Exposing Shrinkflation

I was always one of those who would join in the 'i'm sure these are smaller than i remember' regarding Wagon Wheels or Mars Bars and it was always explained that your hands were smaller as a kid so in your adult hands it would look smaller and that kind of made sense until you stop and think about it and remember that it is big Capitalist companies producing these things and obviously they would try and charge the same while discretely reducing the product and deny doing it so a massive thumbs up to French Supermarket Carrefour who are not only pointing out the companies doing it but putting huge yellow  
arrows to draw attention to it.
Carrefour has began putting labels on its shelves warning shoppers of 'shrinkflation' and has slapped price warnings on products from Lindt chocolates to Lipton iced tea to pressure the likes of Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever who complained that they had to do it due to an increase in the raw material which Carrefour pointed out is not a thing as the raw costs are now back to where they were.  
A bottle of sugar-free peach-flavoured Lipton iced tea shrank to 1.25 litres from 1.5 litres and Nestlé infant formula went from 900 grams to 830 grams while Viennetta ice-cream cake shrank to 320 grams from 350 grams and all now wear a label which reads: 'This product has seen its volume or weight fall
and the effective price from the supplier rise'.
Great you may think until a consumer Group pointed out that shrinkflation is also a thing with Carrefour's own brands so a plague on both your greedy money grabbing houses.

Changing Capitalism

Around 250 years ago, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, in which he described the birth of Capitalism which would lead to the accumulation of wealth beyond anything we can imagine and undoubtedly it has reshaped the world and lifted people out of poverty over the last two centuries, increased standards of living and resulted in inventions that have radically improved our lives but it has come at a cost.
Making a profit has become the over-riding philosophy to the detriment of  society and inequality and probably the greatest threat we face, the environmental damage and devastating climate change.
With those with the most to gain from Capitalism making the decisions, Capitalism will not be replaced anytime soon but with a significant gap between the wealth of the richest and poorest people continuing to grow and nature fighting back with devastating droughts and sea levels rises, it may have to be rethought.
The 2007-2008 financial crisis exacerbated the capitalism problem, hitting the poorest hardest and leading to resentment of the politicians which led to the likes of Populists such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Belsonaro rising to power and the polarisation of left and right wing political viewpoints.
A change may be coming, in a statement released by over 180 corporate CEOs including Wal-Mart, Apple, JP Morgan Chase, Pepsi and Yahoo acknowledged that they must redefine the role of business in relation to society and the environment, doing more than deliver profits to their shareholders and contributing to the improvement of the human, natural and society rather than the sole focus on financial capital.
If Capitalism is to survive, and Karl Marx described it as a necessary step towards Socialism as the workers would rise up and overthrow their corrupt leaders and install a fairer system which would distribute fairly the share of the profits, the future of Capitalism and the Capitalists driving it, depend on it changing into something a bit more fairer and less devastating to the planet.

Not Profiting From Black Friday Sales

When i was a kid the High Street had New Years Sales in January and then these became Boxing Day Sales in December but now the shops have the Black Friday sales in November which may be good for shoppers picking up cheaper Christmas Presents, but i do wonder just how the shops benefit.
By having the sales after the busy present buying Christmas period, shoppers have to pay full price for items earning the shops the best mark up but now they sell their wares cheaper meaning less mark up and hitting their profits.
The reasoning i heard is that it gets people into the stores and they make more purchases but that is the same if they held their sales after Christmas, the shops would still be packed if it's November or January only the stores still would have had that pre-Christmas kerching.
I have noticed in town this afternoon that not all shops are even partaking on Black Friday, mostly the big names are the ones with the signs in the windows and Moody’s Investors Service has warned that 'although the sale brings forward purchases from closer to Christmas, it is at lower margins, and is therefore credit negative for the retail sector overall and rarely positive for companies' and suggests that for many retailers 'their overall profitability and brand values are better served by avoiding involvement altogether'.
So a boost in November is followed by a dent in December spending so i fail to see the lure except for the competition that if a rival is discounting, then they will have to discount also or risk losing out altogether but that hardly seems a healthy position especially as so many well known High Street names are closing their doors permanently anyway due to lack of a profit.

