Not content with focusing public ire on those social spongers who have the temerity to be unemployed or disabled, government has scored a great populist coup, and caused great rejoicing in the land of the tabloids, by decreeing that it is quite acceptable to kill burglars with machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers, tactical nuclear weapons or any of the other items the British householder keeps by them for such an emergency.
But if a burglar were to strip my home of its entire contents, it would not reach a tenth in value of the money that is going to be taken from me in taxation by government for the rest of my life to fund the bank bailouts in which my cash was given to reckless and incompetent bankers to cover their gambling losses.
Not only have they taken all my money, the majority of the money I shall be paying to cover it for the rest of my life, will consist of interest to the bankers because the government borrowed at interest from the bankers the money it then gave gratis to the bankers to bail them out.
And, as doubtless you will have noticed, nothing changed. No reduction in massive salaries and bonuses, no split of casino from high street banking, no transaction tax to deter multiple speculative trades. A million more unemployed, but none of them investment bankers – they have however sacked over a hundred thousand mostly female staff from their high street branches, which were the only sensible and profitable bit of the operation. No bankers in jail, not even for LIBOR fraud. Quantitive Easing, or printed money, is given not for infrastructure projects to produce growth, but given to banks to improve their liquidity. They do not lend it on to companies but pay it to themselves, as bonuses.
Forget burglars. Shoot a banker.
This post is yet more evidence that you are a dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left Craig 😉
p.s liked it a lot
” I certainly wouldn’t vote for them, which is what you are doing when you vote for any of the 3 parties in a UK election …”
Greenwald gets a lot of flack because he pushes 3rd party challenges. We remember the last time we voted for Nader (2000) and the result was clearly disastrous for all except the 1% ( including the military-industrial complex). The differences between Democrat and Republican seem trifling until you assess the damage in retrospect.
That’s because you’ve got terrible electoral systems Ben, that mean any vote against one of the main parties is effectively a vote for the other, especially in Presidential elections (not that first-past-the-post is much different there, but the electoral college is like first-past-the-post cubed)
That and that allowing private donations to political parties and election campaigns ensures the super-rich, big banks and big firms dominate policy making – plus the ridiculous practice the whole world has of making half (often less than half) the voters the winners and half the country the losers after each election, as if it could be democratic to give all power for four or five years to a minority or a small majority.
It’d be a lot better if we had an executive which was a committee of 10 or 20 or so people who were the government ministers each with equal power, while the rest of parliament or congress acted to hold them to account and provide an opposition both collectively and through select committees elected by all members of parliament or congress the way the UK parliament’s select committees are.
(i’m dreaming with all of that i know, but that’s what i think you’d need to have something approximating to real democracy)
forgot to say the governing committee / cabinet / admin would have seats allotted to each party and to independents according to the percentage of the seats they got in parliament / congress – which, if elections were by proportional representation, would be the same percentage of the vote they got in the election.
@Derek – thanks, we know. No (costly) certs here, hence we use the pretend one that comes with the server! It does offer a bit of protection when using untrusted public wifi, if a security exception is set.
I agree with most of what you say, Duncan, but when you get to Gov’t by committee, you lose me.
Such Ombudsmen would have to sign a pledge of absolute transparency with the death penalty attached for me to even consider.
I hate to be all Maoist, but sending them to work in the paddies, or ‘tattie-howking’, would be my preferred method of punishment. If they refuse, of course, or get uppity, THEN shoot them.
Fair, or not?
The reason i prefer government by committee is that if you have one single person who has executive power that means a minority or at best a small majority of the electorate will have voted for that person.
If you have PR for elections and then make each government minister have one vote on an executive committee, the vast majority of voters will be equally represented on the executive.
Also because too much power in one person’s hands is dangerous. It’s too much responsibility and stress for a single person to have all executive power and no single person can look at every issue from a wide enough range of viewpoints to make the best decision.
Sounds fair to me Donald – community service to pay back for their crimes. I’d say they should be paid the minimum wage for any tattie howkin if it wasn’t for the fact that most of them have been paying themselves a thousand times it before and since the crisis.
I can relate to your idea, in principle. But, I’ve found too many cooks spoil the broth. The UN is an example.
I can’t imagine getting single-payer healthcare in the US, much less amendments to the Constitution in this acrid political environment.
