Most of the companies named in the article may be incorporated in Cayman, but they are in fact tax resident in the UK and therefore subject to UK corporation tax.

If you do a company search at Companies House in the UK (http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/) you will notice that most of the companies named are shown on the website and registered in the UK with offices in North Colonnade, Canary Wharf (i.e. Barclays offices)

Just because a company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s tax resident in the Cayman Islands….

Also, just because a person has a lot of directorships it doesn’t mean that they actually work for all of those companies. Richard Branson, for example, has been a director on nearly 200 companies and from this website: http://companycheck.co.uk/director/903949875 it looks like he was a director on over 100 companies in 1999 – you wouldn’t claim that Richard Branson spent less than an hour on each of those companies a week……

As I said at the start, where exactly is the story here other than another attempt at banker bashing without actually researching the topic properly????

‘ That’s him on the left when he was doing a Barclays 10K charity run to raise money for the RNLI in 2010 ‘

A quote from the above article, check if you ‘ Don’t believe it ‘ : CHARITY being the important word to note.

Without deep change of the money system, including rethinking the role of waged labour, re-localisation would lead to the bad old days, I agree. And, as stated, what it must not be is some form of regional ‘splendid isolation.’ In terms of managing resources and distributing goods I too cannot see how a global approach does not make most sense. So for me, again, this is a political aspect–of many other changes–which has to do with the contribution and involvement of as many of us as possible, in as meaningful a way as possible. Existing structures are rotten. In as inclusive and transparent a way as we are able we must rebuild. Where precisely that leads and what form it will take we simply cannot tell from here, but that a rebuild is necessary, is, I believe, unarguable.

Thanks for the links, I’ll tale a look.

Also:
http://www.renegadeeconomist.com/blog/video/in-conversation-with-steve-keen.html

I’m open to persuasion. But having read reams about/by Blond/Glasman et al, I’ve yet to find any really substantive, practical measures that re-localisation’ would involve.

When I think of localism, my brain defaults to ‘postcode lottery’, locsal wage bargaining or, going back a bit further, the kind of ‘parish mentality’ that saw local paupers restricted from moving to find work, then forced into workhouses for not funding work, Poor Law Unions, local school boards, the domination of politics by the local gentry.

Localism might have some attraction if you live in Westminster, but less for those living in Haringey.

Without a strong centre, how do you enforce the redistribution between localities and individuals that is a prerequisite for ameliorating the huge concentrations of wealth and privilege that are a natural consequence of laissez-faire.

Admittedly, I’m on a sticky wicket, arguing for the role of government in ’empowering’ individuals by guaranteeing the kind of ‘positive’ freedoms libertarians generally ignore the need for, but someone’s got to do it.
(Hobhouse’s ‘Liberalism’ is good on this:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28278
(Reformism ran in the family!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hobhouse)

Interesting perspective on why the euro has managed to hold up relatively well despite the crisis:

The Biggest Market Headfake Ever: Is A Wholesale French Bank Liquidity Run The Sole Reason For The Euro, And S&P, Surge?

“As the following note by Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin explains, the sole reason for the EUR (and hence S&P and global 100% correlated equity risk) surge in the past 9 days is not driven by any latent “optimism” that Europe will fix itself, but simply due to the previously discussed wholesale asset liquidations (as none other than the FT already noted), which on the margin are explicitly EUR positive due to FX repatriation, courtesy of the post-sale conversion of USDs to EURs.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/biggest-market-headfake-ever-wholesale-french-bank-liquidity-run-sole-reason-euro-and-sp-surge

This is of course an enormous topic, and I can’t possibly do justice to it in a comment on a blog. However, what I am most certainly not for is neoliberalism, heck, I don’t even think there is such a thing as an individual, but again, that is another, though very related, large topic. The reason I believe in direct democracy is because representative appears to have failed, at least as we have it now. Where are the politicians in this system making the right noises and getting close to power? I hear of none. The system has obviously failed.

Furthermore, state cannot be separated from market, that is a false dichotomy. David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” looks at this in depth. For me and my studies, market is part of state, a subset of it. State exists primarily (including market) as an ‘elitist’ monopoly on power along Hobbesian lines to keep ‘order’ on the assumption that without this monopoly of power there would be ‘chaos’ or ‘anarchy.’ (Mike Hall has mentioned “The Century of the Self”, an excellent and eye-opening documentary which brings this point home very effectively). What is emerging for me (and others) is that this perception is part of our Cartesian self/not-self way of apprehending reality, that humans are separate from nature somehow, and have dominion over it. There are ‘idle resources’ ‘out there’ for our pleasure and control, we are ‘scientists’ objectively generating wealth and setting up infrastructures and institutions to keep ‘order’ in the face of, and kind of at war with ‘wild’ nature. I find this core perception profoundly unsatisfying. There is nothing which is not nature.

How we incorporate the best of what we have thus far managed, as a species, that is, all our accumulated wisdom, into The New Way, we cannot possibly know in advance, just as we did not know what state was 10,000 years ago, or what capitalism was. They emerged over time, and we defined our systems in hindsight.

So, for me, re-localisation is necessary as but _one_ part of ‘fixing’ what must be ‘fixed’ (it’s really just intelligent and wise adaption to new challenges). One thing I think we must avoid as best we can is more separation, to the degree that, e.g., millions of regional polities wander off in their own cultural directions, which, historically anyway, always leads to dehumanization, conflict and war. I am, e.g. very excited by the idea that English is becoming humanity’s first global language. That’s one of the reasons I’m switching from IT in an international energy utility company to teaching English here in Berlin. The Internet (and related technologies) is of course, in potential, an enormous assistance in setting up the open and transparent democratic processes that might replace the current system, and is a dynamic showing humanity how united it is at a deep level, that we are one animal among millions on a rock orbiting a medium-sized star. For me that global awareness is absolutely vital. Act local, think global.

We, the 100%, have to do this together. A grandiose and almost obnoxious cliche, and it is impossible for 7bn humans to ‘come together’ and have a Big Society chat about what to do next. Hence the methodology for building new global consensus begins locally, but stays interconnected globally. We pool wisdom transparently, learn from our mistakes ‘together’, benefit from our successes ‘together.’ For me the goal is not the end of government per se, but the beginning of transparent and direct democracy. No doubt this will scale up in a representative fashion (how could it not), but the starting point is regional. This is precisely what the General Assemblies are working on in Occupy cities across the world, and sharing with one another via the Internet; local/global. The process is actually unifying, not fissiparous (except from the POV of the state of course).

But of course it’s early days, is secessionist (sort of) in its intent, and thus cannot help but bring about enormous upheaval should it gain decent traction. What else are we to do? The entire socioeconomic and political system has broken down, been exposed as the money-value machine it more or less always was. Rigid hierarchies generate vested interests vying for power sociopathically and at great cost to the environment. To set up infrastructure and processes comfortable with steady-state growth, abundance, cooperation, is going to take a deep and far reaching redesign of how humanity self-organises, in partnership with nature, not at war with it and each other. I cannot see how re-localisation is not part of that. If that notion has been poisoned by the neoliberals, it’s time to take it back.