TAX HELL – INLAND REVENUE AT WORK !

A little bit of gossip for your edification

Dear Nick,

A fellow traveller !

You appear to be slightly incredulous as if this is your first experience of astonishingly corrupt bureaucracy as you describe in Tax Hell ! Surely that cannot be the case if you are a journo ?

I fell from what passes for semi-wealthy middle class grace due to a combination of various odd circumstances which have left me currently a penniless peasant, single parent, fighting off endless absolutely astounding State sponsored garbage of the type you describe in Tax Hell.

- Customs and Excise arbitrarily bankrupt me about 1999 on the basis of imaginary estimates of unpaid VAT, despite the fact I made many telephone calls to them telling them I was no longer trading and owed no tax. Although they responded to these telephone calls with bits of paper showing evidence I had told them I wasn’t trading, they just carried on estimating and bankrupting anyway. I suppose they must have just done it because they were bored and needed something to do to just keep them busy really.

Because of a slightly dramatic medical emergency experienced by the mother of my son on the day of the bankruptcy hearing, I failed to make it to court as planned. If I had gone to court, there simply couldn’t have been a bankruptcy, but it happened by default – of course.

I got to court a few weeks later, when Customs told the judge that, no, I didn’t actually owe, and never had actually owed, any of the fantasy money dreamed up by the VAT man at all. In fact he said there had been a meeting with me at some point prior to any court proceedings where I had settled the last valid VAT bill and had a friendly face to face discussion about how I was no longer trading while I actually handed over all the cash that I owed to close my account completely.

But the VAT man seemed a bit petulant about me not being very compliant with ‘procedure’ and form filling – useless bureaucracy and making up non-existent rules as go by the Vat man to you and me !

The problem was, the VAT man said, was Customs and Excise had no option but on carry on making imaginary estimates of tax I should be paying each month on the basis of what had been paid in the past when I was trading even though they knew perfectly well I had told them many times I had ceased trading.

Why was this ? Well, it was just that I hadn’t filled out the right form, apparently ! So, they knew perfectly well I owed no tax because I wasn’t trading, but they just deliberately carried on letting their computer automatically making imaginary demands which were never going to be paid. Then, when these demands went unpaid for a few months, they ‘automatically’ commenced bankruptcy proceedings knowing full well the whole idea was a complete fiction.

It didn’t seem to matter that it would cost the taxpayers a fortune in wasted money and wreck the life of the person they were pointlessly persecuting – simply because the right form hadn’t been filled in !

Purple smoke flew out of the judge’s ears as he spluttered to the VAT man that they were complete fools and what business did they think they had bringing a case like this to his court to waste his time with !

The judge was slightly puzzled as to how to un-bankrupt me on the legal technicality of seeing as how I could never have been properly bankrupted in the first place, it seemed to be something that hadn’t quite properly happened at all and therefore didn’t actually exist as a kosher bankruptcy, and so therefore couldn’t just be annulled. A bit of a legal puzzle.

But some compromise was cobbled together and the bankruptcy was made to just disappear – poof – just like that !

But of course it didn’t really disappear as it had by now utterly destroyed my credit record, which then led to a series of several sub-prime mortgages and the exciting experience of losing about £500 000 equity in my house while being fleeced by completely dishonest banks and fending off about three different re-possessions and evictions in a row in a desperate bid to keep a roof over the head of my infant son and me.

- by now I was thoroughly within the clutches of the dependency State, where my every daily action was controlled or interfered with in some way by a vast army of time wasting idiots similar to the ones you have been dealing with.

As a result of this I have a huge catalogue of stories like yours. Immense numbers of stories; awesome examples of truly incredible bureaucratic filth poisoning everyone’s lives all the time.

- One of them was indeed a tax investigation whereby I only escaped the clutches of these corrupt, dishonest thieves by forking out £600 to an accountant (with my only income being state benefit of income support) to do pretty much absolutely nothing at all that I couldn’t have done myself . I’m not complaining about the accountant. He spent some hours on my behalf and was due payment for that. It was just that what he did was completely, completely silly, irrelevant and entirely pointless – except it had the value of showing the Tax Commissioners that I was worth taking seriously and so the case would get another hearing before them, after the accountant had done whatever he was supposed to do.

It was clear without that appointing of an accountant I would have had it – been taken to the cleaners and been prosecuted for tax evasion on the basis of the pure fantasy that I must have had an (entirely imaginary ) income which I hadn’t declared at all.

When I had that next Tax Commissioner’s hearing – the third in all – the Tax Commissioners became very, very cross with the Inland Revenue, because they had failed to turn up at all to any the three hearings anyway. So the Commissioners crossly said they would dismiss the case against me and said the Inland Revenue behaviour was quite unacceptable and positively insulting to the Tax Commissioner’s Court.

- the next major kerfuffle was the business of me asking social, services in the small matter of actually doing their job of helping children and disadvantaged adults when the mother of my son and two other small children suddenly became seriously mentally ill with schizophrenia, thus putting three children at grave risk at a place two hundred miles distant from me.

This social services story is vile. It shows the spendthrift wickedness of social services in a way they cannot wriggle out of like all the ones they do wriggle out of – even when, like Baby Peter – they are quite obviously culpably liable for grotesque negligence.

But, there you go. That is Modern Times in Britain today with a corrupt government wasting about half the country’s earnings on mercilessly persecuting the entire population of brow beaten taxpayers facing relentlessly rising taxes to pay for the madness of Gormless Gordon, the retarded idiot running the country.

I hope this little letting off of steam amuses you.

I mean, you have to laugh, don’t you ?

Otherwise you would spend all your time crying buckets of blood and tears at the Modern Times we live in.

MINTON REPORT EXPOSES TOXIC WASTE DUMPING CRIMINALS

Thousands of people injured by poisonous waste

But UK’s Totalitarian State engineered by Labour Government suppresses free speech

Wickedly restrictive Libel Law used by Lawyers Carter Ruck to suppress toxic waste dumping makes UK World pariah

Released September 14, 2009

Summary Updated October 15, 2009:

The “Minton report” exposes a toxic waste dumping incident, which affected upto 108,000 people, according to a September 2009 United Nations report.

