Friday 26 November 2010

Mounted police charge at children in crowd

The controversy over the Met Police's illegal imprisonment of children in freezing cold open air conditions as they were kettled (trapped) for hours during a peaceful protest on Tuesday is growing. Police have claimed that they stopped the protest after some violent elements started to attack a police van, but this is questionable, since many in the crowd have subsequently said that they were already blocked off at this point, so the police must have decided to shut off the protest for some other reason. Also, if you saw the news footage from the Helicopter, it was clear that the police could not have kettled the protesters in reaction to the attack on the van, since they blocked them off only a few hundred meters up the road, and already had a line of riot vans blocking off the road. Footage has also emerged which shows horseback police charging spontaneously at the crowd.

Click here to see the video on You Tube

Thursday 25 November 2010

Lest we forget

As the police state continues it's witch hunt of student protesters, there are growing calls to re-muster and continue the fight against the vile reforms to higher education. Lest we forget that we are being ruled by a government with no mandate, elected on less than 20% of the population, elected without the votes of those who they are punishing the most. How cruel it is to complain about the direct action of the students, when those who will be affected had no say at the election (they were too young to vote), and who have been so sorely betrayed by the democratic system we once so loved. Lest we forget that we are being dictated to by a cabinet of millionaires, individuals with little experience of the real world, and no kind heart at the center of their cold forms. Lest we forget that it was not Labour, but the banks, who bankrupted Britain. Lest we forget that the Eurozone crumbles because the banks are collapsing. Lest we forget that it is the poor, the vulnerable, and the disenfranchised, who are being punished, whilst the wealth donors of bankrolled the intellectual anesthetization of the electorate are doing very comfortable thank you very much. Lest we forget that private debt dwarfs public debt by more than £4 to £1, even though the government is now bigger than the private sector. Lest we forget 1929, when the Great Depression in America was aggravated as the government tried to cut their way out of trouble. I'm sure it strains them to dangle so perilously off the cliff, but cutting the rope now will only provide temporary relief, and spark contagion in the long term. Lest we forget that the government is cutting corporation tax, writing off Vodafone's entire £6bn tax bill, and paying off their wealthy supporters, whilst they are jacking up regressive taxes to hit the poor, the students (future wealth creators), and the disabled.

It is really time that people stood up to this oppressive regime and kicked it out of office. Because if they damage our futures, we'll damage their economy. It is also time that people woke up to the fact that as long as we keep voting for frauds, all you will get is dishonesty in return. The average person remains clueless to what is really going on. They assume, logically, that paying off debt is good. But what about the fact that if we paid off all our debts their would be no money, since it is all lent at interest (money that doesn't exist) by the banks. What we are seeing in Europe is the big "call in", with the Markets seeking to bleed off money that they lent/created into existence. So lest we forget where our money really comes from. Also, lest we forget that money, and wealth, are not the same thing. Wealth can only be achieved by the sustainable use, and re-use of the materials and fuels that drive our economy, but lest we forget that for too long have governments plundered wealth in pursuit of money. When we think about this analysis, it becomes evident that in actuality, we are really witnessing a conflict between wealth and money. The problem is is that there is not much "wealth" left. Natural resources, and fuels such as oil, are quickly passing the point of maximum production, they are, in other words, "peaking". So what is going on, is governments, and the banking system, are colluding to drive down demand with tough austerity packages, in order to capture all the remaining wealth for themselves.

We must fight to stop this emerging conspiracy in favour of a more equitable distribution of what we have left, and a more sensible program of conservation and efficiency to replace current market forces, which depend upon economic inefficiencies to expand the economy and create jobs to pay of excessive levels debt which the banks created to trap us into the cycle. You see, it's not government debt we need to worry about. The ticking time bomb is really debt in the private sector, and the widely misunderstood idea of "ecological debt". Look it up...

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Today, we saw the latest round of the vile media witch hunt against the resistance, as reporters stooped so low as to claim that spraying anarchist symbols on a police van is an "act of violence". Poor van, I'm sure diddums is feeling rather sore right now. No, obviously not, it's a police van, not a human being or an animal, so it does not have what we might call a "central nervous system". As a matter of fact, there has been next to no actually violence at any of the student protests over the last 2 weeks. There have been scuffles with the police, which did leave some injured, but since the protesters never intended to hurt the police, there is a lack of good old "mens rea" (intention) when it comes to the term "violence". No, perhaps there was the odd bit of "vandalism", fair enough, but claiming that a protest is violence, just because 1% of the group choose to do some graffiti, is a bit over the top.

Plus, it's not the just Daily Mail who are doing this any more. The BBC have equally been detracting from the whole point by talking about tiny minorities and excusing it away by saying "we only report what goes on" (sic). Now don't get me wrong, the guy who threw a fire extinguisher at riot police from the roof of the Millbank complex was wrong in what he did, but you can't ignore the thousands of protesters who a peacefully demonstrated against the planned cuts to higher education, and the ensuing increase in tuition fees.

