Intense Debate experiment, Mark II

Since the spam folder is still irritating as shit but I'm having a difficult time emotionally with the notion of leaving "home", I thought I'd run this little Intense Debate experiment again.  ID is a Wordpress thingie, so I'm thinking it should give us the reliability of Wordpress commenting without leaving here?  Let's see.  Click on this post's headline to get to the comments.

The Group 'Interview'

Well, first off, it was not an interview.  The waiting room already contained 15 or so young people.  A couple of them nervously chatted, between uncomfortable silences - I work for Tescos, I work for Sainsburys, I just graduated…

We then file up to a large meeting/ lecture room; there are about 50 seats. After a further wait of 10 minutes 30 are occupied. Mostly young people; 2 of Indian extraction - male & female, 2 black guys (1 of whom shortly reveals he has 3 years exp at Sainsbury’s and an MBA from Napier), 80% are 20 – 25 years old, I’m probably the oldest there (cough41). Gent’s dress varies from suited and booted to black jeans, brown shoes and a jumper. The ladies similarly vary from sloppy coats, boots and scarves to power suits and stilettos.

A very tall guy, shirt and tie, sans jacket, strides confidently to the front of the room, he is followed by a younger man, shorter and wearing spectacles.  The tall man has a stripy tie, the shorter fellow sports a pale lilac one, and after introductions the tall chap outlines the nature of the presentation. Both are in their mid thirties.

There will be no assessments today, no questions or tests, numerical, keyboard or psychometric, this lecture is for information purposes, to let you see, and hopefully understand that we do things differently, I’m not saying my colleague or my self are better people than anyone who doesn’t fit with our organisation, just that we are different. We think that you must be a certain sort of person to work for us, but also that we can teach anyone to be that sort of person.

First we are all asked to say our names, where we have come from and what our current jobs are.   Everyone has supermarket/retail experience from 6 months part time as a student to 3- 5 years managerial. Many are recent graduates, business management, IT, information’s systems, retail management, BA’s and masters.

Tallman asks us what we know about the org. Many facts and figures are proffered.  All out off date we are assured, many more stores, a whole extra country, growth is our strength. A, b, c keep it simple, x, y, z, “..and something we call Productivity…” said with loving capital letter and the air of an intimated sexual suggestion by the seated shorter man. In fact,  Tallman moves along, we have a short film that explains many of the unique facets of our glorious firms modus operandi. 

It was about here my eyes started to glaze over.  A film with budget advert production values and a cast of ‘volunteered’ employees explaining the basics of bulk discounting and centralised decision making/planning/systems follows. I miss a lot of this as I’m boggling that they are blatantly using the theme tune from a major TV series as the inspirational music, the sample is less than 20 seconds, perhaps this is how they get away with it?

So, different, efficient, flexible (you need to be, we aren’t at all) lets get down to a typical day.  Starting at 7am, you, perhaps with up to two teammates, but mostly you will stock the shop.  Two pallets of veg, freezer cabinets, ambient, food, drink, household and special promotional lines, all must be transferred from their cages in the warehouse to the store.  In less than an hour you must charge the tills, and have the doors open to receive your first customers, where other operations have a cash manager, a produce supervisor, a personnel officer, here you take on each of those roles as necessary, in the same way that within half an hour you may take on the mantle of complaints tsar, till jockey, shelf stacker and toilet cleaner. The seated, lilac tie one tells how he regularly cleaned the toilet at his store, a fact, he assures us, that rocks other supermarket managers, wide eyed, in their seats.

After providing cover for lunches, monitoring stock levels on the floor and compiling orders it’s time to replenish the shelves and begin checking for short dated produce, of which there will be very little, thanks to our automated stock system, this wonder of the 1980s achieves such a level of refinement in a Europe wide offering, the same baked beans or smoked squid from Portugal to Greece, the same store layout, and themed week, from  Italy to Norway.

Tallman admits that sometimes his words tumble over themselves, such is the speed with which he seizes each second as an opportunity to serve the organisation that took him under it’s wing a mere decade and a half ago, although the time passes so quickly it barely seems like six months.

