by Jules Peck on 3,March, 2010
I saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism – a Love Story last night. I liked it. Yes I agree with the many critics that it’s low on solutions and bombastic. But that’s Moore’s style. Its real strength for me was the insight into the lives of disillusioned Americans who bought into a myth of the American Dream.
Any sane person is left after the film feeling pretty disgusted at the way we seem to have designed a political economy which rides roughshod over people and planet. What comes out most strongly is the way our current form of corporate-consumer-growth-capitalism really is an efficient machine designed to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few. There are solutions in the film – such as the bread factory which has shifted to a worker-owned co-op. The CEO earns the same as the workers. The workers earn $60,000. That’s three times the average income of US domestic airline pilots.
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by Jules Peck on 19,February, 2010
Not to be outdone by the competition, David Cameron has lost his TED-talk virginity (Brown spoke last year). In a speech on his Big Idea of ‘people power’ Cameron seemed to be quoting from Citizen Renaissance saying “It is a post-bureaucratic age and the citizen/consumer is in charge”.
Developing the theme of his Big Idea, he spoke of helping people work out ways to be happy with less money. Returning to his progressive wellbeing-economics form of two years ago, he backed the Sarkozy findings on GDP and growth and said he planned to work with the French President if he gets into power.
He cited Daniel Kahneman and behavioural economics and remarked that more money – beyond a certain point achieved by most in the UK – brings no extra happiness. But then it all seemed to come unstuck when he went seriously off-piste saying “the real problem with inequity is between the bottom and the middle, rather than to worry too much about who’s making money at the very top”. As the Observer said of this, “If Cameron really believed in ‘enhancing the quality of people’s lives’ he’d find a way of harnessing this excess money rather than his current grand plan; dreaming up new ways of slashing public services”.
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