#ResistCapitalism pic.twitter.com/mYkBHmXMdu
— Countermoonbat (@CounterMoonbat) April 9, 2016
Amazon.com Inc is planning to open hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the head of a major U.S. mall operator said.Bezos has big plans. He's freakin' out to take over the entire U.S. economy!
Such an expansion, which Amazon itself has not confirmed, would position the world’s No. 1 online retailer as a competitor to booksellers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. At present, Amazon operates a single bookstore in its home city, Seattle.
“You’ve got Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores,” Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of General Growth Properties Inc, said on Tuesday.
He was responding to question about mall traffic during a conference call with analysts, a day after the No. 2 U.S. mall operator reported quarterly earnings.
Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman declined to comment...
"Intellectuals have always disdained commerce" says Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey. They "have always sided...with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kind of kept down."More.
More than any other outlet, Whole Foods has reconfigured what and how America eats and the chain's commitment to high-quality meats, produce, cheeses, and wines is legendary. Since opening his first store in Austin, Texas in 1980, Mackey now oversees operations around the globe and continues to set the pace for what's expected in organic and sustainably raised and harvested food.
Because of Whole Foods' trendy customer base and because Mackey is himself a vegan and champions collaboration between management and workers, it's easy to mistake Mackey for a progressive left-winger. Indeed, an early version of Jonah Goldberg's best-selling 2008 book Liberal Fascism even bore the subtitle "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods."
Yet nothing could be further from the truth—and more distorting of the radical vision of capitalism at the heart of Mackey's thought. A high-profile critic of the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the regulatory state, Mackey believes that free markets are the best way not only to raise living standards but also to explore new ways of building community and creating meaning for individuals and society. At the same time, he challenges all sorts of libertarian dogma, including the notion that publicly traded companies should always seek to exclusively maximize shareholder value (go here to read a 2005 Reason debate about the social responsibility of business featuring Mackey, Milton Friedman, and Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers). Conscious Capitalism, the book he co-authored with Rajendra Sisodia, lays out a detailed case for Mackey's vision of a post-industrial capitalism that addresses spiritual desire as much as physial need...
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — Pope Francis offered a direct apology on Thursday for the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the oppression of Latin America during the colonial era, even as he called for a global social movement to shatter a “new colonialism” that has fostered inequality, materialism and the exploitation of the poor.
Speaking to a hall filled with social activists, farmers, garbage workers and Bolivian indigenous people, Francis offered the most ambitious, and biting, address of his South American tour.
He repeated familiar themes in sharply critiquing the global economic order and warning of environmental catastrophe — but also added a twist with his apology.
“Some may rightly say, ‘When the pope speaks of colonialism, he overlooks certain actions of the church,’ ” Francis said. “I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God.”
He added: “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”
Francis, an Argentine, is the first Latin American pope, and his apology comes as he is trying to position the church as a refuge and advocate for the poor and dispossessed of his native continent.
During his visit to Ecuador, and now Bolivia, Francis has made broad calls for Latin American unity — on Thursday mentioning “Patria Grande,” the historic ambition to make the continent a unified world force — even as he has sidestepped some local controversies.
Bolivia suffered stark exploitation during Spanish rule, as silver deposits helped finance the Spanish empire, bankroll European colonialism elsewhere and also fill the treasury of the Vatican. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, is a longtime leftist critic of the church, yet on Thursday he spoke before the pope and praised him.
Francis’ criticism of multinational corporations and global capitalism has already brought him criticism and suspicions among some who question the leftist tint of his ideas.
Mr. Morales, a fierce critic of American corporate influence, wore a white shirt and a dark jacket bearing a picture of the Communist revolutionary Che Guevara on the left breast.
“For the first time, I feel like I have a pope: Pope Francis,” Mr. Morales said.
Francis has filled four consecutive days with appearances, but other than an environmental critique offered in Ecuador, the pope had hewed mostly to theological topics or broad themes like family, service and mission.
His appearance on Thursday night was at the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements, a congress of global activists working to mobilize and help the poor. Some people wore Che Guevara T-shirts while some indigenous women wore traditional black bowlers.
Francis drew cheers when he called on the activists and others to change the social order: “I would even say that the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives, through your daily efforts to ensure the three Ls — labor, lodging, land.”
