Land ownership and pensions

Public-limited companies are a problem, I think, because the duty to provide returns to shareholders creates an unsustainable growth-imperative.

But if we were to end plcs, or at the very least try to extract our own lives from shareholder capitalism, what would we do about pensions?

It used to be that government pensions worked by working people paying taxes, and some of that tax money going to pensioners, straight away. That doesn't work any more because we've got so many old people, so state pensions act more like private pensions, investing the money and using stock market growth to deliver pension wealth.

How about this as an alternative.

Land-based pensions.

pic

Right now, "69 per cent of the acreage of Britain is owned by 0.6 per cent of the population", according to the New Statesman (2004). What's that about?

So, Land-based pensions work like this.

With your monthly pension payments, you gradually buy a bit of land.

When you get old, you gradually sell that bit of land to a youngster who gradually buys it off you. The income is your pension.

I can't work out the maths of whether it would keep you in hobnobs, financially, but it's worth a think.

"This land is your land, this land is my land", well it's not, is it.

"Who's is the Kingdom? The power and the glory? Forever and ever; will it be the same old story?" - Songline from the goose and the common by the Claque.

We should own it. Us. Us lot. All of us.

Humm.

4. Evidence on Governance, inequality, CSR and SRI

The GRI has an economic section
http://www.globalreporting.org/NR/rdonlyres/DDB9A2EA-7715-4E1A-9047-FD2FA8032762/0/G3_QuickReferenceSheet.pdf


Economic
ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
EC1 Direct economic value generated and distributed, including revenues, operating costs, employee compensation, donations and other community investments, retained earnings, and payments to capital providers and governments.
EC2 Financial implications and other risks and opportunities for the organization’s activities due to climate change.
EC3 Coverage of the organization’s defined benefit plan obligations.
EC4 Significant financial assistance received from government.

EC9 Understanding and describing significant indirect economic impacts, including the extent of impacts.

http://www.globalreporting.org/NR/rdonlyres/E74AF64F-D559-433E-A35B-096D7A89C241/0/G3IndicatorProtocolEconomicFSSSFinal.pdf

Performance data generated in response to the
Indicators in this section are expected to illustrate:
• The flow of capital amongst different stakeholders;
and
• The major economic impacts of the organization
throughout society.

The GRI requires reporters to disclose their revenue and payments to capital providers.

They ask for information on:

Direct economic value generated
a) Revenues Net sales plus revenues from financial investments and
sales of assets
Economic value distributed
b) Operating costs Payments to suppliers, non-strategic investments,
royalties, and facilitation payments
c) Employee wages and benefits Total monetary outflows for employees (current
payments, not future commitments)
d) Payments to providers of capital All financial payments made to the providers of the
organization’s capital.
e) Payments to government (by country – see note
below)
Gross taxes
f ) Community investments Voluntary contributions and investment of funds in the
broader community (includes donations)

d) Payments to providers of funds:
• Dividends to all shareholders;
• Interest payments made to providers of loans.
• This includes interest on all forms of debt and
borrowings (not only long-term debt) and also
arrears of dividends due to preferred shareholders.


So what is the thinking behind this and who can I talk to to understand it? Is this diclosure required of all GRI reporting companies?


Anglo Platinum

Main economic contribution to society is discussed in terms of tax and wages, and some philanthropy. In 2007, Anglo's returns to capital providers exceeded wages and taxes combined. What is a good balance?

http://angloplatinum.investoreports.com/angloplatinum_sdr_2007/html/angloplatinum_sdr_2007_13.php

http://angloplatinum.investoreports.com/angloplatinum_sdr_2007/html/angloplatinum_sdr_2007_4.php Anglo Platinum - winner of the ACCA (check) sustainability reporting malarkey, ownership and distribution of wealth and power is a big deal for south africa. Ownership and joint ventures

