Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "Richard J Murphy" channel.

  1. It's a bit like a spoiled 10-year-old taking the controls of a large articulated lorry on a busy motorway. He doesn't know where he's going, he doesn't know what he's carrying, he doesn't understand the controls and he doesn't care about anyone else on the road. The only thing predictable about the outcome is that it's not going to be good for anyone.
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  2. Yes. Friedman called it "creative chaos": shock doctrine. They tried it in Chile. It was the most prosperous state in Latin America. They had decent health and education provision, workers had good wages, good working conditions and pensions and they were effectively progressing in parallel with European states. That was all torn down and privatised with the promise that the market would provide all of that and more. It didn't. They got massive levels of unemployment, pensions were stolen and Chile saw terrible poverty and deprivation. All of this was enforced by a murderous military regime, of course. I suspect that Musk and the cabal of billionaires who own Trump are hoping for a similar breakdown so that they can enforce their own version of order from above.
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  3. The most important feature of all capitalism is that it is not the capitalist who creates the value. It is the worker. But the bulk of those billions that have gone into creating ChatGPT haven't gone to those workers. They have gone to those who owned the capital at all stages. No wonder the costs are so high when so many idle palms have to be filled along the way.
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  4. You're right about Streeting. The rise of mediocre technocrats set in with Blair and the disastrous Alan Millburn appears to be this fool's guide and mentor.
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  5. This is excellent. You list 3 problems farmers have but you missed out the fourth: The low real wages which the end customer, the consumer of the farm products, receives. This does not in any way detract from your other arguments but I think it should be mentioned as the overall prosperity of the population is bound to have an impact on farm gate prices. The point about the financialisation of farmland is the killer, though. The farmer is being robbed by parasitic financial capitalism just like everyone else.
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  6. The days when one country could march troops into another and take permanent possession of it are gone. The debacles of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US invasion of Iraq and Russia's attempt to take control of Western Ukraine provide lessons which should be learned. You can be massively superior in military terms but if the host population is determined not to be governed by you, it won't be.
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  7. I think he's neither bad nor mad. He is just morally vacuous and stupid. He has no emotional intelligence and simply doesn't comprehend the difference between right and wrong. In his consciousness, there is "that which benefits me and that which doesn't". Combined with a total lack of intellectual curiosity, emotional insecurity and inability to empathise, it makes him extremely dangerous.
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  8. The network of tax havens could be closed down very easily if the governments of the major economies agreed to do so. None of them want to because all of them serve the interest of the wealthy rather than their populations.
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  9. You left out an option, Richard: Undermining the Scottish Government and Welsh Assembly.
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  10. We still have a workhouse mentality in the UK. The poor are to be blamed, shamed and shunned. When I point out the disparity between tax lost to evasion and avoidance next to the piffling amounts lost to benefit fraud or error, middle-class people always say "Ah, but tax is taking OUR money away from us, whereas these people are just getting handouts they haven't earned." It's a rather nasty side of British culture, I'm afraid. It will take a long time to turn this attitude around, but we should try.
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  11. The rot set in about 45 years ago with the notion that it was all about the individual making himself or herself marketable. The invisible hand of the market would do the rest. Government skill centres began closing and entrepreneurial training companies started cropping up. You'd get a few months sitting in front of a bored trainer who would get you to commit slogans and cliches to memory and give you a useless certificate at the end. The government skill centres used to churn out people with basic skills in construction, computing, catering etc. The private trainers showed you how to write a CV that no one was ever going to bother to read. We have to get away from this idea that young people should be moulded to fit the needs of the market. It should be the other way around. We need to create a society in which people CAN contribute according to their abilities and can develop those abilities knowing that they will be rewarded for doing so.
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  12. There are two "far-rights". The biggest threat to democracy is Neoliberalism. It's an ideology which believes that empathy is a dysfunctional quality which interferes with the proper exercise of self-interest which it considers to be the motor of all prosperity: In this cult, caring is literally bad but it is not intrinsically based on hatred. The dangerous thing going on at the moment is a melding of this far-right with the other one, the one based on racism, misogyny, homophobia, Antisemitism etc to create a very nasty mix indeed. We are seeing that in the rise of Trump, Modi, Orban, Putin and sadly, here in the UK with the likes of Farage and Tice.
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  13. It's basic Keynes/Galbraith economics. It does have flaws but its application in the 1950s and 1960s let to the biggest and fastest rise in living standards in human history - much of it reversed over the last 45 years by Thatcherism, of course. The beauty of it is that money paid out to the lower paid flows immediately back into the economy because they spend it immediately. Thatcherite trickle down does not do this. A lot of it will leave the country and go into tax havens. With the rest, the rich buy assets such as rental housing which forces up house prices and allows them to soak up even more of the economy. It's a no brainer really. Keeping the lid on wages has led to stagnation and decline. Pay increases for the public sector, especially the lower paid sector, are win-win for everyone except the clients of the Tufton Street trolls who pay so much attention to this site.