Thomas Cook

Funny how the Capitalists view of Socialism changes once they run out of money and come with a begging bowl to the Government for taxpayers money, the banks did it to the tune of £200 billion which left the nation in Austerity for over a decade and now Travel Agent Thomas Cook are in the hole to the tune of £200 million and are eyeing the Governments tax receipts as Administration becomes more and more likely.
The Government, so far anyway, have been reluctant to bail out the company but they know that if the Travel Agent does go into administration, the repatriation fee alone to bring home the 160,000 stranded Thomas Cook customers could come to £600 million and then there are the 9,000 UK jobs which will be lost but they set a precedent with Carillion who they refused to offer financial assistance to and let it collapse with the cost of 20,000 jobs.
The company, one of the largest Travel Agents in the World and with a turnover of £9 billion, has said that the reason it has found itself in this situation is down to political unrest in holiday destinations such as Turkey, last summer's prolonged heatwave and customers delaying booking holidays because of Brexit.
The mood music coming form the Government is that most Thomas Cook customers will be covered by travel insurance or Atol protection which suggests that the UK taxpayer is unlikely to become Thomas Cook's saviour.
Obviously the heart goes out to Thomas Cook's customers and the soon to be redundant staff but that is the World we live in where mega-money companies pursue the Capitalist dream until they run out of money and then greedily eye yours and they don't care how many Hospitals are closed or Police Officers are made redundant to pay for it. 
While austerity is still in full force and disabled benefits are being slashed to pay for the last handouts, we just can't afford to pay for Thomas Cook's mismanagement.

Supplanting Capitalism With Democratic Economy

Something which the 2008 crash and the right wing ideology of austerity and cuts has underlined is that Capitalism is a failed economic strategy producing wage stagnation, in-work poverty, inequality, banking crises, the rise of populism and an ever impending economic catastrophe.
At last year’s Conservative conference, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, admitted that in the west: 'Too many people feel that the system is not working for them' but the left have only been advocating Socialism for decades and we had a taste of it under Tony Blair's New Labour until he imploded on the Iraq War issue which sucked the air out of all the genuine, and successful, achievements he
imposed on improving inequality on Society.
Despite Capitalism’s cruelties being ruthlessly exposed, the left has not been able to fundamentally change how wealth functions in society, leaving Capitalism with it's privatisation, deregulation, drip down, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders to shut down any argument with the shout that there is not an alternative.
They mischievously managed to merge Socialism with Communism which they linked to Soviet Union policies and shut down any debate and anyone arguing that Capitalism should be reined in.
As those most profiting from Capitalism are the same people who back it, it is hardly surprising that the left have been unable to break through but with a dawning recognition that a new kind of fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet economy is needed, the left have seized the opportunity to put forward 'The Democratic Economy'.
The new left wing economics, a branch from the ideals of Socialism, put forward by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and the New Economics Foundation (NEF) wants to see 'an economy that makes society, rather than a society that is made by the economy' and in short 'shift decision making power to workers, customers, suppliers, neighbours and the broader public to ensure a more equal model that puts society and it's people before profit, growth and shareholders'.
The idea is to dismantle and displace corporate and financial power in Britain in favour of the less privileged by requiring companies to give their employees shares and to create an 'inclusive ownership' policy which would see inserting into a company’s ownership structure a group of employees with a say in how profits are distributed and wages, hours and employment and working conditions are implemented, workers managing themselves, rather than submit to employers or shareholders.
With Capitalism less effective and more unpopular than it has ever been and many voters unwilling, or unable, to pay much more tax, with living standards squeezed under Capitalism and society in one of the worst, and most unequal, states in several lifetimes, the idea that an economic idea that puts social before commercial goals is a worthy one.
The push should now be to explain that profit and growth are not the economic outcomes that matter, that other values should matter more from now on and Capitalism has failed, just look around you at the ashamedly busy food banks and the homeless sheltering in the town centres to see that, and there is a new economic idea in town.

