Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
#UK government figures hide £800 billion hoarded by super-rich
The wealthiest in society are much richer than Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government would have everyone believe.
New research highlighted by the Resolution Foundation estimates that official government figures massively underestimate the growing wealth of the richest in the UK. A huge £800 billion, or five percent of aggregate wealth in the UK held by the wealthiest families, was missed by the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures.
The findings reveal that the level of inequality between rich and poor, which rose sharply after the 2008 banking crisis, is much wider than previously thought. The wealthiest one percent owns 23 percent or almost one quarter of the country’s aggregate wealth, rather than 18 percent (less than one fifth) reported by the ONS. During the last year of the pandemic, when so many were plunged into a health and economic catastrophe—with at least 95,000 lives lost already—the richest continued to pile up their wealth hoard.
Resolution Foundation economist Jack Leslie said, “The UK has undergone a wealth boom in recent decades, which has continued even while earnings and incomes have stagnated. But official data has struggled to capture these gains, and misses £800bn of assets held by the very wealthiest households in Britain.”
Danny Dorling, an expert on inequality, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, commented, “The more closely researchers look into the wealth of the best-off 1%, the greater the slice of the cake we find they have taken.”
The Resolution Foundation is a London-based thinktank that declares as its’ aim the improvement of the living standards of those on low to middle incomes. The research it analysed was conducted by the UK Wealth Tax Commission, which compiles data to “assess the practical and conceptual arguments for net wealth taxes.” The Wealth Commission was formed in the Spring of 2020 by a team of academics from the London School of Economics and Warwick University, with close links to the Resolution Foundation.
There is a huge discrepancy between official government figures and statistics produced by the Sunday Times Rich List, which provides an estimate of the value of the wealth of the richest 1,000 families in the UK. Last year it listed 147 billionaires. The newspaper only records known assets of its listed 1,000, and last year their wealth was recorded at £742.6 billion. The problem with the ONS figure, explains Resolution Foundation, is that “capturing the very wealthiest families in a survey… is hugely challenging: families are under no legal obligation to respond and there is little incentive for them to do so.” The ONS therefore fails to include the wealth of the rich resulting from the burgeoning value of assets in property, shares and land......
More -
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/11/ineq-j11.html
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Monday, January 11, 2021
‘An honorary Muslim’: The police #spycops who monitored London's mosques in plain sight
Both men were detectives with Special Branch - as the intelligence-gathering sections of British police forces are known - and both are said to have had long experience of counter-terrorism operations.
The al-Qaeda attacks had entirely dwarfed any plots that these men had encountered, however, and they must have realised that some of their previous investigations were looking somewhat trivial.
As they drank their coffees, the two men began to discuss plans to map London’s Muslim communities and organisations in a way that would enable them to gather intelligence about al-Qaeda’s influence within the city, and the risks that it posed.
At this time, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch was facing its own
threat. Having already lost the lead role in tackling Irish republican
militancy to the UK’s domestic security service, MI5, it was facing what
amounted to a hostile takeover by the Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, a
unit which it had regarded as a rival for decades.
In the new, post-9/11 world of policing, Special Branch needed to find a role for itself.
More -
‘An honorary Muslim’: The police spy who monitored London's mosques in plain sight:
Friday, January 08, 2021
Wednesday, January 06, 2021
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Sunday, December 13, 2020
Saturday, December 12, 2020
Sunday, December 06, 2020
Thursday, December 03, 2020
Wednesday, December 02, 2020
Tuesday, December 01, 2020
Monday, November 30, 2020
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Monday, November 23, 2020
#Grenfell #Kingspan Evidence - Monday 23rd November 2020 (1/2)
Video begins at 21.03 for some unknown reason.
Evidence of Ivor Meredith.
Sunday, November 22, 2020
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Friday, November 20, 2020
Leaked Hunting Office zoom meeting - West Midlands Hunt Saboteurs.
Online Zoom webinars run by the Hunting Office evidence a nationwide conspiracy by hunters to commit perjury and actively flout the 2005 ban on hunting with hounds. Throughout the three hours of talks, hunts are clearly and repeatedly incited to engage in mass criminality and shown how to present a smokescreen to anyone watching.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Monday, November 16, 2020
Financial Regulation Matters: Lagarde Seeks to Assert the ECB’s Dominance – and ...