I am hopeful Publicly Funded Elections will change the landscape. This environment, is a tough one for that, as well. Obama could have opted for it but chose not to because McCain didn’t and you can’t have that unilaterally. Both sides must agree. But getting the money motive out of the game is essential.
Shoot a banker? Yeah! … Oh, actually, no – because shooting people is bad (or blowing them up with hi-tech droney things, nuclear missiles etc) … couldn’t we just burgle bankers and get the money back? … oh no, that’s quite difficult and dangerous, given the new laws about your right to shoot burglars in the back. I know, how about if every time anyone from the BBC to your local carnival committee asks you to nominate a popular character, local hero or anything like that for anything from a community award to a national medal, nominate a bank-robber. We could start a mass movement.
“Fair, or not?”
I was chewing up my keyboard trying to sum up the same idea –
All people in financial business earning more than twice the average wage. Seize their assets. Have them do community service for years in order to earn some back. If as they say -they were earning that money because they are high performers, they should be able to help out very well with other, less glamourous problems then! But high performers or not, their business sector crashed so badly it threatened to take out everyone elses livelyhoods and they blackmailed for several years huge chunks of health and services budgets. If there are massive debts to pay into the future, they should be the very first to pay back, they should have started a couple of years ago when thier whole perversely greedy professional sector broke.
Money lending to businesses and people could be operated very efficiently by a newly recreated 21st century NPO.
But its dont fix this loophole -fix that one.
Here is one perfectly reasonable model for progress, but here is another totally different but equally reasonable one. Cant decide. Fuck em in the ear, Shoot em. They’re bandits.
Moniker, you are on to something!
Wait though it might be dangerous… you go first.
More Gandhian would be for the rest of us to dress up as bankers and to conduct ourselves in the community and in the economy and in all our affairs as if we were bankers.
If enough of us did it, civilisation would collapse in a week. On its ruins a new, more civil society would arise.
The key question to ask about Jimmy Savile is this: why the 8 houses? And that’s on top of his own special accommodation at an NHS hospital and at Broadmoor.
They weren’t posh flats or houses. He had so many. WHY?
As for other UK celebrity paedophiles, it’s about time for this scandal to break properly, which puts the British elite easily on the level of Belgium. They’re not all guilty of paedophile crime, but practically all of those who aren’t, have kept quiet about it. Try the following list.
ENTERTAINMENT
Jim Davidson,
Mick Jagger,
Keith Richards,
Bill Wyman,
David Frost,
John Motson,
John Lennon,
David Bowie,
David Jason,
Jeremy Clarkson,
Ronnie Barker,
Freddie Starr,
Dave Lee Travis,
John Peel,
Gary Glitter,
Jonathan King,
Valerie Singleton,
Cliff Richard,
Noel Edmonds,
Tony Blackburn,
Jeremy Beadle,
POLITICIANS AND ROYALTY
Alan Clark,
Prince Philip,
Prince Charles,
Prince Andrew,
Edward Heath,
Jeremy Thorpe,
Leon Brittan,
Cyril Smith,
Lord Scarman,
Greville Janner,
George Thomas,
Lord Macalpine
not forgetting from the distant past:
Lord Reith,
John Maynard Keynes,
A long long list could be made of Hollywood paedophiles too.
“A long long list could be made of Hollywood paedophiles too.”
The absence of which, many are appreciative.
Leonard Young: Some excellent posts, thank you. Particularly your portrayal of Howard Davies – worthy of a Private Eye article. In your “11 Oct,20112 – 11:50 am” post you bemoan MSM’s failure to invite real people (who actually work for a living) on to discuss the economy. That’s probably because most people would admit to not having much of a clue, apart from some right-wing bugaboo that they believe to be sapping their efforts – scroungers, single-parent mothers, immigrants, lazy students, take your pick. Now it’s those well-heeled public sector workers with their god-awful cheek to actually expect a pension after 40 years of service.
In your post at 12:19pm, don’t forget the emphasis should be on multiple home owners – the landlord class – who truly benefit from rampant house price inflation, for a number of reasons. Not least of which is the cost of rent, put way up because the cost of a mortgage is increased. (Particularly in hard time like these, where banks are reluctant to loan out taxpayer-granted cash, without a whacking deposit.)
Buy-to-rent, and you deduct 100% of the interest on the mortgage as a business expense. Buy your own home, and you see no mortgage tax relief – MIDAS went out years ago. Rent, and every penny is non-deductible. This grossly favours the investor class when it comes to property. The single buy-to-live-in home owner used to get a half-way favour, not any more. The favoritism towards the investor class become even more stark.