Has anyone heard negative reports of working with us? The seated one manages to interject, Tallman echoes the question.  Someone mentions a story they have seen in Wikipedia. Tallman smirks and acknowledges the story and others, ‘Plenty to read on the Internet.’ is accompanied by what in a mortal could almost be interpreted as a genuine smile, and it lasts perhaps 0.02 seconds.

All long in the past. Tallman admits that it used to be about the most willing to work 100 hour weeks becoming the shining stars, with many falling along the way, that staff turnover was way over 100%, but that has been addressed by head office and now everyone works a set 47 hour week, although the vaunted flexibility expected from all members of the team, means that you might have to cover sickness and holidays, hours over 53 a week will be offset with time in lieu. I think that was the deal, Tallman’s spiel was now tumbling from his lips with the starry eyed zeal of a true fanatic, and accelerating towards unintelligibility.

The questions peter out, it seems the bases have been covered, the 47 hour week is implemented in five 11 hour shifts, with unpaid breaks (subject to availability and team cohesion, and productivity).  Potentially plus six hours unpaid overtime - flexibility, productivity. It is hard physical labour, less manager, more gang master, running a cash rich business for a German trust fund, all the profits are reinvested, mostly to fuel the organisation’s expansion.  There were hints that the company makes considerable profits from interest on cash holdings.  And it was blatantly underlined that the speed of the distribution system and the muscle of the massive buying power meant that a cabbage, say, that was in a field yesterday could be sold tomorrow, money in the bank, but the farmer won’t be paid for 90 days…

Tallman’s final words return to his first statements, this is a hard physical job, it is five 11 hour days, days off are 2 out of seven, could be Mon & Wed more likely than Sat & Sun, it is not for everyone, and 25% he predicts will not take up the offer of a second interview.  I’ll be in that quarter.

Debunking the Islamisation Myth - Edmund Standing

Am putting up a link to this paper as it's well worth a read. Preface to the paper below.

I am an atheist, a secularist, and an anti-fascist. I have no interest in defending Islamic religious

beliefs, nor the Qur’an (quite the opposite, in fact). I also have no time for those who seek to

understand’ Islamism or downplay the abhorrent nature of religious fascism. That said, I am also

committed to a rational and just approach to my fellow human beings, seeking to treat them in the

same way, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on. To think Islam as a set

of beliefs is false and potentially dangerous is not the same thing at all as thinking that all Muslims

are inherently dangerous or that I should view them as qualitatively different to other human

beings.

In the post-9/11 West, we have seen the worrying growth of a paranoid, bigoted approach to

Muslims which increasingly views them as an undifferentiated mass, as an inherent Other, and as a

powerful fifth column conspiring to destroy the West and enslave it to Sharia law. This approach to

Muslims shares much in common with the approach to Jews found amongst those who believe the

Protocols of Zion is an authentic document, and the ‘Islamisation’ myth is increasingly looking like

a Muslim-themed variant of Protocols belief.

In Britain, militant anti-Muslim bigotry has now reared its head in the form of the English Defence

League, an organisation founded with the explicit aim of combating ‘Islamisation’. The EDL is an

organisation that has been set up to fight a mythical enemy and, in failing to find this enemy, it

seems inevitable that the next phase of the campaign will be to target Muslims as a whole, and

there are strong indications that this is already happening. The ‘Islamisation’ myth, then, urgently

needs debunking, and this report is my contribution to that effort.

Something new is happening in Palestine - International peace day at An Nabi Salih

I just had this missive from I/P

An-Nabi Salih, September 25, 2010

Something new is happening in Palestine. I saw and heard things today that are relatively rare in my experience. I saw conflict erupt in the village between those who wanted to throw stones at the Israeli soldiers, as in the past, and the cooler but no less passionate people who intervened fiercely to prevent this from happening. I heard tough words of peace and hope. I saw the most gentle and dignified and brave demonstration I’ve ever seen. I also saw the army react with its usual foolishness, which I’ll describe, and I also saw the soldiers hold back when they could easily have started shooting. It wasn’t an easy day by any means, but it was good.