You see, when Osborne talks of the need to tackle the debt, he is being so ignorant to the fact that he is not actually getting rid of any debt at all. He is just shifting it to those who are less able to pay. Why Mr. Osborne, will you be charging us a "market interest rate", when what this really means is a "consumer interest rate", pegged 3 or so percentage points above inflation, when the government will actually make a profit on this, since they only pay 1.5% to borrow the money, or less if they just print it. Is this policy, by any chance, a favour to your private banking chums who paid for the election? Now just in case your lawyers are taking a peek at this blog, this is not an accusation, only a theory. The thing that bugs me is that if "Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy" (sic) Mr. Osborne, due to a crippling government debt burden, then why did the private sector not take us down the drain years ago? To understand this question, we need the statistics part.

Whilst the Tories talk of the monstrously big "state" that gobbles up 53% of our GDP, and has debt of around 70% of GDP, they forget to mention that debt in the other 47% of the economy accounts is a whopping 400% of GDP. Osborne is also keen to remind us that if we don't cut spending quickly, we will end up in the same situation as Ireland. So let's examine the lies, damned lies and statistics for this claim. Firstly, the Ireland case study is not new in Mr. Osborne's miscellany of excuses. He wheeled it out 3 years ago, when Ireland started cutting spending in the recession. When he wanted to give the Labour government advice, he simply said "look across the Irish sea". As for the result of this, all I can do is to repeat his grand old saying. "Look across the Irish sea George, and learn this time..., look and learn..."
Oh and when he boasts that our interest rates have come down, I would suggest that this isn't so much that the market has more confidence in the government for cutting spending (it hasn't yet), but that the market has run out of countries to go to who haven't already bankrupted themselves with pointless austerity.

As for student fees, since university education provides a benefit to the whole of society, why does he want to shift the burden of payment away from the taxpayer to the student? You don't even need a progressive system of student debt repayment, you've got one anyway, and it works even if people don't earn £21,000. It's progressive, and it's called, da da da, the TAX SYSTEM! Remember who pays the poor man's benefit; yeah, it's the rich, well trained man who WENT TO UNIVERSITY *in most cases. Oxford university announced recently that it costs them £16,000 to educate one student per year. So sending every 18 year old in the country off to an Oxford quality education would cost less than thirty billion. Now how would we get that money? Simples. Print it. The bank of England is already printing hundreds of billions of pounds in their "quantitative easing" money printing programme, so why not just grease up your money machines and start "quantitatively easing students, not bankers" Mervin King?

As for Osborne, all I can say is "Look at the facts George, and learn."

Tuesday 23 November 2010

They stoop low, very low... (repost from 31/10/10)

The coalition government wreckless slash-and-burn economics has reached crisis point today, with the news that a nuclear weapons base will possibly be privatised, and sold off to foreign corporations. Yesterday, Harriet Harman (Labour) reffered to the Cheif Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander (Lib Dem) as a "ginger rodent". Forget giner rodent, any government that allows nuclear weapons to be controlled by private corporations for profit deserves much harsher criticism. It is simply impossible to express the utter ludicrosity of a government that thinks it needs to privatise our nuclear weapons, whilst letting companies like Vodafone off an incredible £6billion in tax, according to a recent investigation by Private Eye. No wonder the exchequer is short of money. Osborne must be pretty desperate if we are seriously considering privating nuclear weapons. He insits that making cuts is the only option, although it is obviously neccessary to point out the alternatives that he is obviously reluctant to spew forth.


1) -Cut down on the £12 bn pounds British Companies fail to pay in tax each year, saving £48 billion over the 5 year parliament, making more than half of the £83 billion cuts unneccessary.


2) -Start selling the £850 bn pounds worth of bank assets we own from the bailout. Use this money to fund defecit spending, thus reducing the debt burden, reducing interest payments, freeing up more public money to be spent on services, not debt.


3) - Cut VAT to 12% (the treasuries own economic forecasting software shows this would be the optimal level for growth and low inflation), instead of increasing it to 20% simply for the sake of avoiding tax rises for the wealthy. VAT is a regressive tax, which means that the poorest in society will pay more of it as a percentage of their incomes, because poorer people spend more of their incomes on purchasing things, rather than making investments, or saving, as the rich can afford to do.


4) - Instead of privatizing our Nuclear Missile bases to US companies, actually sell the missiles themselves to the US. The US government grows keener and keener, year on year to throw more and more money over to the Pentagon, so why not supply what they want when the demand (and thus price) is high. By 2013 they are expected to have a "defence" budget of over $1 trillion, that's 1 thousand thousand thousand thousand. The yanks could do with a few more nukes ;).