Francis repeated his condemnation of an economic system rooted in pursuit of money and profits, but in an aside he criticized “certain free-trade treaties” and “austerity, which always tightens the belt of workers and the poor” — a likely reference to Greece.
“Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money,” he said. “Let us say no to an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules, rather than service. That economy kills. That economy excludes. That economy destroys Mother Earth.”
But if Francis again called for change, he also offered no detailed prescription...
More.“The market will take care of everything,” they tell us…. But here’s the problem: it doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.Milton Friedman once said that every time capitalism has been tried, it has succeeded; whereas every time socialism has been tried, it has failed. Yet President Obama has oddly claimed that we’ve tried free-market capitalism, and it “has never worked.” This is rather remarkable. Since 1800, the world’s population has increased sixfold; yet despite this enormous increase, real income per person has increased approximately 16-fold. That is a truly amazing achievement. In America, the increase is even more dramatic: in 1800, the total population in America was 5.3 million, life expectancy was 39, and the real gross domestic product per capita was $1,343 (in 2010 dollars); in 2011, our population was 308 million, our life expectancy was 78, and our GDP per capita was $48,800. Thus even while the population increased 58-fold, our life expectancy doubled, and our GDP per capita increased almost 36-fold. Such growth is unprecedented in the history of humankind. Considering that worldwide per-capita real income for the previous 99.9 percent of human existence averaged consistently around $1 per day, that is extraordinary.
—President Barack Obama, Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6, 2011
What explains it? It would seem that it is due principally to the complex of institutions usually included under the term “capitalism,” since the main thing that changed between 200 years ago and the previous 100,000 years of human history was the introduction and embrace of so-called capitalist institutions—particularly, private property and markets. One central promise of capitalism has been that it will lead to increasing material prosperity. It seems fair to say that this promise, at least, has been fulfilled beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Yet people remain suspicious of capitalism—and more than just suspicious: as the Occupy Wall Street movement is only the latest to have shown, we seem ready to indict capitalism for many of our social problems. Why?
A widespread consensus is that capitalism might be necessary to deliver the goods but fails to meet moral muster. By contrast, socialism, while perhaps not practical, is morally superior—if only we could live up to its ideals. Two main charges are typically marshaled against capitalism: it generates inequality by allowing some to become wealthier than others; and it threatens social solidarity by allowing individuals some priority over their communities. Other objections include: it encourages selfishness or greed; it “atomizes” individuals or “alienates” (Marx’s term) people from one another; it exploits natural resources or despoils nature; it impoverishes third-world countries; and it dehumanizes people because the continual search for profit reduces everything, including human beings, to odious dollar-and-cent calculations.
The list of charges against capitalism is long. But some of the charges are not as strong as might be supposed. Take community. Capitalism gives us incentives to trade and associate with people outside our local community, even complete strangers, not on the basis of our love or care for them but out of our own—and their—self-interest. So capitalism enables people to escape the strictures of their local communities. But is that bad? Capitalism creates opportunities for people to trade, exchange, partner, associate, collaborate, cooperate, and share with—as well as learn from—people not only from next door but from around the world—even people who speak different languages, wear different clothing, eat different foods, and worship different gods. The social characteristics that in other times and under different institutions would lead to conflict—even violent, bloody conflict—become, under capitalism, irrelevant—and thus no longer cause for discord. Capitalism encourages people to see those outside their communities not as threats but as opportunities. It gives us an incentive to look beyond our narrow parochialisms and form associations that would otherwise not be possible.
Capitalism therefore does not lead to no community but rather to differently configured ones...
Last year, Mexico played more games in the U.S. — eight — than the U.S. national team played domestically. Since February 2010, Mexico has played 30 of its 50 non-tournament games, called friendlies, in this country — many before sellout crowds.The team's owner openly disses Mexican nationals. Not enough lucre. Well, at least he's not a communist. That's the only good takeaway from this story. He's not a scummy, decrepit Marxist-Leninist revolutionary America-basher, like most of the idiot stateside Mexican leftists who're going to the games.
This isn't to say the U.S. team isn't popular here. According to Adidas, the uniform provider for the Mexican national team, the U.S. and Mexico sold nearly an equal number of team jerseys in this country last year. Most second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans rate the U.S. as their second-favorite team.