An-Nabi Salih is a hard place. When Ezra heard me say yesterday, in Sheikh Jarrah, that I was going to the village, he said, “Take a helmet. They’re violent there, all of them” (he meant: settlers, soldiers, and villagers). Yesterday, at the usual Friday demonstration in the village, the soldiers fired rounds of live ammunition along with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas and stun grenades. I was expecting more of the same today.

The village, north and west of Ramallah, has the great misfortune of having the hard-core settlement of Halamish as its unwanted neighbor. An-Nabi Salih lost some of its lands to the settlement along with access to a fresh-water spring, a precious thing in this arid landscape of dusty rocks and thorns; the settlers stole the spring, but the villagers were not prepared to surrender it, so there have been many violent clashes, spread over years. The settlers do whatever they can to make the villagers’ life miserable, with much success, and the soldiers, as always, back them up. All this is standard practice. Yet that is no longer the whole story.

Today is International Peace Day, and the Palestinian Movement of Non-Violent Resistance, run by Ali Abu ‘Awad from Beit Jala, has planned a celebration-cum-workday in An-Nabi Salih. Hundreds of Palestinian activists were supposed to arrive from all over the West Bank—but the army has turned all the buses away and closed the roads. We run into the same roadblocks at the main turn-off from Highway 60 running north through the West Bank. The soldiers laugh at us when we tell them we’re going to An-Nabi Salih. No chance of getting through. But this is the West Bank, and there is always a way, maybe not an easy way, but some back road or goat track or dirt path that will get you where you’re going; so we wind our way for close to two hours, through Jiljiliya and other villages close to Ramallah until we fetch up at Qarawat Beit Zeid, quite close to our goal. But there is, we know from Ali and Alison, a set of further army roadblocks at the entrance to the village. The Tel Aviv contingent tried to get past them by running over the hills, and several of the activists were caught and arrested. Do we want to attempt the same tactic?

At least some of us may get through, but we hesitate: is it worth the hassle of the arrests and the violence? On the other hand, having come so far, how can we simply turn back? There are seven of us prepared to run the gauntlet. Finally, at high noon, Ali leads us down into the rocky terraces and olive groves underneath An-Nabi Salih. We descend to a level that is hopefully beyond the soldiers’ range of vision, and for twenty minutes or so we creep stealthily from tree to tree and rock to rock, in near-total silence, playing hide-and-seek, outflanking them, crouching, holding our breath, hoping to emerge far enough past the roadblock to elude capture. It’s very hot, and I’m thirsty and, by the end, physically depleted; it’s been 33 years, I calculate, since I last engaged in such games, in my Basic Training in the army. So absorbed am I in the play that I hardly take in the splendor of the hills rolling dizzily toward the horizon, but at one point I do see, just above my head, an olive branch laden with green fruit almost exploding with ripeness. Soon autumn will come; on the way in the minibus, bouncing over the back roads, there was even a sweet moment of rain, with the sharp smell, unlike all others, of wet dust settling to the ground.

There are eleven of us: six Ta’ayush volunteers, four Palestinian women in modern dress, head covered, from Beit Jala, and Ali himself, tall, graceful, careful, prescient. At one point we almost make a bad mistake, start climbing up too soon, too close to the soldiers; but Ali catches this in time and leads us back down through the trees and brambles. When we do emerge onto the road, we are very much inside the village, welcomed warmly by two elderly gentlemen, who come to shake my hand, and then by a contingent of teenagers. The first thing I see is a huge sign, in Arabic and English: “The children of this land deserve our struggle and sacrifices for peace.” Fifteen yards down the road, another one: “We believe in non-violence, do you? We are making social change, are you?” A few yards further along: “La salam ma’a wujud al-ihtilal, “Making peace means ending the occupation.” Biggest of all, draped over the entrance to the town meeting place: “Keeping our political prisoners behind the bars of tyranny and injustice is inexcusable on International Peace Day.”