The Coming Recession

The only things certain in life are death, taxes and recessions and we have seen recently  some wonderful shots of unhappy traders shouting, waving paper and staring at screens with their hand on their mouth which all means...well i'm not sure what it means but it seems like the economy is once again on it's usual one way trip to a financial crisis.
The finance guy on BBC must have been watching the Winter Olympics just before his piece because he talked about skating on thin ice, things hurtling downhill fast and there was even mention of a wild and scary toboggan ride which was accompanied by graphics of Global Markets with big down arrows next to them.
Last week’s share price crashed, wiping $4 trillion off the value of markets around the world before a slight recovery followed by another ariel with two and a half twists reversal.
I don't know what the economy people are saying, i don't even understand half the words they use but they seem to be getting excited about something and we could be seeing graphics with the down arrows for some time but if it leads to the collapse of Manchester United, McDonald's, Estate Agents and Ed Sheeran's singing career we can consider the coming recession a necessary evil. 

Did Things Just Go Woosh?

Excited man on the TV pointing to a graphic that read:

FTSE 250 index down 1.11%
FTSE 100 down 0.63%
Germany’s Dax down 1.68%
France’s Cac down 1.64%
Italy’s FTSE MIB down 1.44%
Spain’s Ibex down 1.81%
Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1.37%.
Sterling down 1%

It is no longer 'if' but 'when' he explained saying it was a bad day all round for global markets before another serious looking man said global meltdowns doesn't work like this, they tend to go 'woosh' and we have been 'wooshed' a few times so we would know a 'woosh' when it happens.
I have no idea what the hell they were talking about or what would woosh or how to tell even if it went woosh but from what i can tell the greedy capitalists who run the show never changed anything after the last recession but kept the same rules that ensured the next recession would arrive the same as it has done every decade or so.
As many people are still suffering from the fallout of the 2008 crash, the 2018 one could knock so many people onto their backs before they even get a chance to clamber back onto their feet.
Things need to change as Capitalism just isn't working but all the time the Capitalists are running the show, Capitalism is what we will have and the recessions that wreck so many lives that come with it.  

Letting Carillion Go

Capitalism is great until you run out of other people's money and then it's either go bankrupt and employee's lose their jobs or you look for a handout of other people's money which is exactly what the banks did back in 2008 and the reason why the economy has sucked ever since.
Now the Government have a decision to make as Britain's second-largest construction group is on the brink of collapse and the banks are refusing to lend them credit and it is towards the Government and the tax payers they are looking for a £2 billion payday.
Carillion are holding emergency talks with ‎Whitehall officials to borrow significant amounts of new funding from its existing lenders but only if the Government agrees to guarantee payments if they default.
'Without that commitment of support from the Government, administration is all but inevitable' said a Carillion spokesman but the noises coming from the Government is that ministers had decided against providing a direct financial bailout to loss-making Carillion and were also likely to be lukewarm about being guarantor for them reflecting the Governments precarious grip on Parliament
especially if the taxpayer is landed with the £2 billion bill.
The company falling would affect the 19,500 people employees and 20,000 pension scheme members in the UK and cause considerable disruption given Carillion holds so many government contracts from building hospitals to managing schools.
Especially galling is that in 2016 it had sales of £5.2bn and until July 2017 the company was worth £1bn and paid out bonuses to the managers and dividends to the shareholders so to come begging for taxpayer funded bail-out which will add a further £2 bn to debt won't sit well in the age of austerity.
The government has said that contingency plans are in place and it is closely monitoring the situation as long as that doesn't mean a repeat of 2008 when the banks privatised the profits but where very quick to socialise the losses for which we are still paying for a decade later.