Will the mining company achieve HDSA participation, in terms of ownership of equity or attributable units of production, of 15% in HDSA hands within five years and 26% within ten years? http://angloplatinum.investoreports.com/angloplatinum_sdr_2007/html/angloplatinum_sdr_2007_14.php#2 Anooraq Resources and Mvela Resources already have broad-based ownership structures and share Anglo Platinum's principles and objectives for the promotion of broad-based and meaningful participation of women, communities and employees. Anglo Platinum’s commitment to transformation and broad-based BEE (Black economic empowerment) has been expressed in a groundbreaking deal with Anooraq Resources and Mvela Resources. The sale by Anglo Platinum of mining assets Anglo Platinum, Anooraq Resources and Mvela Resources agreed on transactions that will result in the creation of two substantial, HDSA managed and controlled South African platinum group metal (PGM) producers, which will have critical mass and significant growth potential. In terms of the transactions, Anglo Platinum will sell an effective 51% of Lebowa Platinum and an effective 1% of the Ga-Phasha project for a total consideration of R3.6 billion to Anooraq. Following this transaction Anooraq, being the current owner of 50% of Ga- Phasha, will own an effective 51% of Lebowa and Ga- Phasha through a newly created vehicle. Mvela Resources will purchase Anglo Platinum's 50% interest in the Booysendal project and 22.4% direct interest in Northam for a total consideration of R4 billion. Anglo Platinum and Anooraq have also agreed in principle to transfer, in due course, their respective 50% interests in the Boikgantsho and Kwanda Joint Venture projects into the newly created vehicle. will transfer assets to the value of approximately R35 billion to HDSA control. (AP is establishing an ESOP plan that will cover 1.5% of APs issued share capital) establish an employee share ownership plan (ESOP) that will benefit more than 43,000 employees. The new scheme covers all employees who do not participate in any Anglo Platinum share scheme and will comprise up to 1.5% of Anglo Platinum's issued share capital. Aiming also for greater economic justice through procurement: In 2007, services and products worth R7.4 billion were procured from HDSA vendors.This represents 32.2% of the Group's discretionary procurement against a target of 28%. Our spend with HDSA vendors has grown steadily over recent years: • 2003 = R730 million • 2004 = R980 million • 2005 = R1.9 billion • 2006 = R4.8 billion • 2007 = R7.4 billion The number of HDSA-owned, empowered and influenced vendors on our registered vendor database increased by 225 in 2007 to 1,445 companies The following data represents the Group's output as a proportion of demand, as defined by Johnson Matthey as 'sales of new metal'. Market share of global demand, % 2007 2006 2005 Platinum 37 40 37 Palladium 16 18 20 Rhodium 41 41 42 Providers of capital Distributions to providers of capital, R millions Interest paid 402 240 387 Dividends 15,905 4,826 2,029 Total 16,307 5,066 2,416 Increase/(decrease) in accumulated profit (3,601) 7,209 2,674 http://www.sumocoal.co.za/procurement.php Sumo Coal subscribes to the policy of preferential procurement and the development and investment in Small medium enterprises (SME). Our procurement policy sets out short term and long term objectives for BEE procurement which are reasonable and achievable. We intend increasing our expenditure in HDSA owned and empowered companies so as to contribute to economic sustainable development. This approach will give HDSA an opportunity to participate actively in the mining sector. In our policy, unless the context indicates otherwise, Broad base black economic empowerment means the economic empowerment of all black people including women, workers, youth and people with disabilities and people living in rural areas through diverse but integrated socio-economic strategies that include, but are not limited to : Increasing the number off black people that mange, own and control enterprises and productive assets, Facilitating ownership ands management of enterprises and productive assets by communities, workers, co-operatives and other collective enterprises; Human resource and skills development, Achieving equitable representation in all occupational categories and levels in the workforce, preferential procurement, investment in enterprises that are owned or managed by black people. INteresting to check out other Acca shortlist - BP and BT BP - also uses GRIs G3 framework http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/STAGING/global_assets/e_s_assets/downloads/bp_sustainability_report_2007.pdf They record their payments to shareholders ($8,106m), employees (inc share ownership and benefits - $11,263m) and taxes ($13,267m). Very different distribution to Anglo. Don't know total revenues, profits or margins from Sustainability report. This information will obviously be in financial report. Interesting to compare the proportions of these distributions by company (why?). This is the extent of their consideration of their economic impact - a deeper look at their impact on environment and development - development angle focuses on investment in communities. Nothing on ownership and distribution of power and resources other than what's in the 5 year statement. BT http://www.btplc.com/Societyandenvironment/Ourapproach/Sustainabilityreport/section.aspx?sectionid=5aa1be8f-f6db-4918-a486-ec03e651e56d BT revenue of £20,704 million to employees: GBP5,358m to shareholders: Total dividend paid in the year to shareholders: £1,236 million. Net debt increased from £7.9 million to £9.5 million. Net finance expense payable £378 million. Total amount falling due to creditors within one year: £7,591 million. To government The tax charge for the 2008 financial year was a net charge of £238 million and comprised a charge of £581 million on the profit before taxation and specific items, offset by tax relief of £343 million on certain specific items. The value BT added to the UK’s economy was over £10 billion in the 2006 financial year and supported the employment of almost 173,000 people. 2006 - Accountability did a study of indirect economic impacts of BT Produced a paper on it concluded - “BT is an important player in the dynamic ICT market in the UK and across the world. Along with other ICT providers, BT’s converging services are changing the way learning is provided, products are devised, people are governed, teams are managed, services are consumed and entertainment is delivered. By managing is indirect economic impacts, BT can help build the responsible competitiveness of the host economies of the countries in which it operates, from UK PLC to the global village and from Brussels to Bangalore.” BT considers its wider impacts in its report in terms of employment and tax, and 'direct economic impact' in a separate category but i don't know what that means. http://www.btplc.com/Societyandenvironment/Ourapproach/Sustainabilityreport/section.aspx?sectionId=3752F85F-76A0-4B58-A8D6-44CEA2E01411 They've got a sustainable economic growth programme one of their four key objectives is this: To create business models that make a difference and inspire people to find new answers Clive Ansell, President of Strategy, Marketing and Propositions for BT Global Services is the champion for sustainable economic growth.