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  14. I remember working in Big 6 accountants when our excellent IT department was closed down and the whole operation taken over by Cap Gemini. They, in turn, contracted out the various bits of it to other companies and individuals. So you end up depending on people who know nothing about your business and aren't answerable to anyone in it. It's ideological engineering. The ideological fulcrum of Neoliberalism is that wealth is created by transactions and transactions are guided by the efficiency of market forces. Therefore, the more transactions you have, the more efficient and wealth generating you become! It's madness. But it's where we are.
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  15. The most visionary (and dangerous) video so far. Boiled down, you are saying "What if the fiscal rules were there to benefit the population rather than the ruling class?" This is stuff worth fighting for but you'd need to appreciate that the ruling class would fight back against such a manifesto with everything they've got. That would be up to and including lethal force - though I imagine that they would try smear and discredit tactics first.
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  16. Spot on. The healthiest UK generation ever were those who were children during the Second World War. They grew up when most of the harmful foods were either rationed or not available at all. Meat and fats were also rationed and the only way to get a full belly was to fill up with tatties, and cruciferous veggies. I read recently that longevity had peaked and is now falling again. I suspect that's because that war time generation has pretty much gone now. The reliance on wonder drugs is a symptom of society's sickness. It's certainly not a cure for it.
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  17. It's quite simple. Starmer is signalling to his buddies in the City that, where there are choices, he will choose to hammer the poor rather than do anything to interfere with their continuing pillaging of the economy. He wants to reassure them that this is a continuity Tory government. So keep the donations flowing, guys. Labour is your party now.
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  18. If we'd had PR it's unlikely we'd ever have had Thatcher's privatisations, the Falklands War, the disastrous deregulation of financial services, the Poll Tax, the collapse of Council House building, the "reforms" to the NHS, academy schools, the closure of libraries, public toilets etc, the Iraq War and (most disastrous of all, Brexit. Quite simply, the UK would have been a better place to live.
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  19. I suspect he thinks he's an agent but Mad Vlad is smart enough to appreciate that he's too stupid for that. He's an asset.
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  20. Billionnaire at the table gorging himself on the finest food and dropping crumbs on the floor to the unemployed below: Watch that immigrant. He's after your crumbs.
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  21. They'd be able to get rid of employment costs by expelling the unemployed. Rudy Giulliani did that with homeless people when he was Mayor of New York. He put them in a bus and dropped them off in the middle of nowhere. Nothing would stop a Charter City from doing that. The bonus would be that it would create an ultra-desperate reserve army of unemployed people to be exploited by other cities or by agribusiness.
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  22. Agreed. The directors should be facing jail time for that.
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  23. Aye. And Starmer is giving people precisely NO reason to vote Labour. They've got "nowhere else to go", you see.....
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  24. Richard is an honest and competent accountant. He's a very dangerous man indeed. No wonder the Tufton Street trolls like to attack him.
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  25. Especially when, as is very common in the NHS, the agency staff are exactly the same people that once worked for you. All you've done is insert an extra layer of costs.
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  26. Absolutely. And you put your finger on it straight away by referring to royalty and the tradition of top down authority. All organisations of size, both public and private, should be obliged to have mechanisms to facilitate employee exposure of wrongdoing and there should be full legal protection for any employee who uses it. Democracy is meaningless if it stops when we enter the workplace.
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  27. Indeed. More to the point, whatever they spend goes straight back into the economy.
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  28. The problem is that decisions like this are made by people who know very little about how to implement them - or whether indeed, as pointed out here, whether they actually CAN be implemented. Britain's boardrooms these days are stuffed with accountants, marketing experts, lawyers and bankers. There won't be an engineer - and especially not an environmental engineer in sight.
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  29. "Also, one should never confuse the health of financial markets with the health of a real economy. " Wisdom indeed. It's a betting shop and, while it's useful to know what people are betting on, it's only a part of the picture.
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  30.  @nickryder9669  You must be very young then. The most successful economic policy was the Keynesian programme which was put into place in 1945 and lasted until Thatcher came along and broke it. All Blair did was continue the disastrous Thatcher "miracle" until it reached its inevitable conclusion when everything fell to pieces in 2008. Since then, all governments, including this one, have tried to revive the disastrous economics of Thatcherism. By the way, Growth doesn't mean a thing if it's accompanied by high unemployment, falling living standards and increasing inequality. Pinocet's Chile had record growth!