The UK media has been suppressed from mentioning the report or its contents since a secret gag order was issued against the Guardian newspaper on September 11, 2009. The report was commissioned through Waterson & Hicks, a UK law firm, possibly to claim client-attorney privilege should it leak.

The company concerned, Trafigura, is a giant multi-national oil and commodity trader. The Minton report assesses an incident involving Trafigura and the Ivory Coast town of Abidjan—possibly most culpable mass contamination incident since Bhopal.

The UK media is currently unable to mention the URL “http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton” or anything else that would direct people towards the report.

An attempt by a member of parliament to subvert the gag order, by mentioning “Minton report”, the date of the secret gag, and “Trafigura” in the House of Commons, lead to a major uproar on October 12 and 13, following an attempt by Trafigura to apply the gag order to parliamentary reporting (see this front page article in the Guardian newspaper).

The parliamentary quote concerned:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.[1]

The UK press gag remains in effect. Incredibly, Trafigura’s lawyers, Carter Ruck, are now attempting again to prevent parliamentary debate over the gag, this time by claiming sub-judice.

Readers can help the victims and the press undermine this unconscionable gag order, by spreading the URL “http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton“.

Trafigura attempts to silence Norwegian Media/Trafigura charged in Norway

The Minton report:

In the report an expert analyses the Probo Koala waste on behalf of Trafigura. The oil-trader has chosen not to disclose the content of the report to the public. The content of the report shows that the waste contained hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and a wide variety of toxic substances.

The expert writes that the waste in worst case can cause deaths. The analysis is done in September 2006, only a month after the Probo Koala delivered waste in the Ivory Coast, and a month before Trafigura sent the Probo Emu to Norway with identical waste.

Possible gas-chamber

Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, Jon Songstad is shocked by the Minton-report. –If this had exploded without burning, the whole village of Sløvåg could have turned into a gas-chamber.

After the tank-explosion in Western Norway in May 2007, people in the village became ill. They vomited, had severe headaches and chemically red sore throats.

Based on information from the Minton-report, Songstad is convinced that the fire in the tank saved the population. H2S burned in the fire, and prevented deadly concentrations of toxic fumes leaking out.

Sworn to silence

The British newspaper, The Guardian, has also obtained a copy of the Minton-report, but according to a High Court ruling have until today not been allowed to mention it, report on it or in any way disclose that they have the document.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation received the High Court ruling and information about The Guardians situation directly from Trafigura’s Norwegian lawyers. The information and the ruling was sent to us in an attempt to stop us from publishing this report on our web pages.

Communication with Trafigura

Trafigura has not been willing to comment on the content of the report. But on September 15th they sent us this e-mail:

« As mentioned in our e-mail of yesterday, Trafigura finds it improper to answer questions to the media as long as the criminal charges in Norway are still under investigation by Økokrim. However, certain of the additional questions and statements in your e-mail of this morning are biased and can not be left unchallenged. Trafigura is in process of producing a written statement as a response to the questions raised by NRK. We will forward this statement to you during the course of business tomorrow, and kindly ask that you refrain from publishing anything before having had the opportunity to carefully examine the response from Trafigura.

Your questions of today do also reveal the fact that you are in possession of a draft, preliminary expert opinion produced by Minton Treharne & Davies Ltd, and that you appear to be ready to disclose information from this report. Trafigura looks very serious upon this, as disclosing any information from this report would be a clear breach of confidentiality and privilege. The report is clearly privileged and confidential and was obtained unlawfully by whoever is responsible for it coming into your possession.

Please be aware that on Friday of last week, our clients sought and obtained an injunction in relation to this document and information contained in it against the Guardian newspaper and Persons Unknown, pending a further hearing. For your attention we have attached hereto a copy of the Court Order.

In the circumstances, we kindly ask you to confirm that NRK will not disclose or make reference to this expert report or its contents. We might add (although it is not directly relevant to your obligation not to publish a document which has been obtained unlawfully) that the document was, as we say, draft and it is clear from its text that it was produced generically without reference to the underlying evidence. We can also assure you that its generic conclusions have long since been wholly superseded by the analyses of the Probo Koala slops by independent experts.»

Read more: Coker gasoline – low quality
Read more: A small pawn in the game
Trafigura charged in Norway

Oil-trader Trafigura is under police investigation in Norway, accused of illegal import of waste. The waste was brought to Norway on the Probo Emu in 2006, and is identical to the waste that Trafigura shipped to the Ivory Coast on the Probo Koala.

The Norwegian police have been investigating Trafigura for more than a year and a half, but so far nobody in the company has been willing to give statement or answer questions from the Norwegian police.

– We are surprised, and have the impression that Trafigura is not interested in assisting in the investigation, says Hans Tore Høviskeland, head of prosecution in Økokrim.

Source

Well I am glad Norway isn’t letting Trafigura dictate, what can or cannot be reported.

Petition/E-mail the UK Government in Protest of Gag orders on the Press

UK: Press Banned from Reporting on Parliament/Trafigura

Capstone Mortgages – Beware!

By Guest Blogger Shaun Parker

Capstone Mortgages – Rip Off

If you are contemplating using Capstone Mortgages then you may want to read about my experience which is similar to many others, you may well want to think again.

How is this done?
Well its quite simple -

• First you must be one of the unlucky people to have taken a mortgage out with them or their other face which is ‘Preferred Mortgages’.

• Then what you do is get your own house insurance because the home insurance they offer is not competitive.

• Then on the anniversary of that insurance you renew your policy as normal because its value for money.

• About two months later Capstone start sending you letters telling you that your mortgage is in arears.

• Your name is then entered on an auto dialing system and their collections department start ringing you night and day but when you answer the phone hangs up immediately and you hear a message to urgently call them.