*
Your note to “old” Abe Renne’s homespun BS didn’t mention how crucial it was to act decisively and quickly, to show that the government would not allow Northern Rock to go bust. Had that been allowed, we would have seen a run on one bank after another, as investors (not to mention ordinary account holders) hurried to withdraw everything they could. There is not enough liquidity in the system to even start to return to people a small fraction of the “money” they think they’ve got, let alone the investors, still less the speculators, and forget about the derivatives.
If even a week went by before all the banks were bust, the pound would have swiftly followed. Our money would have become worthless, and we would nationally be in 1000 years of debt.
It takes a particularly dotty view to consider the NR bailout was a sop to Labour supporters, and “old” Abe never fails to produce.
Nevertheless, thank you again for some excellent posts.
Bravo my friend!
Katz – that’s brilliant. Now let’s see, how would it go? From now on, my little freelancing business will charge its clients for all the money it gives, all the money it takes, all the money that stays where it is, and any money that might be missing when I wish I owned it. I will continue to send clients bills long after whatever services have been supplied on the grounds that if they don’t keep paying, my little business might not be rich any more which would be *a very bad thing*. Oh yes, and the occasional stonking great bill when my little business happens to have less than several billion pounds at its fingertips because that also is *a bad thing*. – Oh and, no-one is allowed to charge me for anything, not even my mistakes, because that would be another *bad thing*, unless of course I earn millions from my mistakes, in which case those who accidentally gave me all that money can have £23.50 in compensation.
When a family member dies and you inherit their money, you have to pay the inheritance tax before you get the letters of administration or probate. There’s actually a scheme whereby you can use the deceased person’s money to do this, but most solicitors won’t tell you about this, and nor will banks. Guess what the banks try to do? They try to LEND you your own money, so that you can pay it to the taxman!
In all sorts of local crookery, including famously landlordism of most descriptions, solicitors are in it up to their necks with local bank figures.
The misselling the bastards get away with is routine and ubiquitous! 7% interest, guaranteed! Foreign currency, no commission (but what’s a spread if it isn’t a commission?)! Why isn’t this illegal? And any time you phone them about anything, they try to urge you to get (deeper) into debt. Yes, shoot the bastards.
There is a total here of over 100 uses of the words ‘bank’ and ‘banker’. Sorry to say that the said ‘bankers’ reading this will be having a laugh as they know that nothing will be done to bring them to heel or to book.
“You need to watch yourself making remarks like that these days – it might land you in jail, or with hundreds of hours of community service plus fine. And I might be right there too, for agreeing with you.”
Don’t be so silly. Do you really think that, if so I pity you for living in constant fear of speaking out.
Funny how, as soon as you mention dishing out to the criminal classes what they have been dishing out to the rest of humanity decade after decade, all these ‘pacifists’ and ‘lawyers’ suddenly jump out the woodwork claiming the moral high ground.
Interesting that one of the things Blair did in his first year as PM was to ratify EU law and remove the death penalty for treason and arson in a naval dockyard.
How many ‘civilised’ British people, including many politicians, cheered on the brutal torture and murder of Gaddaffi? Not only that but we were all debased as a society by having to witness such a crime over and over again while the perpetrators appeared on TV smiling and grinning?
wow, what a little list, now, lets go to war quickly, before anybody asks some serious questions about visits to childrens home’s and hospitals by those listed….
@On The Jimmy Savile Story
Thanks for this list, many of the names on which are already widely known. The comparison with Belgium is interesting. Most of those people are still living. Why aren’t they in prison?
In Belgium, the political class and the police proved completely incapabale of investigating paedophile murders and child sex slavery. Why? Because it went way too far up the social hierarchy for anyone to do anything about it. So the regime’s propagandists wheeled out the king to go on demonstrations!
That’s unlikely in the UK. Prince Andrew association with paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his underage girls is well known. So is Prince Charles’s warm support for his ‘toothpaste-squeezer’ Michael Fawcett, when he found out he’d raped his servant George Smith.
I suppose there are probably figures in the Church of England the British image managers could wheel out, but they’d have to be careful. Many senior judges are involved in paedophilia, in all 4 constituent parts of the UK, but I guess they could find a female one who could be sold as unbesmirched.