Mexico is first....
The U.S. has a Mexican American population of more than 35 million, accounting for more than 65% of a U.S. Spanish-speaking marketplace that is increasingly attractive to advertisers. The most popular team is the Mexican national team, which is why SUM has been able to get major corporations such as Wells Fargo, Unilever, Allstate, Castrol, Makita and Home Depot to sponsor U.S. tours.
Not surprisingly, the Mexican team's favorite cities are ones with huge expatriate populations such as Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles, where they regularly pack huge football stadiums.
In Southern California, Mexico drew more than 90,000 to the Rose Bowl for a meaningless midweek exhibition with New Zealand in 2010. A year later an overwhelmingly pro-Mexico crowd of 93,420 was in Pasadena for the Gold Cup final with the U.S. Some of the U.S. players were extremely unsettled at being the visiting team in their own country. The American national team hasn't played Mexico in Southern California since then.
At Year Two, TheSkimm Hits 500,000 Subscribers http://t.co/9rTv9Ms42x
— Digits (@WSJdigits) July 11, 2014
The Marxist Internet Archive, a website devoted to radical writers and thinkers, recently received an email: It must take down hundreds of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or face legal consequences.Lulz.
The warning didn’t come from a multinational media conglomerate but from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, which asserted copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings.
To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day.
“Marx and Engels belong to the working class of the world spiritually, they are that important,” said David Walters, one of the organizers of the Marxist archive. “I would think Marx would want the most prolific and free distribution of his ideas possible — he wasn’t in it for the money.”
Still, Mr. Walters said the archive respected the publisher’s copyright, which covers the translated works, not the German originals from the 19th century. On Wednesday, the archive removed the disputed writings with a note blaming the publisher and a bold headline: “File No Longer Available!”
The fight over online control of Marx’s works comes at a historical moment when his ideas have found a new relevance, whether because the financial crisis of 2008 shook people’s confidence in global capitalism or, with the passage of time, the Marx name has become less shackled to the legacy of the Soviet Union. The unlikely best seller by the French economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century,” harks back to Marx’s work, examining historical trends toward inequality in wealth.
Despite this boomlet in interest, however, Lawrence & Wishart, located in East London, hardly expects to have an online hit on its hands, said Sally Davison, the publisher’s managing editor. The goal is to create a digital edition to sell to libraries in place of a print edition, which costs roughly $1,500 for the 50 volumes.
Over the last couple of days Lawrence & Wishart has been subject to campaign of online abuse because we have asked for our copyright on the scholarly edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels to be respected. The panic being spread to the effect that L&W is ‘claiming copyright’ for the entirety of Marx and Engels’ output is baseless and largely motivated by political sectarianism from groups and individuals who have never been friendly to L&W.Because online Marxist trolls are so compassionate lol!
Obama’s real antagonist is Ayn Rand, who made the case that reason is man’s basic means of survival and coercion is anti-reason. Force initiated against free, innocent men is directed at stopping them from acting on their own thinking. It makes them, under threat of fines and imprisonment, act as the government demands rather than as they think their self-interest requires. That’s the whole point of threatening force: to make people act against their own judgment.RTWT.
The radical, uncompromised, laissez-faire capitalism that Obama pretends was in place in 2008 is exactly what morality demands. Because, as Ayn Rand wrote in 1961: “No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man–the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction–is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect.”
Obama and his fellow statists have indeed evicted themselves from that realm.
Consumers proved loyal to the annual "Black Friday" ritual—even if that meant shopping Thursday.Continue reading.
Customers shopped at stores and online in numbers that retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT +0.10% and Target Corp. TGT -0.75% bragged about, lured by cut-price televisions and videogame consoles even as the Thanksgiving Day purchasing interrupted many turkey dinners across the country.
"It's all the thrill—the thrill of the shop," said Eduardo Cintron, a student from Acton, Mass., who braved below-freezing temperatures Thursday to get his spot in line for Best Buy's BBY +2.37% 1 a.m. deal to buy a home speaker system. On top of the deals, Mr. Cintron said he liked meeting his fellow bargain-hunters. "If I shopped online, you don't get that," he said.