Fat Cat Thursday

Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
While your boss gets richer off you

The dead Kennedy's certainly hit that nail on the head, you can work like a dog to make as much money as you like but at the same time you are making even more money for your boss which seems apt as today is Fat Cat Thursday or the day when the UK's top bosses will have made more money in 2018 than the typical worker can expect to earn over the entire year.
Dubbed Fat Cat Thursday, 4 January marks the day when the average pay of top executives has passed the median annual salary of £28,758.
What it shows is an excessive and unjustifiable gaps between the top and the rest of the workforce, the bosses pay 120 times the average workers salary despite the Prime Minister's proposed crackdown on boardroom excess.
The highest paid boss is Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising giant WPP, on £48.1m and followed by Arnold Donald of cruise company Carnival on £22m and Rakesh Kapoor of consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser, whose pay packet is £14.6m.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was: 'outrageous that bosses were picking up salaries that look like telephone numbers while workers were suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times'.
The pay gap between employee and boss has tripled since 2000 and demonstrates just how out of control inequality in Britain has become and why the feeling of resentment between the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom is growing.

Capitalism And Conservatives Not Working

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has called Britain's economic situation 'pretty grim' and suggests that it will stay this way for the next two decades and calculated that the national debt will not return to pre-financial crisis levels until the 2060s or even later.
IFS director Paul Johnson described the facts that average UK earnings in 2022 could still be less than in 2008 as 'astonishing' and blamed the capitalist system 'not delivering its promise that it raises all the boats'.
Tucked away in yesterdays budge was the UK is expecting to borrow £29.1 billion more by the end of the 2021-22 tax year than it expected and that there are still nearly £12bn of welfare cuts to work through the system'.
It's official then, the hapless Tories have broken Britain with their right wing agenda for not only this decade but the next one too.
They have grown homelessness, inflation, austerity, poverty, suicides, food banks and crisis in all the public services and that's before we consider the craziness that is Brexit.
The two fundamental questions are then how can we remove the Tories who are economically inept that after a decade of austerity cuts, have left us worse off and why are we even still considering going ahead with Brexit?
Even the most fundamental Brexiter can see that is happening and how it makes absolutely no economic sense at all, the vote margin was only 2% and only a minority of the British people really want it, so we need to ask why on earth is the Government not saying it is just not economically viable and ending the biggest mistake in the history of the UK.
As the problems seem to be the failed system we use, Capitalism, a system which falls over with shocking regularity and ruins lives when it does, why do we believe the lies from the capitalists that capitalism was somehow recovering and is the solution to all our problems when it so blatantly isn't and was the cause of them.
Something needs to change because things are not getting any better but the solution seems to be to carry on doing what we are doing and the next three generations suffering for it.

Del Amitri, Hospital Wings And Da Vinci

There is a very poignant line in Del Amitri's 'Nothing Ever Happens' where he laments that 'American businessmen snap up Van Gogh's for the price of a hospital wing' but as the buyer who shelled out £342m for the Leonardo da Vinci painting, 'Salvator Mundi' has opted for privacy, we don't know if he is American or a businessman and it wasn't a Van Gogh but the sentiment remains the same.
As the new hospital wing at Bradford Infirmary cost £28m that's 12 hospital wings and i'm starting to regret the Del Amitri song comparison already but i'm in too far now so let's keep going.
Unless the £342m came from a bank heist or by cheating on their taxes the person with the big cheque book can spend their money how they like and if they think £342m for a 500 year old painting is worth it then it is up to them but the scene at Christie's when the piece sold encompasses everything that is wrong today.
'$450 million, the piece is sold' said the auctioneer and the saleroom erupted into cheers and applause and you have to think there are so many better things you could spend £350m, 12 hospital wings for starters, and why are people applauding that obscene amount of money being spent on a painting as if such extravagance it is something that should be celebrated.
The stupidity and selfishness of the super-rich and the sad state of the World today in a nutshell where over 3 billion people live in poverty and struggle under austerity but spending £350 million is cheered.
Del Amitri may have got the artist and the cost wrong but the sentiment that 'nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all, the needle returns to the start of the song, and we'll all go along like before' is so very true and so very sad.