Do I believe in non-violent struggle? Yes, with all my heart. And I see that I’m not alone—indeed, far from it. We sit at first, re-hydrating, under the enormous tree in the village square, just like in India. Our hosts serve us Turkish coffee and mineral water. We make some friends. One of the village elders says to me: “Welcome to Eden.” Actually, he just might be right. The heat intensifies. Eventually, inevitably, it is time for the speeches. Popular Arabic music is blaring at deafening volume from the loudspeakers as we take our seats under a wide canvas. It goes on and on, until, mercifully, a young poet takes the microphone and recites a poem. He introduces the speakers one by one. A passage from the Qur’an is sung. I’m weary and, at first, a bit bored.

Normally, I have no patience with political speeches in the villages (how many hours of rhetorical Arabic have I sat through?), but today’s surprise me again and again, shake me awake: we are against violence, we want to be free, the occupation with its hatred is destroying hope but we persevere for the sake of our children and we will win. More poems, dramatically sung or recited, punctuate these orations. Now Ali rises to speak—in English, so that all the Israelis and the foreign volunteers can understand: “I bow my head to all the volunteers who came to An-Nabi Salih today, who struggled past the soldiers and the roadblocks and didn’t turn back. Our struggle is complicated and hard, a struggle that we share—local leaders of the villages, women, children, families—the first Palestinian non-violent movement on the ground, aimed a building a just peace with Israel. When I see Israeli activists coming here to the village, my heart weeps with happiness; I am honored to have these people with us. To all the Jews I say: you are not my enemy. The occupation is your enemy, as it is ours. The Israeli state is a state that eats its children by sending them with weapons to kill and be killed. When you hurt us to the point where we lose our fear of dying, all of us together lose our love of living. They closed off An-Nabi Salih today to keep us out; they know how to put up checkpoints, but they do not know how to fight the feeling of freedom we hold in our hearts. We say to you today, on the Day of Peace: Peace itself is the way to peace, and there is no peace without freedom. I am proud to be in An-Nabi Salih, and I can tell you: we’re gonna make it.”

As if on cue, soldiers roll into the village in their jeeps; they do what soldiers do, that is, they make arrests, they make threats, they bully, they take their hostages to an olive grove on the other side of the houses, facing Halamish. Our hosts ask us if we would be prepared to take water to the new arrestees (they don’t want to approach the soldiers themselves), so of course we set off through the village streets and down the hill until we find them. Some ten to fifteen soldiers, weighed down by what looks like tons of equipment, green camouflage netting on their helmets, are guarding a group of twenty-some students from Bir Zeit university who came to join today’s festivities. We bring them water, we chat with them, and suddenly it transpires that we’ve been added to the list of hostages; the soldiers won’t allow us back into the village. They don’t want outsiders in there. After a few minutes, we tire of this and strike out uphill, dodging the soldiers, who are clumsy, weighed down by their guns and all the rest, as they join hands to create a wall and hold us back, and skirmishes develop, and then the first stun grenade, and it ends with four Jerusalem activists caught, handcuffed and forced to the ground. I am too quick for them, as often, and escape their clutches by darting further into the trees.

By the time I regain the village, the main procession is already forming. I hear mothers telling their young boys to go home, to stay out of it, watch them pushing them away. Originally the idea was to reach the stolen spring, but the soldiers, waiting for us in force at the turn in the road, put an end to this dream. The tear-gas canisters and the cartridges of rubber-coated bullets are loaded on to the rifles pointed at the crowd of women, children, men, young and old, many carrying in their arms green saplings that we wanted to plant around the spring. We sit on the pavement with the soldiers almost close enough to touch, they’re aiming at us, and I’m a little afraid they might open fire like yesterday, and even more afraid that one of the kids will throw a rock and all hell will break loose, but there’s also suddenly no end to the happiness that is washing over me in this crazy late-afternoon moment that I am lucky enough to witness as the light softens into gold and purple and a light wind rises through the trees. People are singing: freedom songs. They swell to a sweet and strident chorus.