....Lagarde spoke recently and in emphasising her unhappiness with the development of sustainability in the marketplace, declared that ‘climate risks are not adequately priced’. The article in Bloomberg’s Quint offering suggests that she may lead the ECB in a new direction, with the decisions on which companies and industries to lend support to would be tied to compliance to EU policies on the issue of tackling climate change. The suggestion is that Lagarde could take the ECB down one of two paths; the soft path being to urge companies to better disclose climate risks that they face, and the more extreme path of judging who should benefit from the ECB’s mammoth bond-buying programme in relation to their compliance with EU regulations on non-financial informational disclosure, and the wider Action Plan that will contribute to the eventual goal contained within the European Green Deal. There are a number of arguments against this more extreme approach, mostly consisting of the lack of authority for the ECB to do this. Furthermore, the EU is seeking to become a ‘less is more’ style institution, which goes against the concept of the ECB becoming the enforcement vehicle for the Action Plan. However, analysts from Hermes have been cited as saying ‘the ECB has been very vocal about its intentions to continue to fight the climate crisis… its ambitions are very serious’. For Lagarde, she has rightly bemoaned the understanding that information that is currently being declared is ‘at best inconsistent, largely incomparable, and at times unreliable’. Whilst the ECB does have the mandate to support the EU’s economic policies, it rarely does so in such an explicit manner. Options that have been suggested range from introducing adjusted ‘haircuts’ that could be applied to securities after their climate risk has been assessed, to outright exclusion from purchasing programmes. If the ECB does decide to take a more direct approach, the credit/sustainable rating environment could be impacted.
This is because the disclosure of non-financial information is of, arguably, crucial importance for the development of the two interconnected industries...
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Financial Regulation Matters: Lagarde Seeks to Assert the ECB’s Dominance – and ...
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Friday, November 13, 2020
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Witnesses say Australian SAS soldiers were involved in mass shooting of unarmed #Afghan civilians.
The full article for ABC Investigations written by Mark Willacy and Alexandra Blucher can be found here -
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-14/australian-special-forces-killed-unarmed-civilians-in-kandahar/12441974
Australian special forces killed up to 10 unarmed Afghan civilians during a 2012 raid in Kandahar Province, ABC Investigations can reveal.
The raid is believed to be the worst one-day death toll uncovered to date of alleged unlawful killings by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Afghan witnesses and Australian sources have told the ABC that the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) operation left a number of Taliban dead.
But both say civilians were also shot during the frenzied raid, including a group of unarmed villagers near a tractor.
Australian sources confirmed a number of civilians were killed that day, but could not determine the precise number, telling the ABC there were up to 10 suspicious killings with another five Taliban dead.
ABC Investigations has obtained a list of names of 11 civilians that the villagers of Sara Aw say were killed in the December 2012 operation led by Zulu 1 and Zulu 2 patrols of the SAS.
The SAS was accompanied by Afghan special forces known as the Wakunish.
"It was 11:00am, three [helicopters] landed," said farmer Mohammad Nassim.
"There were three Taliban in nomad houses [near the village]. They resisted and were killed. But then they killed other people — civilians.
"Civilians were terrified when the shooting started, because they were mass shooting people," he said.
Villager Rahmatullah confirmed that three Taliban were hiding in a nearby nomad hut.
"But no-one [from the village] knew they were there," he said.
"They started resisting [the soldiers], then people learnt that they were killed. The rest of [those killed] were all civilians. One was Mohammad Azam, my brother."
ABC Investigations has been told by sources that the Taliban fighters were killed by the Zulu 2 patrol and weapons were recovered.
But a number of civilians were then killed near a tractor in what appears to be a mass shooting.
This account is backed by villagers interviewed separately by an Afghan journalist engaged by ABC Investigations who travelled to Sara Aw.
Abdul Qadus says his brother Abdul Salim was driving the tractor when he was shot dead.
"At the time he was carrying a load of onions, he was taking them to the city. There were some other people with him as well," Abdul Qadus said.
"The two other people who were near the Taliban in the area, I saw them being shot and killed and they didn't have anything with them.
"Another one was my cousin who was sitting and packing onions when they shot and killed him there."Rahmatullah was irrigating his field when the Australians jumped off the helicopters and engaged the Taliban.
"First, when the helicopters landed, they started with the Taliban. They also shot other people who were there as well. The tractor moved from the area because they were scared."
"[They] shot them at the tractor. They were shooting people intentionally. They were mass shooting," Rahmatullah said.
"Then some people busy with irrigation were shot, some were shot near the onions. Some people went in the tractor and they were shot in the tractor," Mohammad Nassim said.
ABC Investigations understands the Zulu 1 patrol was involved in the shooting at the tractor where at least five Afghans were killed and that some members of the SAS patrol were unhappy about what happened.
There were no weapons found on the victims after the shooting.
Abdul Qadus was wounded in the raid and later evacuated by the Australians.
"When I got injured, they took me to the Afghan National Army hospital at Kandahar airbase," he said.
"I was there two days and nights."
The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) has spent the past four years investigating rumours and allegations of war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.
Investigators are looking into more than 55 separate incidents of alleged breaches of the rules of war between 2005 and 2016.
More than 330 people have so far given evidence to the inquiry.
The IGADF report is expected to be delivered in the coming weeks.
When
contacted for a response to this story, an Australian Defence Force
spokesperson said: "It is not appropriate for Defence to comment on
matters that may or may not be the subject of the Afghanistan Inquiry."
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-14/australian-special-forces-killed-unarmed-civilians-in-kandahar/12441974