proceeds this time would be used to invest in green projects, and pay off private finance initiative debts, freeing up public money to be spent elsewhere. The report argues that investing in affordable housing, in particular, would benefit those on lower incomes more than the better off. "It can mean that people have more disposable income after housing costs, which in turn boosts spending in the local and national economy," the report says.

The authors argue that a rapid boost in the supply of housing would also help to "dampen the housing bubble beginning to appear in response to government measures such as Help to Buy, which facilitates prospective homebuyers to find a deposit". The controversial Help to Buy scheme was the centrepiece of George Osborne's March budget, and has been questioned by a number of critics, from the former governor of the Bank of England, Lord King, to the International Monetary Fund, amid fears that it could create a new property boom.

Mark Carney, the Bank's new governor, has said he is "very alert personally" to the risk that a housing boom is emerging – and said he was ready to burst any bubble, by targeting mortgage lending.

Reforming the bailed-out banking system is another central proposal of the report, suggesting that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is majority-owned by the taxpayer, could be broken up into a series of regional lenders that would build relationships with local industries. "All the mechanisms which have been brought into play to encourage lending to the productive part of the economy don't seem to be working," says Simms.

Labour has promised to introduce a British Investment Bank, to boost lending to businesses; but it has eschewed much of the Green New Deal agenda over the past five years, focusing on an emergency VAT cut as the centrepiece of its policies to create a recovery.

Other members of Green New Deal include Charles Secrett, former director of Friends of the Earth; Jeremy Leggett, chairman of green energy firm Solarcentury; and Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian.

First published at The Observer newspaper

You can read the full report here

The Corporate Welfare State

 

The BBC reports that Starbucks has voluntarily agreed to pay £10 million in tax this year, and again next, in a change of heart on recent behaviour from the multi-national, multi-million pounds making business in the UK. Clearly, media exposure leading to a fear of putting off customers has played the major part in the company’s decision here, but there is a much wider perspective to this story.

The tax authorities make ‘sweet heart’ deals with the large corporations, grateful for any crumbs of tax revenue that they can get from these companies, whilst allowing others to pay nothing at all, through clever accountancy schemes which offshore the profits made in the UK market place. But who can blame the civil servants when the politicians from the establishment parties uniformly react to this type of behaviour in these two ways?

First is to say it’s all perfectly legal (although these tax schemes are so complicated I don’t think they really know whether some are legal or are not). Second, is to pronounce pompously that it’s just globalisation, you can’t do anything about it, we have got to attract private investment at all costs, be competitive, jobs and so on, blah, blah, blah.  

This reasoning rarely gets challenged in the mainstream media even though the unfairness of corporations getting all the benefits to run their businesses that tax payers provide; the courts, police, educated employees etc etc, without contributing to the costs of providing them is the real issue here. And is it so impossible to do anything about it?

Let’s take the legal excuse first. As Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt said recently, his company obeys the tax laws, if the government wants to change these laws they should get on with it. Which is a fair point generally, but it doesn’t stop Google finding ways around these laws, and given its global presence, it is a particularly hard company to tie down to any one particular country, which they of course exploit like hell.

But it does also beg the question, why doesn’t the government change the law? This is when we get into the second excuse, of it being a pointless and undesirable course of action, so powerless that national governments have become that they must ‘attract’ business by allowing them a free tax ride. Admittedly, companies like Google and Amazon (to a lesser extent), can be hard to pin down, but surely it is not beyond the wit of any government to design a system which captures at least some of the tax due on UK transactions? After all, we know the government has been monitoring everyone’s internet habits, don’t we?

Starbucks is an altogether easier proposition when they have a physical presence on almost every high street in the country. All profits on selling coffee and cakes etc in the UK should be taxed and they should be forced by law to declare them this way. If they don’t like it, then they can close down, and it won’t bring the UK economy to standstill. Indeed, independent cafes will fill the void if there is a market for this type of business, and let’s not forget that Starbucks have an unfair competitive advantage over these cafes at the moment, who do pay UK tax.