Child Labour Iphone

The Chinese mining company Huayou has been reprimanded by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) after it has discovered children as young as four mining for cobalt.
Cobalt is a vital component in the batteries for mobile phones and the main recipient is Apple who have now  told Huayou to suspend all mining until they can be checked to be free of child labour.
Apple said some of Huayou's cobalt had entered its supply chain, but that it had now suspended the operation.
An Apple spokesperson added: "Apple is deeply committed to the responsible sourcing of materials for our products'.
Last summer Apple celebrated selling their 1 billionth iphone so there is a very good chance that as they have only just stopped using this supplier, the iphone currently sat on your table was a product of a small child being paid pennies to toil in a cobalt mine.
Worth thinking about next time you moan about your phones short battery life.

The West Moves Right

It seems a strange one that as the World becomes a harsher, more selfish place that it's population seems to be turning to the right, the very place where the owners of the most selfish genes reside.
First the UK votes to leave the EU, ignoring the financial consequences which are starting to trickle out as the realisation settles in that we will lose so much more than we gain from the deal and then America votes in Donald Trump, a four times bankrupt and man who wasn't trusted to run his own Twitter account but has been given the nod to run his country.  
In Germany, the left-wing Social Democratic party has fallen in the national polls, François Hollande’s ratings in France hover at around 15%, while the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party has seen its support almost halve in less than a decade and the Greek social democratic party has fallen off a cliff edge. Even in Scandinavia, once-invincible parties of social democracy have been hit by increasingly disaffected voters.
In a time when Capitalism has failed so spectacularly and when we are still feeling the consequences of the 2008 meltdown, why are people turning to the right which is an advocate of all the failed practises that put us in the hole in the first place?
The Trump victory and failures of the European left has been put down to people wanting to try something different from career politicians and the only option they are presented with comes in the shape of the deeply flawed right, or extreme right in the case of Donald Trump.
In the UK, the right claimed victory following the Brexit vote as the left failed to answer the call that the EU was to blame for all our ills. People swallowed that lie and voted accordingly, dismissing the warnings of what will follow as scaremongering.
Globalisation is making the world a smaller place and it seems that individuals are pulling up the drawbridge to try and protect themselves and their families, trying to shield what they have and hoping things will go back to how they were in the previous halcyon days of a previous age.  
It won't happen because the World has changed and the foundations which the 20th Century were built upon are crumbling and the more radical we become, the quicker they will fall away and the greater the inequality will become.
It may take a while but the left need to be ready to step in because we are leaping into a souped up version of what we have had since 2008 where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer  and our political leaders try to tell us that a decade of austerity measure are for our own good. 
The more fairer and equal left is where we should be, the far harsher and inequal right is where we are finding ourselves but it won't last because at some point the people will wake up to the fact that the right is not there for the benefit of them but for their own benefit, as it always was but which seems to have been forgotten.

Brazil Taking Wrong Turn With Privatisation

It is blatantly obvious that privatisation doesn't work, it increase costs and lowers the quality of services because it is impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less and make a profit and making a profit is the only reason they are there in the first place.
Case in point the news today that Government privatised the collection of Tax Credit debts to a private firm Concentrix who received a payment for each Tax Credit claim they closed due to fraud who then proceeded to merrily incorrectly close down so many claims (and receive their payment for and leave claimants with no money) that the Government have had to sack them and take the job back over themselves.
Undeterred the new government in Brazil has announced a multi-billion dollar privatisation plan in an attempt to pull the country’s economy out of the worst recession in eight decades.
Handed out to the highest bidder will be operating licenses for oil and gas, electricity, airports, sea ports, road building, railways, mines and dams and is expected to raise £24 billion.
Maybe at some point someone will say hang on, instead of all the profits from these things going back into the countries coffers to benefit everyone, they are now going to shareholders bank accounts but by then costs will be up, quality of service and wages will be down and a few more bosses will be swanning around the Mediterranean on a massive yacht and Brazil will be wondering where it all went so wrong.