On the other coast, Erin Swanson, a 41-year-old accountant, browsed blouses Friday morning at a San Francisco-area Macy's M -0.52% before heading over to Ann Taylor. "I am here at 6 in the morning," she said, "I know I am insane."
Wal-Mart said it recorded more than 10 million register transactions between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Thursday in its stores and nearly 400 million page views that day on walmart.com. It sold 2.8 million towels, 2 million televisions, 1.4 million tablets, 300,000 bicycles and 1.9 million dolls. Big-ticket electronics like big-screen TVs and new videogame consoles were among the top sellers.
Target said sales were among the highest it had seen in a single day online, and it booked twice as many orders on its website as last year in the early hours when door-busters became available.
The annual ritual that is "Black Friday" persists, in some cases defying logic as well as the calendar. Stores have been trotting out holiday deals since Halloween, most of the offerings are available online and many of the discounts are illusory bargains on goods designed to be cheap. But shopping now is as traditional to Thanksgiving as mashed potatoes and gravy.
Nancy Ketchen of Scotia, N.Y., stayed true to her family tradition of bringing her daughters to the Crossgates Mall in Albany on Black Friday. They shop, have lunch and then head to a nearby Target, a tradition that she says is more important than getting a better price Thursday evening or online. Her two daughters bought outfits for Christmas Day at Forever 21.
"Sometimes you can get a better deal on Amazon," she said. "We've been doing this for 5 or 6 years. It's fun."
Despite the activity at stores, there was early evidence that many stayed home to shop deals online. By 6 p.m. Thursday, Thanksgiving online sales had increased 10% this year over the same period last year, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks transactions at 800 U.S. retail sites.
About 140 million people are expected to shop over this holiday weekend, a decline from the 147 million who planned to do so last year, according to the National Retail Federation. The trade group said that nearly a quarter of the people it surveyed planned to shop on Thanksgiving Day.
Shoppers spent about $60 billion during the Black Friday weekend last year and more than 40% of that spending occurred online, according to the federation.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.Yeah, well, I'm bumming in my "bullshit job" sometimes, but it pays the rent.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
In response to my post on the George Zimmerman trial and the left’s reaction to it, I heard from some people I know who felt like I erred in my analysis. They believe Trayvon Martin was targeted as a suspect because he was a black teen, that it’s clear that Zimmerman engaged in racial profiling, and so race was a motivating factor in the Martin killing.Continue reading.
People can decide for themselves if what I wrote is sufficiently careful and fair-minded. But I thought I’d use the comments and concerns raised by these individuals to clarify and expand on some points.
What I argued was that there’s simply no indication that George Zimmerman is a racist. No evidence was presented at the trial that the killing was the equivalent of what the head of the NAACP called a “modern-day lynching.” It matters that neither the prosecution, nor the defense, nor the police, nor the jurors ever said that this trial was about race. In fact, they said the opposite. Many in the media (especially NBC/MSNBC) have acted in deeply irresponsible ways. And comparisons to what happened in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012 to what happened to Emmett Till on August 28, 1955 is a terrible disfigurement of history.
On the matter of whether Martin was targeted because of his race: Sanford Police Department detective Chris Serino’s interpretation sounds plausible. He told the FBI that Zimmerman’s actions were not based on Martin’s skin color but rather based on his attire, the total circumstances of the encounter and the previous burglary suspects in the community. And if Trayvon Martin had been a 75-year-old African American man in a suit using a cane and walking next to his four-year-old grandchild, we all know nothing would have happened that night. If, on the other hand, a 28-year-old “white Hispanic” male with rough attire had been walking around his neighborhood on a rainy night, George Zimmerman may well have followed him. It appears what Zimmerman was doing was engaging in criminal profiling. Now, whether it’s inappropriate for race to ever, under any circumstances, be taken into account when it comes to criminal profiling is an issue worth discussing. But that is entirely different than Zimmerman killing Martin was based on racial animus, which is what racial demagogues like Al Sharpton are saying.
At the same time, I want to underscore again my belief that George Zimmerman made some tragic errors. He’s no hero. Moreover, Trayvon Martin not only didn’t deserve to die; he was innocent of any wrongdoing. The fact that he was killed is a crushing blow from which his family will never fully recover. His parents are living through an ordeal they didn’t deserve. A month from now the rest of us will have moved on from this trial. They will not have. Those of us who believe the Zimmerman verdict was correct should not forget that.