10. The Anthropology of money

The Eleventh Round - Bernard Lietaer - p50

Lietaer argues that "interest indirectly encourages systematic competition among the participants in the system."

"Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback, people used barter for all their transactions. One every market day, people walked around with chickens, eggs, hams and breads, and engaged in prolonged negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of the year, like harvests or whenever someone's barn needed big repairs after a storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem some day, others would aid them in return.

One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and en elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile. When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. 'Poor people,' he said. 'So primitive.' ...

He took a cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each round. Then he gave to each family ten rounds, and explained that each represented the value of one chicken. ...

"In a year's time, I will come back and.... I want ou to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made possible in your lives.' 'But where will the 11th round come from?' asked a man. 'You'll see', said the man with a reassuring smile."

"Assuming that the population and its annual production remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen? Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everyboyd managed their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to ten others.

So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the unintended side effect of actively discouraging the cooperation that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants."

Same thing with the bank. They create the £100,000 principle when they lend you a mortgage, but they expect you to pay £200,000 back over the next 20 years to pay the interest. "Because all the other banks do exactly the same thing, the system requires that some participants go bankrupt in order to provide you with this £100,000... In other words, the device used to create the scarcity indespensible for a bank-debt system to function involves having people compete for the money that has not been created, and penalises them with bankrupcy whenever they do not succeed."

So if there are ten of us borrowing £100,000, £1m has been created. but £2m needs to be repaid. It doesn't work.

Interest is prohibited in Islam, and was prohibited in Judaism and Christianity. Henry VIII legalised interest for the first time in the western world in 1545 (p48).

So, if bank debt and interest are key design features, how did money work when interest was banned? (And how did communities work?)

why

This summer in the queue for the showers at a music festival

i met a man called Soleil

he was from West Africa.

He was a sound engineer touring music festivals to learn stuff. In between festivals he was staying in Chiswick.

I asked him what he thought of the UK.

'Places like Doris (the festival), it's great, it's a lot like home. But Chiswick is strange. You do everything alone. You live alone. You raise your children alone. You eat alone. Your old people are alone. To do anything you need money. It's not like this in Guinea. If you don't have money you can still take part.'

I'm interested in togetherness and aloneness.

One morning I found myself locked in a hallway of a house divided into flats. I needed help. I knocked on the door to one of the flats. 'Hello?' called a wavering old voice. 'Hello', I called through the door. 'I'm locked in. Could you let me out please?' 'Hold on.'

Three or four minutes passed. I could hear shuffling. I didn't know what to expect. I was becoming a little nervous.

Then the old old man opened his door. He hadn't managed to button his shirt and his concave ribs shocked me. He grinned and moved slowly down the stairs to the hall to let me out. I had the feeling that I was the first person he'd seen for some time. Days. Longer.

There are some statistics about lonliness among the elderly. They make you sad to read them.

It's a shame because we feel that we need them. Some friends and I are having conversations about buying some land and creating a blended community, where there is a 'blend' of self sufficiency and participation in the formal economy. None of us want to retreat from interesting and important projects and work, but we want our lives to be less dominated by work. We want more time. A less hectic pace. And we want more togetherness.