It seems as though paying tax is only for the little people, and this extends to personal taxation too, where if you are rich you pay next to nothing, but if you are just an ordinary person, you get clobbered.

 

What mugs we all are!

Tottenham Community Rallies to Save Historic Market

On Thursday 26th July the Wards Corner Community Coalition (WCC) launches their exciting community-led plan to regenerate Seven Sisters indoor market in a further show of defiance against Haringey Council and developer Grainger PLC's plans to demolish this much loved community asset.

The Wards Corner market building has been an icon of Seven Sisters since it first opened for business in the early 1900s. The elegant, steel-frame, red-brick structure housed Wards Furnishing Stores, a classic London department store, until it closed in 1972.

Today Wards Corner is the home of a diverse and bustling local market, including London's most vibrant cluster of Latin-American traders.

Dark Clouds over Wards Corner

On 25th June 2012, after years of controversy and community outcry, Haringey Council backed with a 5-4 vote a plan led by one of the UK's biggest landlords, Grainger PLC, to demolish the building and replace it with a residential and commercial development which would be prohibitively expensive for the existing occupants to return to. Haringey Council is a development partner of Grainger on the project, and has been unresponsive to the concerns of local residents.

Mrs Malti Patel has been running a successful shop on West Green Road, part of the coveted development site at Seven Sisters tube for 30 years, but now feels fearful and betrayed. “The council should be protecting hard-working, honest people like me, but I am being ignored. I will lose my business, my job, my friends, my security and my home,” she said.

The Wards Corner Community Coalition (WCC), a campaigning group formed by local residents and traders, has been fighting this one-size-fits-all planning approach since 2007. In an early WCC victory for the community, a judicial review and court of appeals ruling quashed an earlier plan by Grainger in 2010.Then, with huge public support including over 2000 signatures from local traders and residents, and in collaboration with  Planning Aid for London, English Heritage, Friends of the Earth and the Federation of Small Businesses, they managed to see off another version of the same project by the developer in July 2011.

The Community Plan

In defiance of Grainger’s planning approval for demolition, the community proposes an alternative plan based on restoration and developing the area’s existing character and strengths. WCC propose to restore the heritage character of the building and retain the existing market and small businesses whilst providing for new retail and restaurant space, an art gallery, performance space and a community room for events and meetings. WCC also foresees a wider regeneration of the area creating new affordable housing on the site around the market and bringing empty buildings back into use, addressing the goals set out in the original development brief.

Abigail Stevenson, an architectural designer who has worked with the WCC to develop the new Community Plan, stresses the need for planning to engage with and reflect the wishes of the local community. “A community-led alternative would be much better and more appropriate,” says Stevenson. “Architecture is not just about building buildings. You have to engage with people, because if people aren't on board with your ideas, they're not going to work.”

Local resident Candy Amsden, who is a long-time member of the Wards Corner Community Coalition, remembers well her first impressions on entering the Edwardian building:

“I saw this amazing space, and an amazing possibility. There's a set of sky-lights with beautiful cornicing and light just pours in around the pillars inside,” she said.

Amsden sees the Community Plan as a way to foster local enterprise in post-riots Tottenham.

"Small businesses will use other small businesses, they'll use the local accountant, local suppliers. Tesco's and Sainsbury's won't do that," she said.

WCC continues to make their case for community-led development with the plan’s public unveiling this week in Tottenham, which will focus on gathering further feedback and questions from local residents and traders through open small-group discussion.

The Community Plan application has been submitted to the Haringey Council planning authorities, and will be launched publicly at Tottenham Chances at 7pm on Thursday 26th July.

Press:

Email wardscornercommunity@riseup.net

+44 (0)7908 705 377

For info on the community plan including images:

WardsCornerCommunityPlan.wordpress.com

The Green Economy

It will stop climate change and the extinction of species and in so doing will create high growth rates and millions of jobs. It’s seen as a miraculous weapon. Through it, global capitalism will be stabilised. And then it will be sustainable as well.