• You call them and stay on hold for up to 30 mins.

• When somebody answers you are accused of having mortgage arears and that your house it at risk if you do not pay up.

• After 15 mins you find out that what they have done is forced you to have their home insurance without you signing a single document and that the arrears is actually the £300 they have charged you for this privilage.

• After explaining that you have your own house insurance you are then told that you should of sent a copy to them and because you didn’t do this they can force their own expensive product choice on you.

• When you argue about this practice you are told that it is in the small print of your contract but when pushed they refuse to show you this.

• When by chance you discover that Capstone have a copy of your own house insurance on file because your insurance company sent it direct they still refuse to refund the money and continue charging admin costs.

When this happened to me I contacted the customer services manager after four months of Capstone telling me not to worry on the phone and then sending demanding letters through the post and threatening answerphone messages left on the phone.

This Capstone manager promised to sort it out and promised that the Capstone Mortgage Auto Dialing service and their collections team would leave me alone.

He also promised that the charges that should never have been levied would be rescinded. Now almost a year on I am still getting the same letters, the same threatening phone calls and the same charges being levied, whats more today I had a big suprise!!!!

You guessed it, one year on from the first attempt at extortion Capstone Mortgage Services have sent me a new letter for this years insurance, even though Legal and General faxed the insurance policy DIRECT to the Capstone HQ and Legal and General wrote to me confirming this.

That is another £300 added to my ficticious outstanding account!!!!

I rang them immediately and was told by customer services once again that this was an error and that they would refund the cost of the insurance, however, they cannot refund the charges because that is the collections department who are independent. I then found out that last years insurance was refunded but only to the tune of 50% , the other 50% they requested from Legal and General who quite rightly told them to get stuffed so they levied it back on me.

Now considering that they cannot show me my original contract or where I am bound to take their insurance without signing for it, even though I have asked repeatedly to see this contract, also considering despite this lack of proof I have complied with their wishes and so has a leading insurance provider, how can this practice be legal and not outright extortion?

When you investigate further it becomes clear that this practice is designed to bully people into giving Capstone Mortgages money under the pretence of mortgage arrears.

It does not make sense to avoid factoring this story into your decision making process when looking at mortgage providers – Capstone Mortgages would be the last company I would use and I will not roll over and just accept this immoral and unethical practice either.

Read Shaun Parker’s Blog Here:

Watch this space too…..

Share and Enjoy:

By Guest Blogger Shaun Parker

Woman dubbed ‘not bright’ enough to marry, now faces baby being removed when she gives birth

From Daily Mirror 18/10/2009

EXCLUSIVE by Alison Smith-Squire


A pregnant young woman,whose wedding was halted by social workers in an extraordinary row over whether she is bright enough to marry, is to have her baby boy forcefully removed from her at birth.

Kerry Robertson, 17, who has mild learning difficulties, was this week told during a meeting with social workers they believe she is also not ëintelligent enoughí to look after her baby, due in January.

She will be allowed just a few hours with her baby, whom she has already named Ben. But she and fiance Mark McDougall, 25, will not be allowed to leave the hospital with Ben and he will then be placed with foster parents.

She said yesterday: “I couldn’t believe it when they told me I wouldnít be allowed to bring my baby home. I feel sick all the time.

 ”I am so upset I donít know what to do with myself. I know I am having a little boy and so I have already started buying baby clothes and am getting a nursery ready for him. But now I can’t take it in. I don’t want to think about January and I canít stop crying.”

Last month Kerry, who is 26 weeks pregnant, was told her wedding was being halted just 48 hours before she was due to walk up the aisle because, according to social services, she ‘did not understand the implications of getting married’.
Her fiance Mark, an artist, added: “Seeing Kerry so upset is absolutely heartbreaking and I am very worried that all this stress she is under will affect our unborn baby’s health.

“We’re just devastated by this and at the moment we just don’t know how we are going to cope in January. We have both already bonded with Ben and I can’t even begin to think what it will be like coming home without him.

“It seems unbelievably cruel but social workers told us that after an hour or two with Ben, he will be placed into the care system. They added neither Kerry nor myself will be allowed to remove him from the hospital.

“Social services are ruining our lives. They say they don’t believe Kerry has the mental capacity to look after a baby but this is nonsense. Kerry isn’t even being given a chance to prove herself as a parent. Yet, she is enjoying her pregnancy and would be a great mum.”

Mark said he would be happy to take on full responsibility for his son.
He added: “However, social workers  just told me at the meeting to be quiet. As we are not married - because social workers would not let us marry - it seems I have no rights as a dad at all.

“Kerry’s grandmother is trying to apply for custody of Ben but social services have already told us it is unlikely she will be successful.

“It seems social services have their hearts set on taking him away from all of us for good. It looks like Ben will eventually be put up for adoption. We feel totally helpless as there seems to be no way of stopping them.”
Advertisement – article continues below »

Kerry, from Dunfermline, Fife, has been in the care of her grandmother since she was nine months old after her parents were unable to look after her, with welfare overseen by social services at Fife Council.

In January, she met Mark, from Arbroath and when she became pregnant, they planned to marry.

But their plans were dramatically halted when in September, two days before their church wedding, two social workers arrived at the flat they had shared for four months and told them because of Kerry’s learning difficulties, their forthcoming marriage was illegal.

Under Scottish law, a registrar may refuse to marry a couple if he believes one or both the parties lack the mental capacity to understand what the institution of marriage is about.

In a highly unusual step, the registrar at Dunfermline Register Office refused to sanction the marriage after Fife Council wrote a letter of objection.

Mark said: “Everything was organised, from the church to Kerry’s wedding dress.
“Yet, despite arguing with the social workers that we loved one another and didn’t want our baby to be born to unmarried parents, they wouldn’t budge and we were forced to cancel our 40 guests.”

However, Kerry, who is still waiting to undergo an official psychological assessment, says her learning difficulties are not as severe as Fife Council make out.

