'Outraged OAP' or what?

To the editor, South Wales Evening Post
Thank you for drawing attention to our picket at Barclays Bank in Swansea (June 27-July 2). But what matters is not the ‘outrage’ or otherwise of one Swansea OAP. It is the facts that count, and what we do about them. What my age and pension give me is free time for what I tried to do in my job as foreign correspondent years ago: to get at the facts and bring them home to people they concern.

I'm not just on about arms, or bosses bonuses as such. Today, after teachers and others have stopped work in protest over government cuts, it's important to remember that it was the folly of big banks that prompted the cuts. And that they are now back to business as usual: the pay-package of one Barclays bank-trader, at £40+ million a year, could employ 1,800 teachers, nurses, police – or junior bank staff (Barclays recently closed one Swansea branch). The same money could pay 6,000 pensions like my own, or 3,000 carers to look after us when we become incapable. This grotesque inequality comes to roost with us in Swansea, where people in the poorest parts of town die 13 years younger than people in richer neighbourhoods.

That is why I’m picketing Barclays, as leader among piggy banks. With my wife I have made a Golden Pig Bad Bank Award, for presentation at mid-day on Saturday. The plaque on the plinth reads ‘for contributions to warfare, greed, inequality and pillage of the global village.’

Greg Wilkinson

Nightmare drones: nouveaux jeux sans frontieres

Guardian on drone-stike sites in West Pakistan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan

A local journalist goes from one drone hit village to another, detailing damage. A dangerous business because people taking pictures and asking questions may be suspected of helping CIA prepare next strike. What he finds suggests civilian casualties much higher than official accounts admit. An own goal for war-on-terror as local populations rage at US etc.
Obvious, really.
Less obvious but just as dangerous, this form of warfare is relatively cheap for those with the know-how, and leapfrogs old legal and geographical boundaries. Drones are now used by US, Israeli and more recently UK forces for surveillance and or missile strikes, not only in the acknowledged war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan but Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Gaza - wherever conventional forces cannot reach, or would rather not be seen to reach.
UK Watchkeeper drones are adapted from Israeli Hermes drones as perfected over Gaza. The UK version has been tested at Aberporth not far from us.
Drones can fly at 10,000 feet, for hours, days or nights, unseen and unheard from the ground, watching, reporting back to base or waiting to get a target in sights. US Predator drones, as seen on a CNN documentary (check Youtube), are controlled by more or less human 'pilots'at playstation consoles in a desert base, Arizona perhaps. The risk-free piloting is one reason why drones are relatively cheap: training pilots costs as much as making planes, and in conventional airwars too many get lost in crashes and combat stress.
One reason for my recent picket of Barclays is that the bank is a lead investor in the Israeli company, Elbit Systems, that makes the drones now adapted for UK use.
The former US President and WW2 supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower one warned against what he called the 'military-industrial complex' intruding on politics and public life. Now the complex that threatens us is more complex still: military-industrial-political-financial, with funders often deciding what gets off the ground. And its global, no longer confined to one superpower.
The current light being shed on Murdoch's Newscorp web gives us a glimpse of what must also be happening between military, intelligence, political, industrial and financial power centres across continents, picking, mixing and making what suits themselves at our expense.
A recent New York Times report described experimental drones modelled on dragon-flies, and no bigger than insects, able to settle on a window ledge. With poison stings? No more need for human agents with umbrella tips...
One problem in this new form of airwar is the cost and complexity of decoding such a mass of detailed information. Imagine a continual feed from hundreds of spies in the sky, having to monitor so many monitors, fit and analyse the images.
One thing the roving reporter in Pakistan notes is the difficulty of putting together the casualties, not in the image, but in the flesh, on the ground, in what's left of walls, trees etc.