But what is the green economy? In it, policy parameters are supposed to ensure the flow of capital to make markets and the economy "greener" and create "green" jobs. Enterprises are to pay an "appropriate" price for environmental damage. And not least: the state is supposed to orient its public procurements to sustainability criteria and create sustainable infrastructures. 

In 2012, the green economy is on everyone’s lips. For 20 years now people have been rhapsodising over the greening of capitalism. At the same time it is clear that somehow sustainable development is not faring so well. CO2 emissions are increasing. Biological diversity is contracting. Famine, impoverishment and social inequality are increasing in many countries. The much feted "conciliation of ecology and economy" is proving hard to construct. The green economy is not what many want to see it as: a magical formula which will offer solutions on a silver tray for many problems.

With this brochure the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation wants to demonstrate that green economy is a contested term, which can be filled with many different contents – according to different interests. And we hope to show where the proposals fall short, seek a too hasty compromise with the ruling forces and suppress alternatives rather than promote them.

It is clear that if the green economy does not break with the structures of the old economy and merely serves as a growth program for the latter, it will quickly lead to disillusionment and lose its sheen.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is the research institute of Die Linke, (The Left Party, Germany)

Download Beautiful Green World HERE (PDF)

Democratise the money supply to save the planet

It seems like nowadays that every person and every country in the world is in debt. Ever since the financial crisis in 2007-8 which began with the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, world leaders have been frantically trying to save other private banks and financial institutions from failing by pumping trillions of dollars onto their balance sheets and the wider economy. In the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown spent a total of over £1 trillion, which was the same as 31% of GDP in March 2010. In the United States of America, the government at the time committed an incredible £9 trillion to support Wall Street (source New York Times). By socialising the losses of the private finance sector, there are now sovereign debt crisis across Europe, which threatens the membership of the Euro currency and even the European Union itself.

Which begs the question - why did we have to spend all this money, which would have been better used on preventing the looming catastrophes of peak oil and runaway climate change? What makes private banks so special?

To cut a long story short, we are in this debt crisis because of our deeply flawed banking and monetary system. In 2012, private banks create 97% of the money in the economy as debt, whilst the government only creates 3% in the form of coins and paper money. Until this system is fixed, we will continue to spiral further and further into a debt crisis, instead of focusing on fixing the environmental crisis and other problems facing our country.

In the United Kingdom, the publicly owned Bank of England has a monopoly on creating coin and paper money, which it prints each year and circulates into the economy. This is good news, as the Bank of England, and by extension the Treasury, earns 'seigniorage', the profit difference between the cost of the paper and its value (i.e. twenty pounds for twenty pound note). In 2008, the profit to the Treasury from this was £2.33 billion, money which gets spent on public services or reducing tax. 

However, the Bank of England does not have a monopoly on creating electronic money, which private banks can legally create every time a customer opens a current account with them or applies for a mortgage. As Martin Wolf, the chief economics editor at the Financial Times puts it, 'The essence of the contemporary monetary system is the creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending.'

This is bad news! Private banks are owned by private shareholders, and are run for profit. It isn't in their interests to make sure that money is spent on productive businesses, good jobs, environmentally friendly projects, etc. It's in their interests to create as much money as they can and invest it in the most profitable sectors they can, which tend to be property (hence the housing bubble and subsequent crash) and environmentally destructive but very lucrative projects such as coal power plants, oil rigs, the tar sands projects in Canada and other nefarious schemes. As customers, we have no say over where our savings, or what should be *our* money supply, is invested.

Luckily, there is a solution. The monetary reform campaigning group Positive Money have been raising this issue for several years, and have even drafted legislation which would take the creation of money away from private banks and put it back under the democratic control of the government. You can learn more about this issue on their website, as well as on this one hour documentary called '97% Owned'.