“Last year I volunteered to help disabled children at my local primary school,” she says, “I have friends, a family who supports me and a fiance who loves me. I do everything for myself.”

Meanwhile, Mark points out that whilst his fiance ‘is not terribly academic’, she can read and write.

“She is a loving caring person, who is enjoying being pregnant and would be a good mum,” he says, “I didn’t even know she had learning difficulties until we’d been dating for two months and anyone who meets Kerry can see for themselves she is just a normal girl.

“For the first time in her life Kerry was truly happy. We were both looking forward to having out baby. But now our lives have been totally turned upside down and we are living a nightmare.”

Stephen Moore, Executive Director, Social Work Service said: “Much of the work we do is governed by legislation. Complex decisions are made that balance risk and welfare while supporting people at times of personal or family need.

“We cannot discuss details of individual cases for reasons of confidentiality but give assurance that we will always work with people for the best outcome for all involved.”

THE JOYS OF INTERNET ‘SHOPPING’

Or everyday life made extremely unpleasant and stress inducing by complete idiots

I just thought I would share this little gem with you all.

It neatly describes everyone’s typical experiences of the arrogant, offhand manner of modern retailing and using the internet in particular to buy things.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was  trying to buy some school uniform clothing from your  internet based business.

After spending about forty minutes being forced to ramble painfully  and fruitlessly around your intensely badly designed web site looking for the most basic information, I made a telephone call to you make the very simplest of enquiries as your website was so bad it was unable to be of any use to me.

This only made matters worse as firstly, I had to wait a long time while being constantly informed how important my call was and so I must wait to speak to someone, and secondly it was clear that I was only going to be able to speak to a ‘brain dead’ call centre operative who would be unable to communicate sensibly about anything, instead of a proper retailing member of your company who would actually know the basics about what your business does and how to deal with your customers’ ordinary everyday requirements.

Nevertheless, I bit my lip and suppressed the annoyance at a business that had this kind of breath-taking arrogance towards its potential customers of employing useless ‘call centres’ instead of bothering to deal directly with it’s own customers.

Unfortunately, I was proved absolutely right, as when the operator in ‘customer services’ answered, she was nasty sounding right from the off, arrogant, aggressive, and completely offhand and not only entirely uninterested in dealing with my very simple query, but was clearly unable to as she obviously knew absolutely nothing about what kind of service  a retailer is expected to provide to a customer. 

So, even if she had been a decent, civilised  and polite person who was actually trying to be helpful, instead of exactly the opposite, she would not have been able to do what any normal retailer should be able to do in terms of helping a customer purchase the products needed. She was simply a disinterested ‘call centre time waster’ who  knew very little about anything at all, had nothing but sawdust and cotton wool inside her head instead of a brain, and couldn’t care less about anything except vacuously polishing her fingernails as an alternative to actually thinking while she was speaking to one of your customers on the telephone.

But actually she was an unpleasant, ignorant  rude specimen of humanity that any sensible person would consider  a positive danger for a business of any kind to employ. And as this useless person was an employee of a ‘call centre’ instead of what should have been a knowledgeable person directly employed by your own  school uniform clothing supply company, she had absolutely no interest in helping one of your customers buy any of your products. Instead she lost you business.

This ghastly juvenile young harpy started aggressively lecturing me as though I was an errant child for asking the simple and ordinary questions that I did, and promptly put the phone down as her crowning achievement in how to annoy customers and lose you business.

I am not going to spend the next several years being forced to buy my son’s school uniform from your unpleasant company without doing something about it. Instead, I will make every effort to convince not only this school, but all the others, that they would be far better off dealing with a decent retailer instead of such a rude, arrogant and downright nasty, grasping, overpriced  bunch of twits like you obviously appear to be.

Frankly, the sooner you go bust the better it will be for all the schools you currently service. Employing incompetent, disinterested call centres who know nothing about retailing, instead of doing your job and actually supplying a proper retailing service (which is what you are supposed to be in business for ! ) , thus annoying and misleading your customers in the most irritating of ways, is a pretty good way to lose all your custom to another  business that operates in a more civilised manner.

Yours Sincerely,

Boz

IS THIS COUNTRY INSANE ?

Or is it just this Labour Government systematically poisoning everyone’s brains with the madness of political correctness ?

Baby P thug to be freed soon

Baby P thug could be freed in under three years after appeal judge declares he’s not a risk

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

27th October 2009

One of the sadists jailed over the death of Baby P could be free in less than three years after the Court of Appeal today overturned his indeterminate sentence.

Jason Owen, 37, was jailed in May alongside his brother Steven Barker, 33, and the child’s mother Tracey Connelly for causing or allowing the toddler’s death.

Peter was found dead in his blood-spattered cot in August 2007. He had eight broken ribs and a snapped spine after suffering more than 50 injuries in eight months at his home in Haringey, North London.

Low risk: The Court of Appeal said Jason Owen was not likely to be a serious risk to the public in future.

Read more at The Daily Mail:

POLITICIANS ARE DANGEROUS

By Guest Blogger Jack of Kent

Putting complex ideas, however, in the hands and minds of politicians is even more dangerous than allowing them to determine their own expenses, or to run a scheme of agricultural or other subsidies.

Read the rest of this article here: JACK OF KENT

THE PAST IS WITH US ALWAYS

And this morning at about 9.15 a.m. Nick Hewer – Alan Sugar’s sidekick in the television show ‘The Apprentice’ – slithered out of my past like a bad smell to annoy me with his sanctimonious greasiness.

Nick was being breathlessly interviewed by Libby Purves on the BBC Radio Four Midweek programme about his glamourous life as public relations man turned TV star in The Apprentice.

What annoyed me was avuncular sounding Nick telling us all how the world of public relations had treated him well and, added as an afterthought, he said he hoped he had treated people in it well too. What a nice chap he seemed.

Nick wasn’t such a nice chap treating people well when I knew him !