Philip Green Feels BHS Workers Pain

Philip Green is not the most popular man at the moment, especially amongst the 11,000 BHS staff who are facing redundancy thanks to the £571m hole he left in the BHS pension fund which has forced the shop into bankruptcy.
To recap, in 2005 BHS owner Green paid himself a dividend of £1.3bn, mainly financed by increasing BHS debts to £1bn which has now sucked the retailer under and left 11,000 workers out of a job as the shops close with a £581 million hole in pensions which means workers will not receive the full pension they paid into.
A feisty Philip Green has been hauled before MP's to explain his decisions which led to BHS going to the wall where he told MPs he was working on a solution that would help BHS workers although no details were given.
So just to cheer up the BHS staff as they trot along to the unemployment office, the man responsible for their current jobless status has just taken delivery of a new private jet, adding a £46m Gulfstream G650ER to a transport collection that includes a speedboat, a helicopter and three yachts.
There, don't you feel better now. 

Trickling Up Not Down

The Boston Consulting Group has released their annual wealth report and it's found that the World's wealthiest people just got 5.2% wealthier.
Before everyone starts off on one about how the money is flowing up and not trickling down, the 5.2% is down from the 7.5% which they got richer by last year so we should have some sympathy.
Of course it is too bad all that money has to came from someone else's pocket but it is unfair to say that the wealth does not trickle down, it does, just that it trickles down to offshore accounts to avoid paying tax on it.
All in it together remember.

Who To Blame For BHS Collapse

Worrying times for the 11,000 British Home Stores workers as their employer goes into administration although the store has said that they will continue to trade as they seek a buyer, although with a £1.3 billion debt, you do wonder who will be willing to take it on. 
While the consequences for jobs and pensions are rightly the immediate focus of attention, we can trace the problem back to 2005 when the seeds of BHS’s demise were sown under the control and ownership of Philip Green.
Green, a bought the BHS business for around £200m in 2000 but by 2004 had not only recovered that investment but had doubled it and received around £400m in dividends.
Then in 2005, BHS formed part of a holding company called Taveta Investments Limited which paid Green a dividend of £1.3bn, mainly financed by increasing debts by nearly £1bn and paid to his wife who is domiciled in Monaco therefore avoiding UK Tax.
At the time he described the payment as: 'affordable' and 'leaves the business with plenty of opportunities to grow'.
He obviously got that very wrong as this morning BHS collapsed with debts of over a billion and threatening the livelihoods of 11,000 workers.
As a business model, sucking £1.3bn out of a company and saddling it with £1bn of debt is not the best plan but obviously Mr Green and his wife did very well out of it but that is modern day Capitalism for you, as long as the shareholders are able to dig their fat, greedy fingers in the pie then the people who toil for them on minimum wage can go hang but i guess there are always the payday lenders to pick up the pieces.

Money Talks

Karl Marx put forward the notion that large corporations would grow so rich that they would not only dominate capitalist society economically but also dominate the political system and therefore satisfying their own interests to the detriment of everyone else. How far off was he?

The government said in December it was considering a new levy in tobacco manufacturers and importers to raise funds to increase NHS Staffing, cut smoking rates, improve productivity and reduce pressure on the National Health Service.
In Treasury documents released today, of the 58 organisations it consulted, 40 backed the proposals including the Royal College of Physicians, Public Heath England, Cancer Research UK, doctors, cancer charities and the Government’s public health experts.
Against the idea was 12 organisations, eight of them tobacco firms or tobacco lobby groups.
The Chancellor, George Osborne, sided with the 12 and rejected his own plan, stating that it would undermine the 'recovery of the UK corporate sector' and the levy 'would simply be passed onto smokers'.
Tax revenue from tobacco in 2012/13 amounted to £12.3 billion for the UK Governments coffers which obviously troubled the Governments mind more than increasing more NHS staff or reducing pressure on the NHS.
Seems Karl was spot on yet again, the people with the money get their way, funny that.

