Sunday, 3 February 2013


Deborah Orr and Iain Duncan Smith – Two Sides of the Same Coin

Posted on November 17, 2012 by  | 60 Comments
There is nothing more vile than the rich lecturing the rest of us about what it means to be poor.  Whether it comes from a chinless failure like IDS, who sponges off his wife’s wealth, or a liberal hack like Deborah Orr, who sponges off her husband’s book royalties, it is the most contemptible trait of the so called chattering classes that they think they know anything at all about our lives.
Couched as it is in crass liberal piety, Deborah Orr’s column in The Guardian today exposes the truth about what fake left liberals truly think of those who haven’t reached their latte slurping heights.  The concept of the deserving and undeserving poor is just as entrenched amongst humous guzzling Clapham (or in Orr’s care, edgy Stockwell) yummy mummys and flash daddys as it is in any Knightsbridge drinking club.
Orr has deigned to speak of the lower classes today in order to offer a tacit defence of Iain Duncan Smith’s attempt to rebrand poverty as a moral failing.
In an attempt to demonstrate she isn’t a vile old Tory, Orr points out that a life of minimum wage work is hardly an aspiration, unlike Iain Duncan Smith’s work makes you free mantra.  She stops far short of calling for higher wages though (wonder how much she pays her cleaner?).  Instead she declares:  “Duncan Smith’s indicators invite consideration of how the poorest can truly be motivated.”
Nothing else she says before or after this statement really matters.  She has clearly decided in her Chablis addled mind that all the poor need to do is motivate themselves and their problems will disappear.
Iain Duncan Smith announced this week that he will abandon the internationally agreed definition of poverty, which is calculated according to how much money someone has compared to everyone else.  Instead he has come up with yet another hare-brained scheme which attempts to shift the blame of poverty firmly onto those who are poor.
Along with the predictable ‘worklessness’, the new Tory speak for unemployment, IDS claims that family breakdown, poor health, low educational attainment, addiction and debt are the new causes of child poverty.
Yet even the richest in society can suffer from all of these  so called moral failings including worklessness.  Deborah Orr is a prime example.  She seems to think that writing the occasional shit column for The Guardian, whilst her husband – the public school then Oxford educated Will Self – spunks out the odd book and is sometimes on the telly, means they have proper jobs.
Worklessness infects the cosy media elite, with their army of underpaid child minders and  cleaners, far more than the rest of us who have to clean up our own shit and look after our our own kids.
As for the other new indicators of poverty, poor health can happen to anyone, and at some point is likely to happen to everyone.  Millionaires can run up huge debts whilst the divorce courts are full of squabbling Tarquins and Jemimas ripping each other apart over who gets to keep the fucking chandelier.  Deborah Orr’s own husband spent a large part of his earlier arduous career as a Guardian journalist shooting up smack.
The question is how these social problems, which cut across the classes, impact on people’s lives.  And that is down to how much money people have.
When kids who’ve lost EMA can no longer afford books and fares to school or College, their poverty has nothing to do with poor educational attainment.  Their poor educational attainment is down to the fact they’ve got no fucking money.  When people’s health is worsened because they can’t afford good food, warm homes, or their local hospital has closed down, that  is down to simple lack of cash.
If couples split up because of arguments over money, or because the benefit system increasingly pays people to be apart – something that will get much worse when next year’s benefit cap for families is introduced – they are placed under that pressure because they are skint.  When families run up huge debts with loan sharks because they can’t pay the heating bill, then that debt is merely a symptom of having no money, not the initial cause.
People on sickness or disability benefits are not poor because they are unmotivated, or even because they are sick or disabled.  Lots of rich people are sick or disabled.  They are poor because society no longer has the decency to ensure those who can’t work due to illness or disability are paid a livable income.
And whilst a cosy spell in The Priory may be enough to confine youthful drug addiction to a scary dinner party anecdote amongst the pampered middle classes, shit housing, shit benefits, and shit treatment services mean the reality is very different if you are poor.  And by poor I mean have no money, which is what poor means.
The endless jumping through intellectual hoops in an effort to redefine poverty that comes from both liberals and tories is rooted in the same entrenched sense of class entitlement.  Neither wishes to acknowledge their own privilege and instead insist they are in such a cosy position because they are simply wonderful examples of human beings who’ve worked hard and are very clever.  Both sides overlook the structures in society which create both mass poverty and their own affluent lifestyles.  And both sides, just like  Deborah Orr and Iain Duncan Smith, send their children to private school to pass on their social privilege.
They will both connive to maintain this privilege, insisting that society can’t be organised any other way and all the poor need to do is pull their socks up and stop whining.  As Deborah Orr herself said, protesting about the cuts is a waste of time.
And both, whether openly expressed, or snidely insinuated, believe that those with least are responsible for their poverty – because if people stop blaming the poor, then they might start blaming the rich.  And even the most mung bean sprouting, Big Issue buying, politically correct and oh so concerned affluent liberal knows instinctively whose side they are really on in the class war.
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The rich get richer: David Cameron's tax cut will help 13,000 millionaires


New figures reveal the number of people earning at least £1m a year has rocketed
David Cameron in party political broadcast

 THE number of millionaires who will benefit from David Cameron’s April tax cut has soared to 13,000.

 Experts had predicted that 8,000 people earning ­£1million a year would get an average tax cut of almost £100,000 – thanks to the PM and Chancellor George ­Osborne’s ­decision to cut the 50p top rate of tax to 45p.