Nick Hewer employed me in his public relations consultancy Michael Joyce Ltd a long time ago. It was a sordid experience which ended with me being the latest in – apparently – a long line of people fired (and sued) by Nick. In my case on the grounds ‘the client didn’t like me’.

Nick then tried to avoid paying me a considerable amount of my pay that was due. It was a mean, grasping, nasty, greasy, underhand little trick that spoke volumes about the ghastly manner in which Michael Joyce Ltd was run and the horrendous way Nick’s employees were frequently treated.

A court told him to pay up eventually, but not until he vented his venomously grasping nature by attempting to frivolously sue me in act of breathtakingly childish spite.

It backfired on him. I’ll tell you more about the wonderful, glamourous world of public relations later ‘cos I have chores to do now.

But I can tell you it isn’t glamourous at all. It is full of sordid little people like Nick and another PR person I met called Codrington whose ancestors became rich by trading in Slaves and owning sugar plantations with which they used to become respectable stately home owners in the West Country. He fleeced me too in a blatantly fraudulent way. Another nasty piece of work there.

It seemed to the PR world was stuffed to bursting with people like that !

HOW HARINGEY AND NORTH WALES SOCIAL SERVICES WICKEDNESS DESTROYED MY FAMILY

and reduced me to complete poverty as a single father bringing up my son without his mother

Its all done and dusted and I have custody now and have done for ages.

Briefly what happened was:

My partner thought (me too) she had post natal depression when our child was born.

GP totally uninterested – told me to take her to A&E

Much, much later (months and several dramas) she agrees to go to A&E

She is now actually wailing ‘what’s wrong with me ? I need help’.

A&E consultant turns to me and asks me if I agree with his diagnosis of Manic Depression.

I’d already worked it out ages ago. Yes, I said; that’s what I think it is, aint I clever cos I’m not a doctor.

She spends time in hospital and is put on medication. Cutting a long story short, the NHS treatment for mental health patients is a complete shambles and she is treated appallingly.

One evening she suddenly becomes wildly psychotic, has a funny turn and flees the house in London with her two kids aged 9 &10 plus our one year old, three kids in total.

She drives 200 miles to North Wales at 1 a.m. drunk and clinically psychotic, falling asleep at the wheel on the five hour journey and constantly woken up by her two terrified children. All nearly killed & only saved by following lorry driver as they swerve around motorway.

I contact social services asking them to help. the kids are at risk etc.

Social services do their best to avoid doing anything, but eventually, after a lot of nagging by me in many phone calls they pay mum and kids a visit in North Wales but can’t be bothered to let me know.

I only find out with one of my nagging phone calls when the social services brightly announce they have now actually seen mum & kids and they agree she is barking mad and psychotic, but social services tell me they can’t do anything about removing the three kids for their own safety ‘until something happens’ as they so eloquently described the kids being harmed in some way.

So, I apply to court for custody. Kids mum actually agrees with me and says so in court to judge who then orders interim custody to me but orders father of other two kids to take them (when he didn’t want to !) It became a disaster.

Mum returns to my house with me and baby.

Social services then tell mother to get a lawyer to ‘ fight me for custody, otherwise she may never see her son again’. That was what that moron social worker Conrad Barzey said to her a week after she had come out of hospital after being badly ill and sectioned. Mum, the idiot Barzey and me, all sitting around a table at my house where mum was very happily living with me.

This incompetent fool Barzey causes mum to have another breakdown within a few days and a week later she abducts boy to North Wales 200 miles away.

I show police my court order instructing the boy should live with me at my house and both police and me think it will be quite straightforward to retrieve boy as their whereabouts are known.

But North Wales Social Services then tell police to get lost and instruct them to tell me to go to court if I want to retrieve my son.

I go to court to be faced by a posse of social workers with a legal team, including a barrister, all now telling mum how they will champion her in fighting me for custody – despite the fact mum had started out telling me and announcing in court she wanted me to have custody as she recognised the dangers of her mental illness. She wanted me to have custody she told me, because she completely trusted me and our relationship was and had always been good excepting when the illness kicked in.

Social workers tell family court judge that they recommend mother has custody on grounds that as our son had been with mum for these past few weeks ‘it would be disruptive’ for him to be returned to me. This despite the fact I had been the primary carer for some long time.

Family Court Judge tells social workers she is not happy with mum looking after child as she has recent history of severe mental illness. Judge is forced to accept social workers recommendation but tells social workers to visit mum and child daily. Judge tells me I am a good father and social services must pay my expenses to travel and spend two days a week with my son.

In order for the social workers to fulfill orders of Judge I am forced with legal blackmailing to agree to consenting to a voluntary ‘care order’ to effectively place my son in social services care so they may spend money on fulfilling judges various orders.

I had absolutely no idea of the dangers of volunteering my son into the care of social services just so they could have their way with their obsession that I, simply by virtue of being a male, would be naturally entirely unsuitable in some unspoken, undefined way, to properly look after my own son.

Now that I am older and wiser, I realise it was a complete stitch-up by my very bad legal team (I was on ‘legal aid’ so the solicitors think they could do a lousy job) and social services.

Social services now had the legal control of my son, I had none at all – and they proceeded to abuse it, preventing me having access to him and even threatening me with having him adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operative with them.

Mum soon showed just how incapable she was of looking after the boy but social services did not remove him for many months.

When they did remove him, they put him into a foster home where he was physically abused and by the time I managed to rescue my son from the evil clutches of social services fostering a few weeks later he was covered in 28 identical round bruises on his torso where he had been repeated poked in the ribs with a walking stick by these appalling, sadistic and thoroughly nasty social services foster parents.

This rib poking with a stick was to prevent the boy coming too close to them. The foster parents wanted him to keep away from them because he wanted to be constantly ‘cuddled’ being used to much affection from mum and me as well as his older siblings. The stick was poked in his ribs to keep him at a distance.

How do I know ? My boy was three when I finally retrieved him and could speak extremely well indeed. He told me and I recorded it on tape. He still remembers it at the age of eleven ! It hurt – a lot !