We want older people to join us. We value our elders.

Then there's family time. Quality of relationships. The time that we have for each other. The fact that a house used to cost three and half times one salary and now it costs three and half times two salaries and so both parents have to work pretty much full time and fit in childcare along with the chores and cooking and trying to sleep and vaguely trying to squeeze in a bit of exercise if they're lucky and the quality of life is just shit.

Margrit Kennedy with her unsourced figures estimates that about 50% of our spending - the money we've squeezed so many other things to earn - goes on interest.

Which the graphs show makes a few people very rich.

I wonder what that's like for them. I wonder how much difference it makes to their wellbeing. I'm pretty sure that above a certain level it doesn't. The progress paradox.

I see big business like a bit of a cancer to be honest. It was amazing to come back into a town after being in Doris (the music festival) and be surrounded by junk food at every turn. Ads everywhere. Everyone looked the same. So did the buildings. Clone town Britain. Diversity and creativity had been squeezed out and standardised conformity took centre stage, along with people ill from all the junk food and insecure from all the ads protraying model people to aim to be.

I'm feeling anxious about the money project again today. It's back to the economics thing. I do my best work when it's about, for and with people. The money project pretty soon will become a people project but it has to start with a fair bit of political economy.

And that still feels like cold hard iron.

And difficult. It feels difficult.

But it's my loudest question. These are my loudest questions.


Shit they're too small to read. Back to the graphics anon.

And I think they're really really important. And answering them feels like the most important thing to do.

Because I think figuring out that side will enable us to live more sustainably and with more togetherness. Humm. I haven't articulated the link clearly but I feel it strongly.

My mother says we don't do that kind of togetherness here because it's cold and we need to stay indoors. In Africa they co-operate more because it's warm.

Humm. Alastair McIntosh describes super cooperative communities he grew up in, reciprocal economies etc, and that was on the Hebrides. Which has a much poorer climate than south east England.

Is this actually a project on profit?

write up notes from Tomorrow's Owners margin

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WEINON.html

The Nonprofit Economy

Burton Weisbrod

'What motivates managers of nonprofits? Why are these organizations exempt from taxes on income, property, and sales?'

Or is it a project about interest?

And what would an economy that's not based on debt look like?

How to go about the project

• see notes on wall
• aim: the PhD sparks further research and change project activity
• Risk: PhD would be low impact if it were poor quality - methodology, readability, relevance, thinking, analysis, etc.
• PhD could be part of a collaborative project - how?

The expertise required:
stage 1 - economics
stage 2 - political science
stage 3a - business change management
stage 3b - policy - national economic and development policy, in both developed and developing countries.

Principle: participatory and collaborative wherever possible. Look everywhere for opportunities to make it so.

Bibliography

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Beck, Thorsten et al (2005). SMEs, Growth, and Poverty: Cross-Country Evidence. Netherlands, Journal of Economic Growth. Volume 10, Number 3, p 199-229.

Beinhocker, Eric (2007). The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, complexity and the radical remaking of economics. London, Random House.

Bernard, Prosper M. Jr (2008). Varieties of Capitalism and Inequality: Canada from a Comparative Perspective. Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 2, Issue 2.

Brewer, Mike et al (2008). Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies

Burkhard, Ross (2005). Democracy, capitalism and income inequality: cross-country evidence. US, Boise State University.

Davies, J et al (2008). The World Distribution of Household Wealth. UNU-WIDER

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Kay, John (2004). The Truth about Markets: Why some nations are rich but most remain poor. London, Penguin.

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Lietaer, Bernard (2001). The Future of Money: Creating wealth, work and a wiser world. London, Century.

Meadows, Donella (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. US, The Sustainability Institute.

McMillan, John (2002). Reinventing The Bazaar: A natural history of markets. New York, Norton.

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Porritt, Jonathon (2005). Capitalism as if the world matters. London, Earthscan.

Shephard, Andrew (2003). Inequality under the Labour government. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies

Spratt, S and Wallis, S (2007). From Old Economics to New Economics: Radical Reform for a Sustainable Future. London, new economics foundation.

Surowiecki, James (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds. US, Abacus.

(2008). Tomorrow's Owners: Stewardship of tomorrow's company. London, Tomorrow's Company.

Yunnus, Muhammad (2007). Creating a World Without Poverty: Social business and the future of capitalism. US, PublicAffairs.