5) - The government has to stop allowing the Bank of England to print money under the guise of the "quantitative easing" program. Simply printing money only redistributes value from those who have money to those who print it. By inflating the money supply, the government is artificially confiscating value from our money in order to prop up the banks.


Whilst Cameron keeps to the shadows, wheeling out his cronies to do the nasty work, it is the Liberal Democrats who are rightly picking up the brunt of voter fury. Whilst Alan Johnson will claim that the government is cutting for "ideological reasons", that is only what the government should be doing. We can't complain that the conservatives are doing what they promised. Unsatisfied voters should blame the Liberals. They have broken nearly every election pledge they made, most notably the "no rise in tuition fees" scam. If our economic system recognized "effort" in the same way it did money, then the electorate, consumers of political services, could ask for their votes back. The idea of recall was backed by Clegg and Co at election time, but as soon as he get's power, we haven't heard another whisper about the idea. Sadly some voters have short memories and even shorter minds. Whilst the politicians deserve some of the blame for tricking people into believe that we were "on the brink of bankruptcy", the voters have swallowed this nonsense with the trust that a 5 year old has in their schoolteacher.


Osbourne's fantasy about the "brink of bankruptcy" is really the brink of b******t, and he knows it. Perhaps if Labour were sharper than resorting to the same old adversarial, fact lacking debate that plagued the chambers of parliament when they were in power, then voters might begin to see past the myriad of propaganda that the Tory machine churns out. According to a recent press release, the first meeting after Cameron got to Downing St was with the publishing tycoon Rupert Murdoch. What this says about his priorities is simply disgraceful. If we were on "the brink of bankruptcy", the why, Mr Cameron was it Murdoch, not Mervin (the governor of the Bank of England) who got the first meeting at number 10? Since Cameron, Clegg and chums do not comprehend the complexities of bankruptcy, I will point out that to be bankrupt is to be insolvent, and to be insolvent is to be inable to pay your debts. Since the budget that Osborne inherited had less than 10% allocated to debt repayment, far from the over 100% that would qualify the country for liquidation procedures, and since Osborne obviously read the Darling budget he inherited in depth, there is evidently something fishy going on.


Economic bankruptcy is the least of our worries. It is the inability of governments present and past to quantify the perilous approach towards social, environmental and now moral bankruptcy that epitomizes the corrupt back room politics that brought the current lot into power. It is neither Liberal, Democratic, nor Conservative to rush through a fiscally regressive, barnstorm budget, like the one we witnessed back in June. Nor is it Liberal, Democratic, nor Conservative to shut off the freedom of opportunity that is afforded by having a home. The government's planned £400 per week cap on Housing benefit, the £26,000 a year family cap on benefits overall, no exceptions (what about the single mum in Manchester with 15 children...), oh and the fat new tution fees of £9,000, and the petty, meagre, £1 billion pound "Green Investment Bank" that will only be funded in 2013, and no years other than that, that will drive the oxymoron of "sustainable growth" (on a finite planet), let alone the countless other morally, socially, and envionrmentally bankrupt policies that the Clegg, Camermon, Cable, cohort subscribe to.


Sadly, voters will probably switch back to Labour at the next election. Whilst they didn't get us "into this mess", no, the US subprime mortage crisis did, they could have opted out of the costly wars in Iraq, Afganistan and Sierra Leone, instead putting the money aside in some sort crisis funded to deal with future crises'. The thing is, every one with the slightest knowledge of economics knows well that we move from boom to bust. History shows that the bigger the boom the bigger the bust, but when Brown had is boom, he boasted that he "had abolished the economic cycle". How can you abolish something that is driven by human instinct? People invest, make money, run out of money, and then cut back, and the economy goes bang. That's what happens. If Osbornes medicine is to dig us out the ditch, the more successful he is, the greater we will fall next time. By that time, it will be the next government's job to jumpstart the engine. If that government is only going to repeat the mistakes of the past, then it is time for a different type of government. Currently, we have a situation where each is worse than the one before, so voters get fed up quicker, vote for a new one, which is even worse, and then after getting fed up with that one, switch back the lot that seemed so bad before. At least, this is what the media would like you to believe.


Instead, it is only the small number of swing voters to decide the path of the country. Since it is these "floating voters", no matter how they come to their decision, that really choose governments, isn't it time for every party loyalist; left, right and center, to really reconsider their allegiances. Only with a wholesale awakening of these die-hards, can we remove the oligopoly of these "floating" few who sit at the steering wheel in our democratic bus. If people were allowed to make a negative vote, as well as their positive one, then elections would better reflect how humans really think, rather than arrogantly assuming that support is not matched by opposition. Responsiblity now lies with the news media to bring about the reboot.