Mum returned to live me with at some point, but social services actually did their best to prevent that for some unknown reason. Unfortunately mum’s illness just became worse and worse as a direct result of the chaos social services had caused.

Social services had presided over the disappearance of the two elder children to a father who didn’t want them anyway and proceeded to completely traumatise them until they could eventually escape back to mum some time later.

By this time the obvious stresses on mum incurred by all these proceedings just made her illness worse and worse and, cutting a long story short, she simply drifted away from her son and me under constant pressure from social services and the North Wales council who would harass her from time to time over her council house.

The North Wales Council and their social services department involved in this saga were positively depraved, certainly quite corrupt, certainly liars. Typical Tony Bliar/Gormless Gordon Labour Government aparachik employees, busily destroying the fabric of our country.

They are also mostly definitely wasters of vast amounts of public money (the reason all our taxes are sky high as the same scenario is repeated throughout this wicked government headed by Gormless Gordon, preceded by Tony Bliar the warmongering intellectual spastic with the hugely inflated ego).

The many details of this story only continue to make it more nightmarish than you can possibly imagine, but I have already written nearly fourteen hundred words in this synopsis. It would take a book to tell the whole story.

Statutory Instruments

From Guest Blogger Henry North

MONDAY, 25 MAY 2009

Jacqui-Smith

No charges were ever brought against Mr Damian Green MP, yet Jacqui Smith wants to hold onto his DNA sample for six years ‘in case he offends again’. And to ensure that not only Damian Green but every MP in the House is denied the chance to have a say on this, she’s proposing to use a Statutory Instrument.

OK, so you take a borderline fascist idea that will give the state near total surveillance over citizens lives, you plan to pump billions of tax payer money into this scheme, you try every trick in the book to bring it in through the backdoor, all to the publics’ anger, as well as opposition from both Tories and the Lib Dems, and then you find that the ECHR has decided it’s illegal. It should be dead, right? No, what happens is this:

Yesterday the criticism mounted as the Home Office admitted it plans to rush the reforms through Parliament using a ’statutory instrument’ which will be rubber-stamped following 90 minutes of discussion by a Labour-dominated committee, with no debate or vote in the House of Commons

Ya hoo. Or, you could scrap the whole thing. Ever consider that? No? Well, at the very least do what Strasbourg ruled you should do and stop taking the DNA of people cleared of their charges. The EU may be a load of rubbish, but you guys support it, so follow its rules.

Miss Smith’s officials sparked further anger by saying the procedure was necessary in order to comply with the Strasbourg ruling as quickly as possible – effectively claiming there was not enough time for MPs to debate the matter.

Oh, you are, are you?

But the Home Secretary sparked outrage over so-called ‘Big Brother’ powers earlier this month when she unveiled new rules, which will still allow the police to keep innocent people on the database for six years, or 12 years if they were arrested for but cleared of a serious sexual or violent offence

Not good enough. The last part, in italics, is doubly insulting. So, if you didn’t commit a minor offence, you’re “only” going to have your DNA taken for 6 years. But, if you didn’t commit a sexual/violent offence, that makes you more guilty than a person who didn’t commit a minor offence. Once you’ve been charged, it’s assumed you’re guilty, even if the courts disagree.

Even the tabloid papers have a higher burden of proof, what with their history of demonising paedophiles and murderers before they’ve even set foot in court. We now receive punishment based on the seriousness of non-existent crimes. This is an insane, abusive move, that completely bypasses Parliament.

The LPUK has not one but two solutions to prevent this sort of abuse of the law- we will scrap the proposed database, along with ID cards, but will also review the statutory instrument system.

Editorial note:

The utter moral bankruptcy of this government is beyond belief and yet my own MP L Featherstone has no idea of how many statutory instruments have been passed in her time as an MP. If she doesn’t know whats the bet that other MPs dont have a clue? Especially those that disappear once Mick has had his 35 second speech the other day look at them scurrying out as if they were doing something useful when they could have participated in the Foreign Office stuff

Hat tip to Raedwald for the pic and the first paragraph and the Libertarian party members blog namely Martin for the rest.

Frankly I think the government now is a cherry short of a schwarzwalderkirschtorte

Jacqui-Smith

COMMENTS

RavingMad said…

What some are failing to notice, is that the attack on democracy is on many fronts, at different times and using different methods. Statutory Instruments are just one form.

Our eyes are turned towards the expenses row and on-going revelation of a government and establishment in crisis. All the while we are being debased and disenfranchised with little means of knowing how to stop it. yet more crimes ‘in our name’ and ‘at our cost’. Just whose f****** country is this????

 theundergroundrestaurant said…

I’m also disgusted that if you are arrested but not charged or convicted, the police can hang on to your DNA and keep the arrest on your record until you are 100 years old.

This recently happened to my 14 year old daughter. She has now a record until she is 100.

Haringey Social Workers Deliberately Lie

- and I can Prove it !

Haringey’s Sharon Shoesmith is much in the news today for being an incompetent fool when she was the Director in Charge of Haringey’s Social Services department. You know, that bunch of bureaucratic idiots who keep presiding over the repeated murders of small, defenceless children who are supposed to be in Haringey’s care.

Vacuous Sharon seems completely unaware of just how incompetent Haringey Social Services were when she was Director in charge of what they did before she was fired – in case even more child murders took place.

She seems to think Haringey and her bunch of useless Social Services layabouts weren’t to blame for the death of Victoria Climbie or little Baby Peter Connelly who was deliberately and systematically tortured by the sadistic boyfriend of his disgustingly depraved mother Tracy Connelly.

Baby Peter was finally killed by having his back deliberately broken by the sadistic boyfriend with the apparent tacit approval of Haringey Social Services headed by Sharon Shoesmith.

I can personally confirm just how incompetent and stupid Haringey Council’s Social Services Department has been. Why ? Because I am the parent of a child whose life Haringey did their best to wreck.

Neither the child’s mother or me, his father, was ever thought or accused by anyone of being bad or inadequate parents. That wasn’t the problem at all.