If the Israeli army had a brain, which it apparently doesn’t; if the government of Israel had even a modicum of generosity of spirit, which it doesn’t; if the people of Israel and the Jewish people throughout the world could open their ears and hear the voices I heard today, in Arabic and English, but they can’t; if the world weren’t all upside down and crooked and often cruel, but it is—if all these ifs could only stop being ifs, then they, whoever gave the orders, wouldn’t have tried to stop us from coming to An-Nabi Salih today, in fact they would have welcomed the arrival of this new generation of proud peace activists from Hebron and Ramallah and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Movement of Non-Violence wouldn’t be pushing the heavy rock uphill, day after day. I guess it’s in the nature of such movements to struggle with the rock. Human hearts are heavy as stone.

Something new is happening in Palestine.

Le dispatch #2 – CRS: La Courneuve Recoit Sarkozy

It was in La Courneuve in 2005 that Sarkozy referred to the need to « nettoyer les cités au Kärcher »*[i] (« clean the cities with a power hose ») and to protestors as « bande de racailles » (« bunch of scum »).

Now we have a comeback from Segolene Royal: «Il faudrait sans doute plusieurs Kärcher pour nettoyer le système Sarkozy » (« It would need a lot of power hoses to clean up Sarkozy’s system ») in response to the recent events at La Courneuve.
Liberation’s coverage may give an idea of how this panned out.

8 July[ii] – Reporting on the first eviction on 7 July, of some 120 squatters in the Balzac block, which is known for drug-dealing, and is scheduled for demolition. The eviction passed off quietly, with the prefecture rehoming people in hotels / hostels – some refused, asking for permanent accommodation. This phrase may become more important later :
L’évacuation s’est déroulée dans le calme, selon la préfecture...

21 July[iii] – Reporting the second eviction on 21 July, of c. 150 people who had returned to the Balzac. Let’s look at the language :
Elle s’est déroulée «plutôt dans le calme», selon la préfecture...
Sound familiar ? But...
mais l’association Droit au logement (DAL) a dénoncé une expulsion «brutale» et des «violences policières».
Of the 126 people evicted (57 women, 19 children, 50 men), 70 accepted hotel accommodation. DAL says that not enough rooms were provided to house them all.

28 July[iv] - Posting the video of the third eviction on 27 July, with little comment on it.

30 July[v] - The backlash starts – «Expulsion : une vidéo indigne» (« eviction – a disgraceful video »), which has been seen 300.000 times.

DAL again denounces the «brutalités» and «une expulsion particulièrement violente» - they say that the pregnant woman seen being dragged off as she held her baby a «reçu cinq jours d’incapacité totale de travail» (basically « was signed off for five days by a doctor ») «alors que la préfecture affirme elle qu’il n’y a pas eu de blessés» (« although the authorities said there were no people injured »)

The Prefecture has given up claiming things were ‘calme’ -
Selon la préfecture, l’évacuation «s’est faite selon la procédure légale et les règles d’usage», et «dans de relatives bonnes conditions».

2 August[vi] - the reports move from being factual towards comment. The language is getting more condemnatory – the video symbole de la dérive sécuritaire (« dérive » being defined in my dictionary as ‘drift’ in the sense of ‘regrettable evolution’), and is ‘scandalous’. Viewings of the video now at 480.000, internationally.


Like Nabila Ramdani[vii], this piece puts the blame for the attitude of the security services squarely at Sarko’s door:
La vidéo dont il s’agit est en quelque sorte l’application sur le terrain des solutions musclées préconisées tous azimuts par Nicolas Sarkozy (« the application on the ground of the sort of all-out physical response recommended by Nicolas Sarkozy »)

Their conclusion :
Une solution de sortie négociée était possible. Mais, là comme ailleurs, l’Etat a choisi l’esbroufe sécuritaire. (« a negotiated departure was possible. But, here as elsewhere, the state chose militarist swagger »).

(Le Monde – articles behind the paywall so have only read the subhead – is less condemnatory, and more along the lines of the first reports from Lib ; the video was filmed « par un militant » etc)

My conclusion – for what it’s worth.

First, the CRS ‘armadillos’ have a reputation for being disproportionately physical, particularly when the people they are dealing with are not white, which pre-exists le système Sarkozy – but it does seem that they are now being ‘enabled’ in this by the government.

