While The Fires Rage
We Talk Casinos
It’s the summer where everyone suddenly realises the climate crisis that scientists, activists have been telling us is on its way has arrived. There’s terrible fires in Canada, Bordeaux has a wild inferno that all the French firefighters can’t put out. Greece is on fire; Sicily is on fire. And now as I write this there’s a wildfire raging on Dunwich Heath, just down the road from Sizewell C, the Nuclear Power Station currently in construction. The Nuclear Power plant are even lending fire fighters their diggers to help stop the blaze. Everything feels very apocalypsy.
It’s understandable then that the mood was bleak when we met Ann Pettifor last night to discuss her book The Global Casino. Pettifor is the economist who predicted the 2008-9 crash before anyone wanted to hear about it, and has been working relentlessly since then on making the case for a massive transformation of our economic system in order to move away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy. But to do that, Pettifor has always argued that we need to change the financial system, and put it to service of people and planet, rather than the bunch of hucksters who currently control it.
For anyone who finds economics texts an unpromising read - this is very different. Ann’s book argues in very clear and plain English that the prices of all the things we currently desperately need, food, energy and credit we need to get through to the end of the month - are set and controlled by markets in Wall Street and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Her argument is really that not only are our politicians not truly in power - but it’s the same for most countries around the world. Most of the forces that are truly in control of our economy are far-off agents. Ann argues that none of this happened by accident, our democratic institutions have been gradually eroded and real power has now moved to remote actors who do not have our welfare in mind.
Below is a recording of our book club, where members/ supporters of our work get to meet some of the finest minds wrestling with the big problems of our time. It’s not so much of a traditional podcast as an intimate space to meet and chat with writers and filmmakers that inspire us and keep us moving forward in such troubling times.
Chapters in the video..
0:00 — Why Ann wrote the book: globalisation means single global markets in the things that matter most, beyond the reach of any government
0:34 — Why the Energy Secretary can’t lower your bill, and what the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is
1:36 — The oil price right now: crude is down, but what you pay at the pump is up
3:03 — Ukraine, Russian refineries, and the refining bottleneck
4:23 — Grangemouth: INEOS, Jim Ratcliffe, 400 jobs, and a private decision that hit a whole economy
6:21 — Nigeria takes on the World Bank: Dangote’s refinery, and a country that refused to play
8:57 — Buffer stocks: how countries used to manage the price of food
10:22 — The thrust of the book: regaining sovereign autonomy over markets
10:47 — Why Parliament feels so feeble — deliberate disempowerment, not incompetence
11:50 — Pensions and BlackRock: $13 trillion of other people’s money, and who carries the losses
14:33 — Why Ann thinks capitalism has to end, not be reformed
14:59 — The apple tree: why capitalism values the fruit, not the tree
16:17 — Rent, credit and interest: what capitalism is really collecting
17:11 — Discounting the future, and why the IPCC’s numbers look the way they do
17:29 — The Rockhopper case: €2m spent, $185m paid out for profits never made
19:40 — “Capitalism is about extracting assets from the future”
20:43 — Urgewald’s Global Coal Exit List, Vanguard, and the tidal wave of fossil fuel money
23:06 — Solar is free, which is exactly the problem: the case for socialising energy assets
24:48 — The anger is coming, and the far right is already organised to catch it
26:44 — A note of hope: the DSA and what’s stirring in the United States
27:21 — The Jubilee 2000 lesson: social movements go home, parties take power
31:05 — No insects. No butterflies on the buddleia. Shifting baselines and biosphere collapse
33:22 — Richard Millwood: is “casino” too playful a metaphor?
34:58 — Keynes, Susan Strange, and the recklessness the metaphor is meant to carry
35:58 — The Green New Deal, and how it was co-opted and blunted
38:34 — We’ve done this before: Bretton Woods 1944–45, and Nixon tearing it up in 1971
39:57 — What people asked themselves in 1941: what actually caused all this?
42:31 — Gill Westcott: what if Britain took back control the way Nigeria did?
43:17 — The markets would scream. Sterling would fall. Politicians would run.
45:21 — “The best way to destroy a progressive government is to argue they have no money”
45:45 — The Bank of England could be the government’s bank, and currently isn’t
48:22 — Interest rates are a political decision made by unelected people around a table
49:33 — Hilary Haynes: interconnection, militarism, Gaza’s ecological cost, and pension powerlessness
53:06 — Defined benefit versus defined contribution: how risk got individualised
54:18 — The olive trees
56:03 — The missing political vehicle
56:35 — Joanna, Green Pensions: forty years in the industry, and the collapse-aware financial adviser
59:21 — If capitalism ends, what happens to pensions?
59:46 — Ann’s answer: the NHS is the model. Collective insurance, not individual gambling
1:02:53 — If BlackRock gets it wrong, pensioners lose. BlackRock doesn’t.
1:03:50 — Why pensions are missing from the inequality conversation
1:04:23 — How final salary schemes were wound down, and who wanted that
1:08:06 — Elaine Moore: Ed Miliband is joining the World Bank board. What should he do?
1:08:41 — The IMF is where the real power sits
1:09:51 — The sovereign debt crisis: Ghana spending close to 90% of revenue on debt
1:12:04 — Closing thanks, and a commission for Ann’s next book
In the room / members who asked questions
Ann Pettifor, in conversation with Dan Edelstyn, with questions from Richard Millwood, Gill Westcott, Hilary Haynes, Joanna Coull of Green Pensions and Elaine Moore.
We’ve been inspired by Ann for years - her work getting a $100 billion debt write off for some of the poorest countries in the Global South has long been an inspiration to me and Hilary - and we were star struck when she agreed to meet us in the Bank we set up in Hoe Street to print our own cash and engineer a much more modest £1.2m debt write off.
Ann also inspired our most recent movie Power Station - from her book The Case for the Green New Deal (Verso 2019) in which she argued very clearly and passionately that every viable building should produce its own energy, and the days where energy came from fossil fuel companies could very swiftly be up.
What’s stayed with me isn’t just the economics, although the trillions of dollars invested in fossil fuels continues to haunt me and I see it as a huge wave, a tsunami of highly profitable investment that is drying the grass, setting fire to the forests and boiling the seas.
But the image of Ann with her grandchildren talking about her buddleia bereft of butterflies. The feeling that she’s missing seeing and hearing the insects, a sense of her quiet rage. What got me was her saying that her grandchildren will look at that bush and simply think that’s what a buddleia is. She isn’t optimistic and she says so flatly. She sees clearly that what we need at this stage is nothing short of a revolution.
But despite the sad tone and a feeling that perhaps she’s tired from her book distribution and maybe tired of having hoped, having fought for so long, and having met with so much disappointment - that she believes that things can change very quickly. It is possible to redesign a system at short notice. There have been two instances of this pretty much in her lifetime. So some change is bound to come along - and if we organise ourselves well, perhaps there’s still time to head off the apocalypse.
Thanks to everyone who turned up and put their hand up — Richard, who asked whether “casino” isn’t far too playful a word for something this vicious; Gill, who wanted to know what would actually happen to Britain if we did what Nigeria has just done; Hilary, who took us to Gaza and the ecological cost of flattening a city; Joanna, forty years inside financial services and known to some as the collapse-aware financial adviser, who asked Ann what becomes of all our pensions if capitalism ends; and Elaine, who wanted to know what Ed Miliband should do with his new seat on the World Bank board. That’s the book club.
Next month it’ll be a film club - if you’d like to join in - then join our membership for free here: https://membership.power.film/join-free
Get Ann’s book here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3258-the-global-casino