It was from a completely different direction that Haringey Social Services entered our lives and terminally damaged the family, directly causing my child to effectively end up losing his mother. That’s right. Haringey caused my child to be deprived of his mother through sheer ignorance, incompetence, and pig headed stupidity with a bit of blatant and provable lying from social workers to deliberately falsify a report to the family court.

Haringey’s nasty and incompetent behaviour also left me as a single parent to bring this child up without his mother – basically because social workers’ behaviour and Conrad Barzey’s in particular made her have a nervous breakdown; driving her into a state of mental illness which became so severe she has been incarcerated in secure mental hospitals on a regular basis ever since and is incapable of looking after herself or her child.

Oh, and I also lost my £800 000 house and any possibility of working for a living for years and am now left trying to survive as a single parent looking after my child with State benefits of just over one hundred pounds a week. Try it yourself, it’s impossible. It’s real grinding poverty. Child poverty, never mind me. It’s child poverty deliberately engineered by this filthy, mendacious government’s, lazy, malicious, incompetent employees.

I remember in particular a nasty pair of Haringey Social workers who visited my house. One of them was this ignorant, ill educated and unintelligent oaf called Conrad Barzey. He put his signature to some very provable lies and falsified a report to the Family Court and generally did his best to deliberately construct the report in a way which would ensure a bias of some kind towards deliberately building up an entirely imaginary case to persuade the Family Court this child should not be looked after by its father – me.

As I was the only person available to look after the child, it seemed Haringey were quite happy to make sure the child lost both his parents for absolutely no valid reason whatever. Indeed, I was actually threatened by social workers – right in front of my solicitor – that social services were now ‘considering adoption’ and would have this child forcibly adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operate with them’.

So, let’s just get this right shall we ? Social services would forcibly adopt a child because they didn’t like its argumentative parent being indignant at being bullied and completely interfered with by social services; who had already illegally taken the child into care under false pretences, aided by a bit of lying in court, and now they wanted to teach that parent a lesson in the power this notorious State wields over its cringing citizenry by wrenching this parent’s child away into the netherworld of the abysmally failing care system.

No doubt where the child would grow up like all the other children in care being physically, sexually and emotionally abused to mature into an ill educated drug taking, criminally inclined psychological train wreck, costing the rest of society a fortune as this individual, wrecked by the evils of social services, ekes out its miserable, deprived existence at huge cost to everyone.

But, if the parent was passive and grovelled sufficiently at the mentally challenged idiots who comprised social services, then their egos would still be intact enough to graciously allow the parent to have his own child back as a reward for being compliant – even perhaps when that parent was totally unable to safely look after a child as demonstrated by the Victoria Climbie murder and the sadistic murder of Baby Peter Connelly by his evil carers.

In other words, it was clearly more important for social services to have their egos massaged and to feel good about themselves arbitrarily wielding misplaced power over other people who they should be having absolutely nothing to do with in the first place, than to make rational assessments about taking vulnerable children away from murdering and abusive parents. Golly Gosh ! Perish the thought !

It was like having a conversation with the Mafia; and they were using the language and threatening aggressive violence of the Mafia to intimidate me – just because they had the power to. So they abused that power; just like they abused it to let child after child like baby Peter Connelly be murdered in Haringey while they were supposed to be protecting those very same children.

What a nasty joke Haringey Council are ! And what a nasty joke of a Social Services Director Sharon Shoesmith is !

It wasn’t exactly clear to me at the time what on earth it could mean as I was most certainly ‘co-operating with them’ in the most civil, patient, and friendly way I knew how because they had already made it clear to me they would do anything they pleased to just arbitrarily take my child away from his mother and father without the slightest justification.

But then there had been the incident of ‘the pointing finger’ when I had unthinkingly actually pointed my index finger at a social worker from the armchair I was sitting in as an unconscious bit of everyday common or garden body language to simply illustrate a point I was making at the time.

I hadn’t realised what an offensively brutal crime pointing a finger to illustrate something was in the warped world of idiot social workers. Apparently, it meant I was being violent they said. Curiously, their overdeveloped sense of umbrage and concern over possible insults to themselves never extended to being able to recognise real violence leading to the murders of children like Baby Peter Connelly !

They had made it plain to me that they had every intention of making sure that they would do everything they could to prevent me from having my own child and they would rather the child be (completely illegally) deprived of both parents for no reason whatever.

I’ll tell you more about him later as it is well after midnight and I can’t do justice to writing this ENTIRELY TRUE story properly because I’m so tired and I’m already rambling a bit.

blogsurfer

alpha inventions

Evil foster mum has sentence cut

From Gloucestershire Echo Newspaper Friday, September 26, 2008,

APPEAL judges today cut the 14-year jail sentence imposed on a foster mother who subjected three children in her care to a “horrifying catalogue of cruel and sadistic treatment”.

They said that although Eunice Spry, 64, routinely beat, abused and starved the vulnerable youngsters over a 19-year period, their injuries were not as serious as other cases where lesser sentences had been imposed.

Giving the ruling, Mr Justice Burnett said the part of the sentence which reflected the cruelty and violence should be reduced to 10 years.

Together with the two-year sentence for witness intimidation and attempting to pervert the course of justice, Spry will now serve 12 years.

The devout Jehovah’s Witness was sentenced at Bristol Crown Court in March last year after a four-week trial when it was heard that she had forced sticks down the children’s throats and made them eat their own vomit and rat excrement.

Mr Justice Burnett, detailing what he called a “catalogue of abuse”, said as punishment for misbehaving, Spry would beat the children on the soles of their feet and force them to drink washing-up liquid and bleach.

She even confined one girl to a wheelchair for three years after a car crash in a cynical bid to maximise compensation for the accident.

Spry staunchly denied all the claims made against her and insisted the only physical punishment she ever used was “a smack on the bottom”.

But the jury convicted her of 26 charges, ranging from unlawful wounding, cruelty to a person under 16, assault occasioning actual bodily harm and witness intimidation when she threatened one of the children who was to give evidence against her.