Even better, as you are (hopefully!) a member of the most democratic political party in England & Wales, you can make it Green Party policy today to reform this system. I have submitted a motion to SOC to amend current Green Party policy EC661 to the following motion:

Synopsis:

97% of all money in the UK is created by banks. Our government prints bank notes and coins, but private banks create electronic deposit accounts. This state of affairs drives unsustainable growth and is the root of our debt crisis. This is damaging and unnecessary, and should be changed.

Amend Policies for a Sustainable Society EC661 in its entirety with the following motion:

Motion:

The Green Party will remove the ability of banks to create money and lodge the power and responsibility of creating new money solely with the state. New money will be created when necessary by the Bank of England, as determined by the politically-independent Monetary Policy Committee, and credited to the Government for use as Parliament sees fit (see EC676). Banks will not be able to lend money in customer's current accounts, effectively moving to a full reserve banking system. Customers current account money will be 100% safe, as opposed to the current fractional reserve banking system where we have to bail out banks. Banks will be permitted to lend money in savings accounts that they hold on deposit for a fixed term, but only for the duration of that fixed term or notice period. The emphasis in monetary policy will be to control and redirect the creation of money towards socially and environmentally sound areas of the economy, and away from unsustainable and consumption-driven areas.

If you want to support this motion, please email soc@greenparty.org.uk today and write something like:

"I would like to support the motion below proposed by Daniel Key. 

Text of motion (above)

Name: 

Local Party:

Postcode:

Membership Number (if you have it)"

Please do this ASAP and ask your colleagues/friends to do this, and together we can regain control of our money.

Please use the comments box below to ask any questions you may have about this issue or the policy motion.

Written by Daniel Key

Haringey Green Party

Tax Giveaway to Multinational Corporations

This week is parliament's last chance to amend the 2012 budget: a budget entrenching a strategy for the UK and the global economy that has already failed. Time is short. The Commons will have just three days to debate and scrutinise the finance bill – 670 pages of complex legislation, much of which poses threats to jobs, public services and fiscal stability in the UK and abroad, not least by opening up a major new area of tax avoidance for large multinational companies. Parliament must find its voice, and do what it can to soften the blow.


George Osborne's message is clear: the wealthiest individuals and corporations will be further rewarded, despite clear signs that they are neither creating jobs nor helping to reduce public borrowing. Meanwhile the growth of a finance-driven economy vulnerable to the twin storms of financial crisis and climate change will be further incentivised.


The chancellor's unfair and regressive decision to cut the 50p top rate of tax may have stolen the headlines, but at the heart of the budget there is another tax giveaway to multinational companies. These are the proposals to change the tax rules covering "controlled foreign companies" (CFCs). By redrawing the scope of taxes on large UK companies' overseas subsidiaries, the proposed changes will make it far easier for multinationals to shift profits into tax havens. While Osborne claims to find aggressive tax avoidance "morally repugnant", his budget gives the green light for big business to step up their tax dodging.


A glimpse at some typical British companies shows quite how much potential tax revenue they generate in developing countries. Barclays makes almost £1bn profit in Africa alone; the brewing company SABMiller makes £1.9bn across Africa, Asia and Latin America; mining giant Anglo American declares profits of £2.8bn in Africa and Latin America. At the 2011 average global rate of 23%, the corporation tax on these three companies' profits alone would contribute well over £1bn to government revenue in developing countries.


These changes will undermine the UK's public finances. Bizarrely trailed as a measure to "[protect] the UK tax base against avoidance", in fact the Treasury itself estimates that the CFC rule changes will cost the exchequer nearly £1bn a year: part of a £20bn package of corporation tax cuts over the course of this parliament.


The government's current proposals simply ignore the vast majority of ordinary taxpayers who want big business to pay its fair share of taxes. According to a YouGov poll conducted for the development agency ActionAid, just 14% of UK voters support proposals to weaken the UK's rules against tax havens. By contrast an overwhelming 79% want stronger tax avoidance action from the government, including 73% of Conservative voters and 87% of Liberal Democrat voters.


