The 2020 Public Services Trust, a part of the RSA, has launched a report called Business, Society and Public Services which calls for a more sustainable approach to economic growth and a fairer process for distributing wealth so that we can invest in public services over the longer term. The widening gap between rich and poor is a cost on our collective responsibilities and we need a different way and a new commitment to investing in our social and public institutions
http://2020psh.org/?p=1023
At the same time, Common Dreams highlights one of the cases where sustainability and fair distribution are an anathema!
The Common Dreams website is certainly one that people with a particular world view might choose not pay much attention to all that often. Once again though it has highlighted the dreadful risks that large ‘casino’ banks take – and in the end their (failed) risks hit every single person, e.g. the £60b the UK government used to bail-out just two banks in 2008-09 and the cuts in public services we are now seeing as a result of that economy-saving move (lest we forget.
Common Dreams tells us “Doing God’s work” as JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon calls it - that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”” His London traders’ £2b losses have cost JPM big money and one of his senior players’ careers.
Read more about what these ‘masters of the universe’, as Tom Woolf called them in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ are up to. Remember, what they do on Wall Street, eventually impacts on us.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17
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