‘PIG BRICK’ BAD BANKS AWARD
2011
to
Barclays bonus bosses
for
contributions to warfare, inequality and
pillage of the global village

Letters to and from Barclays Head Office and local staff

July 6th 2011
Bob Diamond
CEO Barclays Bank, 1 Churchill Place
Canary Wharf, London E14 5LN

Dear Mr Diamond

The above image is of a golden pig, mounted on a brick (see previous), an award that your Swansea branch refused to receive or deliver to you. That was last Saturday, after a weeklong picket of the branch. As I explained in a letter to your local staff, my protest was not directed at them but at the behavior and policies of their bosses. My aim was to draw attention to the bank’s national and global efforts, and to encourage customers to transfer their accounts to less disreputable banks – in this case the Co-op and a Nationwide with branches just across the road.
I am not interested in moral finger-pointing, or demonizing people like you. If we grumble about ‘greedy bankers’ then we should look to our own investments, take more care of how our money is spent, not just what interest we get. At the moment, it’s almost impossible to find out what’s done with our savings. Apart from ringfencing high street banks, government should legally enforce our RIGHT TO KNOW. Just as government is bound by freedom-of-information law, and retailers by product-description rules, so banks – which control more wealth than governments - must be obliged to tell us what they do with our money.
In my citation for this Pig Brick Award, I make a link between inequality, warfare and ‘pillage of the global village.’ Banks like yours, at the top of the economic food chain, set the pace in widening inequalities both within and between nations. The resulting competition and conflict is destructive in itself. It also distracts from the need for common action in face of even greater threats, as unsustainable growth depletes essential resources and triggers climate chaos.
I am writing to you assuming that we are more like each other than not. I assume that you too would rather do good than harm. Profit is worse than worthless unless it translates into common good. Profit, and the process for making it, can only be good if it benefits those who contribute and bear the cost in their lives…
That’s so obvious, it cant wait on governments to turn it into law. Slavery and child-prostitution were not all well and good until laws were passed against them. The same goes for other sorts of exploitation. Meanwhile, although you may get 100 times more than I do to live on, we are equally responsible for what we do in the positions we find ourselves in. This is still the only life and world we’ve got, and we’re bound to share it. That word commonwealth was highjacked by crowns and colonies but still means what it says.
Time to come down from your tower and rejoin humanity. You’ve so much more to gain than lose. Football and bicycles may be a step in the right direction or a mockery (like the coin thrown out of the carriage window in the Tale of Two Cities). For now, the issue may not be that sort of revolution, but whether the world as we know it keeps turning. We badly need your banks and skills to save it for our children, all our children, and to make a better life all round.

Greg Wilkinson

PS The golden pig began with the brick in its plinth. I was going to deliver the brick, with this message, through one of your Barclays windows. I would have made sure nobody got hurt then explained myself in court. No mere malicious damage or breaking and entering, but a timely warning, prompted by personal and corporate behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace (as in Greece, though I’d not forseen that). As it happened, younger, wiser heads prevailed and what came your way instead was the rampant pig. Since no Barclays manager cared or dared speak to me, I kept the pig and handed the brick to a security guard for safekeeping. The pig may appear again. In it’s mouth is a human figure, clutching at a diminished globe.


Barclays' reply (extracts) 11.07.2011
'I am sorry you felt it necessary to organise a protest outside our Swansea branch to show your disapproval of Barclays and high street banks in general. I agree with the branch's decision not to forward your 'award' to Mr Diamond, as I believe this is distasteful and inappropriate...
In terms of bonus awards...we see compensation as a means of supporting the implementation of strategy in a way which best serves the interests of our shareholders...we must attract and retain the best people...
Barclays strategy...gives primacy to return on equity...
Barclays takes its responsibilities as a corporate citizen very seriously and this includes open and transparent engatement with tax authorities worldwide..Barclays paid tax in the UK of over £2 billion in 2009...
As a global organisation, Barclays should be measured by reference to its global tax contribution rather than one type of tax in one country... Barclays and its employees are proud to by making a significant contribution...to the UK economy and all the other countries where we do business.
yours sincerely
Mark Bailey
Customer Relations Manager