But the impact of these tax changes will also go well beyond the UK. Because they effectively reward UK multinationals who shift their profits from the global south into tax havens, this charter for profit shifting will also damage the public finances of poor countries where UK multinationals operate.


ActionAid has estimated that watering down the UK's anti-tax haven rules is likely to cost exchequers in the global south £4bn a year. Just as health services and education are being attacked in the UK, so the budget's new CFC rules are also effectively an attack on developing countries' ability to fund their own public services. Anti-poverty campaigners and concerned voters – many in my constituency – have raised concerns over the proposals. The government's response has been predictably muted. The Treasury says simply that it hasn't considered the impact on developing countries because the rules are "designed to protect the UK tax base".


Setting aside the fact that the Treasury itself expects an erosion of the UK tax base from these rule changes, it makes no sense to ignore the effect of multinational tax breaks that may deny poor countries revenue equivalent to nearly half the UK aid budget.

Taking account of the budget's impact on revenues at home and abroad isn't a radical ask: the World Bank, the OECD, the UN and the IMF all called on G20 countries last year to undertake precisely this kind of "spillover" analysis to ensure that changes to their tax regimes don't damage the fiscal efforts of developing countries. The government has thus far ignored this advice, just as it has ignored the UK public's overwhelming distaste for multinational tax dodging. It's time to make it listen.

Written by Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader
First published at The Guardian here

Greenwash Olympics in London

Human rights and environmental pressure groups have joined forces to campaign against three sponsors of the London Olympics.

The protest campaign - called Greenwash Gold 2012 - has targeted Dow Chemical Company, BP and Rio Tinto.

The group has made three animated films about the firms and members of the public will be invited to vote online for the "worst corporate sponsor".

All three companies have defended their ethical record.

The films include footage of:

A survivor of the Bhopal gas leak disaster in 1984. Dow agreed to purchase the Union Carbide Corporation - whose subsidiary Union Carbide India ran the Bhopal pesticide plant - in 1999. The purchase was completed in 2001.
A representative from the Gulf Coast where communities have been dealing with the environmental impact of BP's oil spill in April 2010
A woman from Utah who claims she is fighting against "life-threatening" air pollution levels caused by one of the mines from which Rio Tinto is providing the metal for the Olympic metals.

'Money talks'

Meredith Alexander, who quit as a commissioner of the 2012's sustainability watchdog in protest over the link between the Bhopal disaster and Dow Chemical Company's involvement in the Games, chaired the campaign launch.

"The Olympic values are all about celebrating our common humanity. But the Olympics is also big business," she said.

"There is an expensive machine behind the Games that is funded by corporate sponsors. Sadly when these sponsors are selected, money talks much more loudly than values."

Dow has always denied any liability for the chemical gas leak and maintains the £288m ($470m) settlement for those affected is fair and final.

BP refused to comment on Greenwash Gold 2012, but in June 2010, the oil firm's regional vice president Peter Mather defended the company's actions.

"Our focus as a company is 100% on the Gulf of Mexico, doing the right thing - doing the right thing on the seabed and our focus is also on the shore," he said.

A Rio Tinto spokesman, defended the company's actions saying: "We operate within the parameters of our air permits and are consistently in compliance with US Environmental Protection Agency and Utah Division of Air Quality regulations, which are based on strict standards for protecting human health."

London 2012 is yet to comment on the campaign launch.

First published by the BBC here

The campaign group for a cleaner Olympics are the Counter Olympics Network

Downhills School Govenors Sacked by Government

Six months ago I volunteered to become a local authority-appointed community governor at Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London. Last Thursday, I tuned in to BBC radio to learn that I had been fired. Our governing body was dissolved without notice and I, a "big society" governor who is not a parent at the school, may not be allowed to set foot inside again. Many of my former colleagues have been reduced to tears: what had we done to deserve to be despatched in such a ruthless manner?