Executive Committee Of The Exploiting Class

Almost consistently since i wrote it in 2008, the Marxism in A Nutshell post has been in the most viewed list.
Obviously there is a lot of interest in what the German had to say way back in the mid 19th Century and that has to be a good thing but before we celebrate the downfall of Evil Capitalism (boo) and cheer the arrival of Socialism (huzzah), there are a few more steps we need to take, mostly ridding ourselves of the parties that Marx described as 'the executive committee of the exploiting class' which translates in the 21st Century as politicians in the pocket of those with deep enough pockets to influence the political decision making process.
The bottom line is big companies don't make multi-million pound donations out of any political fervour or love of the political party, they expect something in return.
With that in mind, the Conservative Party held a fund raising Party with an invited list of about 570 of the country’s wealthiest people who paid £1,000 each to gain access to David Cameron and senior Conservative cabinet members and seated with ministers whose portfolios were relevant to the diners financial interests.
According to the seating list leaked to the Guardian newspaper, Iain Duncan Smith who is overseeing welfare cuts, was seated with directors of payday loan company CLC Finance, the housing minister, Kris Hopkins, was seated with two of London’s top property executives and Michael Fallon, the energy minister, dined with directors of a offshore renewable energy firm.
Politicians raising funds by mixing with tycoons with a vested interest in certain areas cannot be healthy, we all remember how the tobacco advertising ban was suddenly put back a couple of years following the Formula One million pound donation to Tony Blair and the Labour Party a few years ago.  
The politicians will always claim to represent the masses but will always carry on like this with  those who can afford it buying influence and you can bet your last tin of beans from the food bank that the influence they are buying will not be beneficial to anyone but themselves. 
Marx was obviously right, the few do hold influence over the many, but we can't throw off our chains just yet because Capitalism has a few more recessions to go yet before enough people realise Capitalism is no friend of the poor and the people who prop it up do not give a rats about anyone or anything except profit making and their bank balance.
I suggest digging out a copy of the Marx book so you are up to speed when the whole house of cards comes fluttering down.

Democracy & Capitalism Not That Good Really

The Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, has been spelling out the risk of Capitalism destroying itself unless bankers realise they have an obligation to create a fairer society and Capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish.
I do take umbrage at the insinuation that the banks and financial houses are not full of people who do their jobs ethically and want the best for everyone, we call them the cleaners.
Two of the biggest white elephants of our time are Capitalism and Democracy but for some reason they are held up as the high water mark of human achievement.
Adam Smith, the father of modern Capitalism, was wildly wrong when he assumed that mankind's 'principles' would stop what we see today with the overwhelming majority of people continually having to do with less and less whilst the 1% enrich themselves to the level of obscenity.
Without doubt Adam Smith got that wrong, greed is not good and only fills the bank accounts of the top end while it empties those at the bottom but while we are governed by the millionaires at the top end, nothing is going to change until a crunch comes.
The Occupy movement is a start and it will get its act together one day and things will change but until then  it's austerity cuts for us and massive bonuses for the bankers. If Capitalism destroys itself through its own greed and lack of ethics then it shows what an awful and faulty system Adam Smith envisioned.  
As for Democracy, placing a cross on a ballot paper every five years in order to hand over political control to a party is as much say as we have. Yes we can remove a Government but once in they are there for a long time and can cause untold lasting damage to every corner of our lives.
Short of a revolution as in Ukraine, we are stuck with them and it's 60 months until Democracy wheels its way back again.
Democracy is 1 day every 1826 days and no way to remove the party if its breaks its promises or make u-turnd on the manifesto it was elected upon.    
It seems that the two things that we praise the highest and foist upon others, sometimes at the end of a gun, are really not that praiseworthy.