 But new figures reveal the number of people earning at least £1m a year has ­rocketed to 13,000, despite the ­economy being on the brink of a triple-dip recession.
The income of Brits who earned more than £1m last year was an astonishing £27.4billion.
HM Revenue and Customs ­figures reveal that the million-pound ­earners would have paid a total of £12.7bn this year at the 50p tax rate.
But that will drop by £1.3bn to £11.4bn when the rate is slashed to 45p.
The cut will come as ­Britain’s poorest are hit by a council tax ­benefits shake-up.
Labour’s Shadow Treasury Minister Catherine McKinnell said the latest figures proved that Mr ­Cameron and Mr Osborne were “out of touch with ­reality”.


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Saturday, 2 February 2013

The Mind Thieves



The evidence linking Alzheimer’s disease to the food industry is strong and growing.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 11th September 2012
When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies, who appear to delight in other people’s problems.
When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it can be driven by similar forms of addiction(1,2,3,4). I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.
But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer’s is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it. They call it diabetes type 3.
New Scientist carried this story on its cover last week(5): since then I’ve been sitting in the library trying to discover whether it stands up. I’ve now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I’ve tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. While the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.
Around 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide(6); current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050(7). But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain’s impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the US, the percentage of the population with diabetes type 2, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years(8). If Alzheimer’s, or “diabetes type 3”, goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.
Insulin is the hormone which prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Diabetes 2 is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs which would usually take up the glucose.
The association between Alzheimer’s and diabetes 2 is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this dementia than the general population(9). There are also associations between Alzheimer’s and obesity(10) and Alzheimer’s and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies)(11).
Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer’s was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease(12). They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were sharply reduced by comparison to those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.
Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival(13,14).
Experiments conducted since then appear to support the link between diet and dementia(15,16,17,18), and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another(19,20,21,22). I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you’re interested, please follow the links on my website).
Plenty of research still needs to be done. But if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer’s disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, appear to be incapable of responding.
In this country as in many others, the government’s answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation’s diet to food and drinks companies: a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business(23,24).
A scarcely-regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals which would otherwise prompt people to stop eating(25). It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedoms granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools(26). It can kill the only effective system (the traffic light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war: a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.
We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies: those who mock people for their pathologies and those who spread the pathologies by peddling a lethal diet.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Caroline Davis et al, 2011. Evidence that ‘food addiction’ is a valid phenotype of obesity. Appetite Vol. 57, pp711–717. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.017
2. Paul J. Kenny, November 2011. Common cellular and molecular mechanisms in obesity and drug addiction. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 12, pp 638-651. doi:10.1038/nrn3105
3. Joseph Frascella et al, 2010. Shared brain vulnerabilities open the way for nonsubstance addictions: Carving addiction
at a new joint? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1187, pp294–315.
doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05420.x
4. Ashley N. Gearhardt et al, 2010. Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction, 106, 1208–1212. ad. d_3301 1208..1212
doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03301.x
5. Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
6. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
7. Fabio Copped`e et al, 2012. Nutrition and Dementia. Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, Vol. 2012, pp1-3.
doi:10.1155/2012/926082
8. See the graph in Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
9. Johanna Zemva and Markus Schubert, September 2011. Central Insulin and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Signaling – Implications for Diabetes Associated Dementia. Current Diabetes Reviews, Vol.7, No.5, pp356-366. doi.org/10.2174/157339911797415594
10. Eg Weili Xu et al, 2011. Midlife overweight and obesity increase late life dementia risk: a population-based twin study. Neurology, Vol. 76, no. 18, pp.1568–1574.
11. M. Vanhanen et al, 2006. Association of metabolic syndrome with Alzheimer disease: A population-based study. Neurology, vol. 67, pp.843–847.
12. Eric Steen et al, 2005. Impaired insulin and insulin-like growth factor expression and signaling mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease – is this type 3 diabetes?.
Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vol. 7, pp.63–80.
13. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
14. Naoki Yamamoto et al, 2012. Brain insulin resistance accelerates Aβ fibrillogenesis by inducing GM1 ganglioside clustering in the presynaptic membranes. Journal of Neurochemistry, Vol. 121, 619–628. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2012.07668.x
15. Eg:
Wei-Qin Zhao and Matthew Townsend, 2009. Insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis as common molecular foundation for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Vol.1792, pp.482–496. doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2008.10.014,
16. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
17. T. Ohara et al, 2011. Glucose tolerance status and risk of dementia in the community, the Hisayama study. Neurology, Vol. 77, pp.1126–1134.
18. Karen Neumann et al, 2008. Insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease: molecular links & clinical implications. Current Alzheimer Research, Vol.5, no.5, pp438–447.
19. Eg: Lap Ho et al, 2012. Insulin Receptor Expression and Activity in the Brains of
Nondiabetic Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease Cases. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Volume 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/321280
20. Suzanne M. de la Monte, 2012. Contributions of Brain Insulin Resistance and Deficiency in Amyloid-Related Neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s Disease. Drugs, Vol. 72, no.1, pp. 49-66. doi: 10.2165/11597760
21. Ying Liu et al, 2011. Deficient brain insulin signalling pathway in Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. Journal of Pathology, Vol. 225, pp.54–62. doi: 0.1002/path.2912
22. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
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Friday, 1 February 2013


To us, it's an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it's the heist of the century



In David Cameron we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy
'I would love to see tax reductions," David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, "but when you're borrowing 11% of your GDP, it's not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn't." Oh no? Then how come he's planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?
If you've heard nothing of it, you're in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d'etat is taking place.
Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn't in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century. The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can't be named. Here's how it works.
At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.
Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.
But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron said: "What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy." He's doing just the opposite.
These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business that doesn't outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments.
So how did this happen? You don't have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up "to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy" are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays.
I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I've just read Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I'm not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world's tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London in effect dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won't see a piastre of it.
Reading Treasure Islands, I have realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn't have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, shielding them from their obligations to society, insulating them from democratic challenge.
Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.
And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website
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