Second, it may not be clear from the UK coverage that the video came from the third eviction, so one could argue that the response became understandably more robust as things progressed – but the observations of DAL relating to the second eviction suggest that the violence had already started. One does not need to be too paranoid, I think, to surmise that the CRS were waiting for an excuse to ratchet up the violence, particularly if, as it seems from the reports of insufficient capacity for relocation, it was inevitable that many people would return as they had nowhere else to go.

Third, that the stress on how many people have viewed the video, and references to this being available internationally, implies that it is international rather than national opinion that counts.

_________________________________
[i] ‘Kärcher’ is defined in my dictionary as a trademark, and meaning a ‘pressurised water gun’ – not a water cannon then (as I originally thought) but the sort of high-powered hose used to clean buildings or wash shit off the streets. It has now become a verb – ‘karcheriser’ – which has also been used by Languedoc-Roussillon’s own Georges Frêche (see my previous for his previous).
[ii] http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101645938-a-la-courneuve-la-barre-balzac-evacuee-avant-demolition
[iii] http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101648179-les-expulses-de-la-courneuve-ont-ete-evacues-de-leur-squatt
[iv] http://www.liberation.fr/brut-de-net/06012211-trois-minutes-et-quarante-sept-secondes-d-une-expulsion
[v] http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101649743-expulsion-a-la-courneuve-polemique-sur-des-violences-policieres
[vi] http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101650050-expulsion-a-la-courneuve-la-video-symbole-de-la-derive-securitaire
[vii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/02/france-racial-intolerance-sarkozy

An Experiment with commenting

I've wanted to experiment with the commenting ability since I found out about the IntenseDebate commenting widget.  I didn't want to do this on the main site, because I'm not sure about the logging in business.  The drawback to switching over is that you have to have an OpenID, Wordpress or IntenseDebate ID.  According to the OpenID website, anyone with a Google account can use that to log in on OpenID, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how.

The Intense Debate commenting function allows for things like smileys, spell-checking and embedding YouTube videos in the comments.

Let's use this thread for people to play around with it.  If most people don't like it, we can always remove it.  If it's popular, I'll add it to the other blogs.

Have fun.

And if we shut the Stock Exchange...

Following Frog2's posting of this earlier, have had a crack at putting it into English. The writer is Frédéric Lordon, and I must stress that this is in no way meant as an accurate translation but a reasonable (I hope) approximation of his ideas - and it is only the first third (up to D’autres promesses, d’autres menaces) of the article - in case peeps are interested. Will attempt to get more up in a bit...

Et si on fermait la Bourse...

It was a little over a year ago : governments shored up the banks using taxpayer money. Mission accomplished. But at what price ? The OECD estimates that the amount involved in that rescue at $11.4 trillion ($1676 for ever human on earth)... but finance is not only the affair of bankers, but also shareholders . One proposition would not please them – close the stock market.

The chaos of the last two years nearly made us forget : the speculative finance market (working in a closed universe, far away from the rest of the economy) was dumped on the back of businesses – and, as ever, in the final analysis, the workers.

It took this ‘suicide’ to remind us of the daily damage done by the share market, in which the injunction to make money is converted by businesses into crazed cutbacks on salaries, the systematic destruction of collective bargaining, intense increases in productivity combined with a continual decline of working conditions.
Against these degenerative attacks it is necessary to restate the cause and effect that drives ‘share power’, in which none of the structures presented by capitalism can rein in the reduction of salarues. And if the distinctions between the two ends of the ‘chain’ often cause us to lose sight of the whole picture, and that the suffering at one end is caused by pressures at the other, if the distance between them allows the denial or distinction of the two in the media debate, nothing can completely cover up the existence of one systemic causality.

If the game of the speculative market has been reset, with bullish vehemence by governments, and has taken over the public debate, it is important not to forget that the share market is also trying to return to its previous position.

Few alternatives are coming from the left (OK, Liberation and the Socialist Party, but we still call it ‘the left’) – you might think there are no alternatives. But SLAM (Shareholder Limited Authorized Margin) is one, and the abolition of continuous quotation and its replacement by a monthly (or longer) ‘fix’ is another. And sometimes one considers if we can pose a different question : what if we closed the Stock Market ?