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  31.  @gwynroberson198  You really need to ask that? It's because they'll get paid more by the agency than by the NHS. To spell it out: The NHS pays more NOT to give staff a decent pay rise.
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  32. Yes. The thing about stock markets is that those in the know and with the requisite controls get rich whichever way it moves.
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  33. Both Cameron and Osborne have effectively admitted that it was the latter. They called it shrinking the state, of course.
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  34. Beware of anyone wanting to protect your freedom of choice. They invariably end up making sure that you "choose" something which benefits them and and not you.
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  35.  @zetectic7968  Well spotted. Richard Murphy is attracting a large number of these trolls. Or possibly, one or two professional trolls (Tufton Street or similar) are processing a steady number of sock puppet accounts. You can tell because they all make the same or similar arguments in the same formulaic way that you would rarely find in a random cross section of the public. Kudos to Richard, really. They clearly consider him to be a threat
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  36.  @matthewshutt8108  When you take into account the poor take-up rate of means-tested benefits, the administrative cost of means-testing and the costs of people suffering from poor health as a result of turning off the heating or reducing food intake, it makes perfect sense. The net amount saved by means-testing is piffling and the potential damage is enormous.
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  37.  @andyinsuffolk  Yes. Local democracy is good. Most of continental Europe is far more devolved than the UK. But that's not what Charter Cities are about. Their principal aim is to undermine democracy at all levels.
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  38. The system is absolutely ridiculous. It's the equivalent of allowing schoolchildren to hire and fire their own exam invigilators and markers. In the 1990s I worked in the tax department of a big six accountancy firm. We, along with all other departments, were essentially subordinate to the audit function - which was huge. Audit managers were situated within the clients' premises and there was a revolving career door where they would often get progression by getting employed by the client. Certainly not in their interest to point out transgressions! At the very least, auditors have to be appointed by government and not allowed to undertake any other work for that company but, in my view, the function is ideally suited to being run as a civil service function with no wriggle room for the client to pick and choose at all.
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  39. Better still. Let's have a democratically accountable publicly owned pension fund with its actions and behaviours subject to complete transparency and public debate.
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  40.  @richsidman8548  It came from JD Miller, the executive producer: "To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show,” Miller wrote. “At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.” Just cut and paste the above into your search engine to get the many sources. Leader? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. The man's a complete moron. He's the only man in history who was stupid enough to bankrupt a casino! The only people more stupid than him are the idiots who believe him.
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  41.  @TheHesseJames  I think you might be confusing inequality which is a political concept with asymmetry which is mathematical. I doubt if anyone would disagree with the proposal that hard work, ingenuity and commitment should be rewarded. That's a good thing. But allowing people to use their political and economic power to grab all the resources is not only morally repugnant but gums up the whole economic machine which produces the wealth.
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  42. He is only failing in the eyes of those who were wide-eyed and optimistic about the "change" he and Reeves promised. The people who wanted him to replace Corbyn are quite happy. He is serving them as expected.
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  43. That depends upon whose taxes and which taxes you raise. Redistributive taxes will certainly result in growth. The poor spend money while the rich "save" it.
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  44. I agree with all this. Limited liability does have a use but it is too easily abused. It is too easy to use it as a vehicle for fraud and for abusing employees' rights. It should be much harder to set up an LLC and legislation is needed to make officers of the company and large shareholders responsible for crimes committed by companies as if they had committed them themselves.
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  45. This will never happen in the UK as it is currently constituted - nor indeed in most EU countries, which are equally obsessed with this nonsense about balancing the books. Perhaps we can make an example in an independent Scotland and demonstrate that there is a clear alternative? Just asking....
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  46. No. The Democrats lost because they offered the working class precisely nothing. As is usually the case, the Fascist Right has won because the only alternative was the soft Right.
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  47. Well said. Universities not only contribute to local economies but also local social and political life. If you are lucky enough to live close to one you will have access to the best bands, orchestras, plays etc. And discipline and organisation are important but so is subversion. Universities should be places where EVERYTHING is questioned and challenged. Universities are incredibly valuable and they should not be subject to the marketplace.
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  48. Looking forward to the series, Richard. I particularly liked your point about myth-busting. It makes absolute sense.
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  49. The money that banks rent out does not come from savers! FFS, are there people who still think this??? It is new money created with a button push.
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  50. @ "The Tories were pretty bad, but at least they kept the UK economy from completely collapsing" Um, were you sleeping when Liz Truss almost did exactly that? But I'm fascinated. What exactly were these "obvious" solutions?
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