The reality is that we were victims of our own success. The secretary of state had to remove us, using his sweeping powers under the new Academies Act, because of the resistance we had put up to plans to force the school to become an academy. With our parent-led protest and threats of judicial review, we were in danger of setting a precedent for other schools opposed to a forced academy conversion.


On 8 March, shortly after the Downhills Ofsted report was published (which judged the school inadequate and put it in special measures), my fellow governors met department of education officials and were told that Michael Gove was minded to impose an academy order. Under this order a school can be forced to become an academy governed under an interim executive board (IEB).


The following Monday we wrote to Mr Gove. We said we did not rule out becoming an academy but also considered remaining a community school in local authority control a viable option. We wanted to consult the school community on both options before making a decision. In the end we conducted our own ballot, which showed that 90% of parents who responded were against academy conversion.


In our letter we presented our action plan to address the serious failings identified in the Ofsted report. We recruited an executive head from an outstanding school in Haringey to assist our deputy head, who had been praised by Ofsted. We suggested the governors ourselves should be mentored by the governors at the outstanding school.


We asked for more information about the Harris Federation– the government's preferred sponsor – and for an explanation of why they were considered right for Downhills. We requested raw data for each Harris academy showing progress in maths and English, particularly for disadvantaged children.


Instead we were dismissed without answers. The summary justice dispensed by Gove to our governing body and that of neighbouring Nightingale school indicates that he will not let anything stand in the way of his grand design. But he is making a serious mistake in treating parents and governors who question his plans with such brazen contempt.


We are not Trotskyites or political extremists – far from it. One of my colleagues is a hedge-fund trader who spends every Wednesday evening on football training classes. I am a lawyer who has spent the past five years working at a UN war-crimes tribunal. I joined Downhills governing body because I wanted to do some useful work in the local community. I knew next to nothing about education policy and had no bias against academies. My own poorly performing state secondary school became an academy years after I left, and I only wish it had changed earlier.


I have nothing against the Harris Federation, whose track record is by all accounts impressive. What I do not accept is the argument that academies are the only means of achieving a good education for our children. There are plenty of outstanding schools in local authority control. How a school is run is what's important, not whether an academy or the local authority is in charge.


What persuaded me to join the Downhills campaign were the views of the other governors, parents, staff and the local community. They had legitimate concerns and felt the school could be turned around under local authority control. Many of their arguments I disagreed with, but as the majority wanted the school to remain under a democratically elected, accountable local authority, I was persuaded they were right. At the very least I believed they were entitled to have some say on who should be in charge of the school when such dramatic changes were under consideration.


No doubt Gove's supporters will say Downhills was a failing school that needed dramatic intervention. I find that argument unconvincing. Downhills is certainly not among the worst performing schools as our key stage 1 results for 2011, which at 61% were above the national floor standard, indicate. And it cannot be right that every underperforming school needs to be converted to an academy. Where there are strong arguments for an alternative this should be properly considered. The views of parents and the local community should also be taken into account.


It seems that we will never know the answers to the questions we asked. Our dissolution and replacement with an (Interim Executive Board) IEB, highlights the academies' lack of transparency. As David Wolfe, a leading education lawyer points out, academies do not want to disclose information about how they are run and often back out of legal challenges to avoid so doing. We have league tables for primary and secondary schools and we now need them for academies too. Otherwise parents and governors can have no way of gauging whether a centrally selected "chain" academy provider is a suitable match for their school.


The big guns that have been brought in on the new IEB running Downhills will be under tremendous pressure to deliver results. No one would question their credentials – the new IEB members include "superhead" Dame Sylvia Morris, honoured for her work at a primary school in Southwark, Dan Moynihan, the CEO of the Harris Federation, as well as Robin Bosher, its primary director. But they have never been seen at the school before and we can only wonder how much they know about Tottenham, what links they have with the local community and what sort of welcome they expect from parents who have so overwhelmingly backed our campaign against forced academy conversion.

Written by Roger Sahota
First published at The Guardian here