In the debonair coverage of the late Jean-Pierre Gaillard, longstanding financial journalist at France Info, the appearance of ‘rolling’ share market information, with its incessant repeptition of « CAC 40 – Dow Jones – Nikkei », means that the market has already ceased to be a social institution and become almost a fact of nature, the suppression of which is simply unthinable. It is true that two and a half decades of this continuous bludgeoning has lead to this sort of normalisation, notably to express the ‘modern’ economy which cannot be conceived otherwise than by the share market.

To continue this [normalisation ?], necessitates ignoring the manifold destructive correlations resulting from this share power – viewing its supposed economic advantages and actual social costs as something entirely separate from the institution of ‘the market’. It would also be necessary to question the division between these economic advantages and social costs because the trend towards the ongoing compression of salaries which follows the reduction of dividend revenue are not macroeconomic effects. The chronic under-consumption which results has pushed the nice strategists of finance to propose that households pay using credit, becoming a permany crutch supporting missing demand. It is obvious that an assessment is easier if there is one column of figures rather than two, particularly if you ignore the worst one. But if the ‘good’ then shows itself also to be breaking down, how to keep it together ?

And yet it is not enough to say that the positive claims of the market are doubtful. Without it, it seems, there would be no financing in the economy, no funds for businesses to call on when up against insolvency, and less support for start-ups.

But Investers Pump in Money !

On paper, the system doesn’t lack allure. Agents (savers) have excess financial resources and seek to use these, and businesses are on the search for capital – the market is the institutional form that brings these two together to mutual advantage matching the capacity of the former to finance and the needs of the latter for financing. And even better – by providing permanent resources (capital funding based on shares), it stabilises financing and minimises cost. But crash – and nothing at all can keep it on track.

Does the market finance business ? At the point we are now at, it is more that business finances the market ! To understand this unexpected reversal, we must not lose sight that the financial flows between business and investers go in two directions – when the latter subscribe to the share issues of the former, dividends flow back symetrically and there is the ‘buy back’, a characteristic ‘innovation’ of share capitalism by which business are driven to buy shares in themselves to articifially increase the profit per share, pushing the share market (and thus the gains of investors) to the highest point.

As a result of this incoherent system, some attain the peaks, but the exorbitant dividends expected mean that a large number of industrial projects are abandoned as unable to provide them, leaving these businesses with unused resources – ‘idle capital’ which is then supposed to be returned immediately to its ‘proper owners’, the shareholders. Thus, capital leaves the businesses to go to the investors, a ‘backwards motion’...and gives legitimacy to the share market. But the capital raised by the business is actually less than the volume of cash pumped in by investors, and the net contribution of the share market to the economy has become negative (nil effect in France, but colossally negative in the US, the model for all.)

There are those who, at the same time, do not cease to accumulate wealth. The paradox is in fact pretty simple to unwind – failing new share issues to mop up the new available capital, the investors moved to the secondary market (resale of existing securities). Also, the constant development of these [secondary securities] as the effect of taking financing away from new industrial projects, and only inflating the value of securities already in circulation. Value increases and the share market does very well, thank you, but the actual financing of the real economy becomes something more and more unusual : a game restricted only to the speculators and very good for them, as, in fact, the volume of activity in the secondary market crushes that of the primary market.

While the share market as an instrument of financing, rather than speculation, has become useless, there are businesses who still speak well of it. The problem simply doesn’t arise for the small or medum-sized businesses – while not prestigious, we must remember that they represent the vast majority of production and employment – and more surprisingly, the big fish have litle recourse to it, except when they indulge their desire to play the merger game or a public offer. When they have to find financing, the paradox is that they tend to look elsewhere than the flows of the CAC 440 or the Dow Jones, to the bond market or, in a strange archaic approach, to the bank ! By juicy irony this results less from an issue of principle than a self-imposed restraint, not wanting to dilute their ownership. Thus, the triumph of hare power has included dissuading those business that could actually finance the economy from joining in !