Reply to Barclays 13.07.2011

Dear Mark
Your reference: 100G37M2
Thanks for troubling to reply and I wish I were expert enough to take up more of your points about tax and pay. Instead I rely on commonsense and some principles we may well share. You say Barclays ‘takes its responsibilities as a corporate citizen very seriously,’ and it is as a more-or-less responsible individual citizen that I write to you.
You use the word ‘compensation’ to describe a bonus strategy ‘that best serves the interests of (Barclays) shareholders’ and to ‘attract and retain the best people.’ In normal usage, ‘compensation’ is something we get to make up for damage done to us, and now I wonder what damage is done to your top people by the work they do.
Perhaps it has something to do with the contradictions buried between those uses of the word ‘best’ and your ‘responsibilities as citizens’, whether of one country or the world (you say you have operations in 50 countries).
What, for instance, if the best interests of your shareholders are not fully met by a ’strategy which gives primacy to return on equity’? Shareholders will suffer like the rest of us if resource-depletion and climate change continue unchecked, if growing inequalities lead to social tension and breakdown, and if global poverty and ignorance keeps driving population growth.
Shareholders might also be happy just to know that they are helping rid the world of hunger and preventable disease, rather than supplying arms to keep the lid on discontent. And if top bankers are really to be ‘the best people’ they must be working with good people everywhere to prevent avoidable suffering and safeguard life on earth. ‘Return on equity’ is not good enough, unless by equity we mean fairness and equality in the older and more general sense of the word. Bonus also means good.
When I spoke of Bob Diamond ‘rejoining humanity’, it was not just rhetoric. I firmly believe that he, and you, would rather be doing good than harm, along with the rest of us, as fellow citizens in a world at risk. I’m not sure how this applies to, say, corporate standards in the Cayman Islands, but I am clear that here and round the world we cant wait for laws and governments to tell us what to do and not to do.
Corporate responsibility, and Profit in its fullest sense, has everything to do with common good, working for a better life for all and a world fit for our children. I trust you will agree with some of this at least. I realize that it does not only apply to Barclays, or bankers, but hope that you will get the message through to Mr Diamond and others whom it may concern.

Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson

PS You found the Golden Pig award ‘distasteful.’ I agree in the sense that no person or class of people should be dehumanized (we’ve seen where that can lead). On the other hand, we all know what we mean by ‘greedy pig’ and when we use it, perhaps to our children, in irritation or in jest, we wish them no harm. And, in the other sense of Piggy Bank, what’s meant is perfectly acceptable: somewhere safe to keep our pennies for when we need them, not to be raided for other purposes.


Letter to Barclays Swansea staff before picket

Friends
Our presence at your door this week is not an attack on you. We’ve no doubt that most of you will be doing reasonable jobs as best you can. Our action is directed at the Barclays bosses who make the decisions. And reward themselves so generously.
Our aim is not to inconvenience you but seek your help in getting through to the decision-makers in your company. Here are the main points of a leaflet we are handing out to customers and passers-by.
• Barclays CEO takes £9 million this year, with top dealers grossing over £40 million (as tax-payers face cuts in jobs and services thanks to them)
• Bankers set pace for deepening inequality. Top 100 CEOs averaged 30% increase last year while median real incomes flat-lined
• Barclays practices and encourages corporate tax-avoidance, leaving rest of us to fill the gap
• Barclays and other high street banks serve as fronts to global casino operations • Unelected bankers control more money than governments
• Wealth of nations is squandered regardless of human need, mass hunger and impending climate chaos.
• UK Government climate change targets are doomed for lack of investment
• Barclays leads UK banks in finance for arms-makers, supplying Arab tyrants and Israeli occupation
• We can do better with our money.
• Co-op Bank has an ethical investment policy and is controlled by its members
• Mutual building societies are accountable to savers and invest mostly in affordable housing.
• On Saturday July 2nd, we plan to present an award for you to pass on to your CEO in London
(To check facts, go to http://wotsleft-greg.blogspot.com)
I closed my own Barclays account some years ago because of the bank’s support for apartheid in South Africa. Now the bank supports other equally unpleasant regimes. As a tax-payer and pensioner I still have an interest: Barclays tax avoidance increases the burden on the rest of us and my income is about 0.1% of CEO Bob Diamond’s £9 million. For the reported £47 million amassed by a top Barclay’s trader, we could have 2,000 more teachers, nurses, police or high street bank staff. At my age, it concerns me that the same money could employ 3,000 carers.

Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk)

PS Did you know that an early director of Barclays came from a Swansea Quaker family? In the early 19th century, the bank was known for a time as Barclay, Bevan and Co.