As for Esther Rantzen, well, given her association with the BBC and the same synagogue organisations in Leeds and Manchester to which Savile was supplying young children for abuse, and her idiotic statements about Savile (which Katy Brand discusses here)…well I suppose they could try it, but it might backfire. Only a very naive person would bank on ChildLine retaining the respect it used to hold.
Katy Brand:
Rantzen has admitted that she heard the rumours at the time, referring to it as ‘green room gossip’, the implication being that it was classier to ignore it. If I have learnt anything from my time working in TV, it is that ‘green room gossip’ is almost always true. The very best source of information on a show is the make-up artists, who see people at their very worst, and make them look their very best. They see everything and hear everything, and many a rumour has started in the make up chair and not stopped until it has reached you sitting at your kitchen table, eating a boiled egg and reading all about it in the paper.
If you are a seasoned TV presenter, you know that green room chat is the most reliable source of information in the whole world, and so I cannot entirely sit back and say ‘oh well, Esther, how could you possibly have known for sure?’ But still, it’s Esther Rantzen, and one should have a little respect.
It wasn’t until I watched a Sky news interview with ‘Dame That’s Life’ that I started getting really angry with her. Looking uncomfortable, she was clearly choosing her words carefully as the reporter asked her the obvious questions: ‘What did you know? When did you know it? Couldn’t you have said something? You started ChildLine for goodness sake, why didn’t you do something?’ (I am paraphrasing a little here, but only a little).
Esther’s replies left my jaw on the floor. She started by saying that until now it had ‘only been one single child’s word against the word of a television icon’, implying that this meant it was impossible to verify. She went on to say that now it was ‘five adult women’ who had come forward it was easier, and here was the part that started to make my blood boil, that they were ‘cool, credible, sensible women’, who through their lack of emotion were ‘convincing’ to Esther, and so she had started to believe there was some truth to it all. Really? Really, Esther? So, for you to believe allegations of child abuse, it can’t only be ‘one single child’ saying it? And the victims have to be ‘cool, credible and sensible’ in order to be ‘convincing’? And there has to be more than one, and they must never have met one another? Really? Isn’t that kind of attitude exactly what you have been campaigning against all your professional life?
The reporter then asked her why she hadn’t raised the rumours with anyone at the BBC. Esther’s response was that it ‘wasn’t relevant to anything I was working on at the time’. What, like ChildLine? She then said she was ‘only a guest’ on Savile’s show, effectively suggesting that child abuse was somebody else’s department. Exactly whose department we’ll never know, as the department of the person who was setting up ChildLine seemed to consider it ‘irrelevant’.
Watching Savile’s ex-colleagues squirm around in the aftermath of all this is deeply unpleasant, and it just shows how difficult it can be to stand up to someone so powerful. People, including Esther, keep referring to the fact that Savile had even been blessed by the Pope, and if the Pope can’t tell someone’s a paedophile, then how could they possibly be expected to know? The irony of this defence is almost more than I can stand – yeah, let’s put all the paedos in front of the Pope and let him decide how bad they are – GREAT IDEA. They say it takes a village to raise a child; perhaps it also takes a media village to abuse one. As Esther said, ‘we all contributed’. Damn right.
Re: @Komodo, re the Beeb article:
Thanks, Jon, for replying. Hobsbawm is alleged (see thousands of c&p artists on Google – I can’t verify this quickly) to have described himself as an “unrepentant Communist”, and would certainly not have objected to that description. Certainly the article makes the statutory nods to the “Marxism is the embodiment of all evil” meme, but it would probably have been spiked if it had not. And Marxism, as a political epithet, conflatable with Stalinism, can well be left to rest in peace. Its meaning and associations have been changed enormously since Marx and Engels considered the idea of a just economy. It’s a toxic brand, like it or not.
As an economic theory, after major refurbishment and a lick of paint, it might still fly….
Thanks for the compliment Moniker. But with all due respect, you are thinking small.
More effective would be to convince all your friends and loved ones to make a bad bet after convincing the betting shop to give you a share of the winnings. Then you bet on the opposite outcome.
If the worst happens and your loved ones win, then you decline to pay up, appeal to the government that your financial reverses would bring down the system, convincing the government to bail you out.
Then you take your loved ones to court demanding a share of their winnings.
It worked a treat for Goldman Sax.
O/T. A little serious light entertainment if you’ve got two minutes to spare. The latest in a series of cartoons about how Julian Assange was set up. Please distribute.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8wrmtDkoLU