But the trial and its aftermath demonstrated something else as well. It served as a kind of Rorschach test. Some people who paid close attention to the trial came away convinced that the second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman was indefensible, that the jury verdict was correct, and that the effort by some on the left to turn this into a Mississippi Burning moment is wrong and reckless. And many of those who claim solidarity with the African American community right now have had little or nothing to say about black-on-black crime, which is doing far more damage to the African American community than the type of incident that occurred in the Zimmerman-Martin confrontation. The moral outrage therefore seems somewhat contrived and convenient.
The rallying cries shot out across Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday evening.Just a little.
"Take the riot to Hollywood," one expletive-laden message on Twitter beseeched. "Hollywood. 7:30."
That invitation for trouble and others like it, police believe, were the seeds of a bizarre, chaotic night in the city's entertainment mecca that caught the LAPD off guard and left city officials scrambling to assure tourists and revelers, once again, that Hollywood is a safe place to be.
A group of 40 to 50 people, mostly teenagers, heeded the social media calls and went on what police described as a rolling crime wave.
LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said it appears the group thought Hollywood would be an easy target because police were focused on patrolling the Crenshaw District, which had been the scene of renegade violence during protests over the George Zimmerman verdict in Florida on Monday evening. As the problems began in Hollywood, the department was also dealing with protesters marching through downtown.
"What we're thinking is these youngsters took advantage of our redeployment of officers down to the Crenshaw District last night and decided that this would be a good night to come up to Hollywood and act a little crazy," Smith said.
The historical trends of the last decade show that when it comes to the regulation of American business operations, the direct involvement of government in providing subsidies to specific industries, and the level of federal taxation of corporate income, the “cowboy capitalism” moniker applied to the U.S. political economy is more myth than fact. To the extent that America may have deserved the distinction of being a “cowboy capitalist” nation in the 1980s, that distinction has clearly changed in recent years as economic freedom in the United States has suffered a steep decline since the turn of the millennium.Via Maggie's Farm.
And what would it take for the United States to regain its ranking among the world’s most “free” economies? According to Heritage, it “will require significant policy reforms, particularly in reducing the size of government, overhauling the tax system, transforming costly entitlement programs, and streamlining regulations.” Those are serious fiscal and institutional challenges that realistically could take several decades to successfully address, suggesting that any significant shift in the direction of a “freer” market economy and “cowboy capitalism” would be generations away.
The European Parliament moved this week to cap banker bonuses. But the plan faces stiff resistance in Britain, Europe's financial capital, and even German commentators question whether it will stop banking excesses.The left seeks to bring the rest of the world down, damn the consequences. At least some common sense is prevailing in London, and that's despite Britain's long slide in the socialist mediocrity itself. (The NHS scandal continues to amaze the world with the wonders of socialized medicine.)
As of Jan. 1, 2014, bankers' bonuses will be capped at 100 percent of their annual pay, or 200 percent with shareholder approval. The decision, reached in Brussels early Thursday morning by the European Parliament, the European Commission and the rotating Irish EU presidency, is likely to be approved next week. The regulation will apply to all bankers working within the EU, as well as employees of European bank subsidiaries abroad.
Although the regulation may not have a huge impact on normal banking executives, it could have a radical one on investment bankers, who work in a sector where it isn't unusual for bonuses to reach as high as ten times their annual salary. The center-left member of parliament leading the negotiations in Brussels, Udo Bullmann of Germany's Social Democrats, described the move as being no less than a "revolution" on the financial markets.
But in London, Europe's banking capital, criticism of the decision has been massive. "This is possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire," scoffed conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson, adding that Brussels cannot set pay for an entire sector "around the world." The move would only boost the United States and Asia as financial industry centers and further alienate Britain from the EU, he said.
So far, British Prime Minister David Cameron has been reserved in his remarks about the bonus cap, although he shares fears that the new rules will scare banks away from Britain. "We do have in the UK -- and not every other European country has this -- we have major international banks that are based in the UK but have branches and activities all over the world," he said. Cameron called for a regulation in Brussels that is "flexible enough to allow those banks to continue competing."