The three victims, known as Victim A, B and C, all gave evidence describing how their daily routines were punctuated by random acts of bizarre and sadistic violence at the hands of their foster mother.

The abuse was finally discovered after another Jehovah’s Witness secretly confronted one of the children about marks to her head caused when Spry rubbed sandpaper over her face.

Trial judge Simon Darwall-Smith told Spry that this was the worst case he had come across in 40 years in law.

The offences took place in two of Spry’s homes in Gloucestershire between 1986 and 2005.

“All these children have suffered serious psychiatric damage because of the ordeal that they have endured,” said Mr Justice Burnett.

He added: “We have found this case especially difficult to resolve.

“We consider that the sentence of 12 years on account of the cruelty in this case is out of the range which can be inferred as appropriate from previous decisions in this court.

“We are particularly mindful of the fact that in this case the physical injuries could have been much more serious than mercifully they were.”

Detective Constable Victoria Martell who has been involved in the investigation for over two years, since the first call was made to Police by Victim A on December 26 2004 commented; “It is disappointing that the sentence has been reduced, in my opinion the fourteen year sentence originally given to Ms Spry was commensurate to the gravity of the offences she committed and the severity of the abuse she inflicted upon the children in her care.

“The whole case, which began in 2004, was extremely shocking and emotional for all involved, and while I am pleased that my role and the role of Gloucestershire Constabulary to get justice for the victims was achieved, none of us must forget the appalling abuse the three victims have suffered and the undoubted distress this has caused.

“Having been brought up in isolation the social skills of the victims were largely undeveloped and they were, at first, very timid and shy.

“I am pleased to say that they are now a lot more confident and are flourishing as young adults. I certainly hope they can continue to enjoy the rest of their lives.”

You can read it all in the book ‘CHILD C’ by Christopher Spry

Blogsurfer

alphainventions

VIOLENT UNREAL FANTASY WORLD OF MEDIA BRAINWASHES CHILDREN

The famous American child psychologist Bruce Perry wrote “We live in strange times. Modern Western society has benefited from advances in technology, communications, transportation, social justice and economies beyond the dreams of our ancestors. And yet our society seems to be incapable of ensuring that our children grow up safe in safe, predictable, relationally enriched, humane environments”.

Personally, I think this is caused entirely by the undeniable brainwashing every person gets from the media; everything – films and television in particular, as well as print media of every type.

People collectively have little or no knowledge about the science of psychology – that’s how brains work- just to clarify things. Many people simply dismiss the idea of psychology as mumbo jumbo nonsense. That is just the same as dismissing the primitive discoverers and early users of electricity in the 1800’s. Then, electrical appliances were a bit of a joke. They suddenly became deadly serious when the light bulb was invented and immediately transformed human civilisation completely.

It is a simple fact that our brains are programmed with the software of our upbringing. This shapes how those brains think and work, take decisions about everything and determines the daily behaviour and the entire rest of the life for that individual.

The media fabricates an unreal world where advertisers, who do not dismiss psychology because they know how to harness it to manipulate people into spending money, make their victims believe in a false and imaginary world that has never existed and cannot ever exist.

So, alcohol advertising specifically targeted at teenagers makes them think it is ‘cool’ to drink themselves into oblivion in nasty, uncomfortable bars where they are deliberately forced to stand in order to encourage faster and greater consumption of booze. Film and television constantly break new barriers of fantasy and violence which blurs the boundaries of reality.

Newspapers and Print media of all sorts produce a make believe, child-like world of ‘celebrity culture’ which tries to convince readers it is a real world they can and should aspire to become part of themselves.

Young first time jobseekers when asked what work they want to do in life vacuously just say they want to become ‘famous’ and a ‘celebrity’ – as though that is some particular, real, way of earning a living. How pathetic.

This is a dangerous and nasty world we have fashioned where we are squandering all the benefits of increased wealth and advances in technology gained in the last two hundred years or so.

This is why so many families are being destroyed and feral, violent, aggressive children roam the streets in bored packs seeking thrills in drugs and random, meaningless violence.

http://www.blogsurfer.us/

BABY PETER – HORRIBLY MURDERED BY HIS MOTHER’S BOYFRIEND STEVEN BARKER

By Guest Blogger Pilot at the SHINING ROCKET BLOG

Little Peter Connelly lived for a short while on earth, and while he lived he never knew safety or love or gentleness or mercy. No, he did not know about those things. For Peter, existence meant neglect, indifference, pain and violence. And what does a baby know, really? He probably thought that’s all life was.

Are babies capable of bewilderment, do you think?

Peter was too young to speak, and for as beautiful as he was, he did not hold his mother’s interest. Tracey Connelly was absorbed in other business, really, and couldn’t bother much with Peter. There was so much to do. There was sleeping, relaxing, sitting down, smoking, socializing on the internet. Languishing in her boredom. Thinking about herself.

These things take a lot of time, after all, and there’s only so many hours in a day. And then, I’m sure it must have been very stressful having Social Services watching all the time, visiting the house all the time.

And while Tracey Connelly entertained herself with her activities, Steven Barker also entertained himself. 

Look at the picture. Do you see the bruises? 

Baby Peter with bruises on his face


Steven Barker threw little Peter around like a rag doll. He spun Peter around on a stool until he fell off and hit his head, and then put him back on and spun him again. He trained Peter to obey like a dog, with a snap of his fingers. And speaking of dogs, he used Peter to train the Rottweiler that lived in the house. Under that angelic blond hair, Peter had bite marks on his head; it is not known whether these marks were human or canine. That’s right: as part of training the Rottweiler, either Steven Barker or the dog bit Peter on the head.

Steven Barker’s brother, Jason Owen, participated in some of this abuse.

Baby Peter with shaved head and face smeared with chocolate to hide injuries

Have you had enough yet?

There’s more.

Of course there is.

Steven Barker compressed Peter’s windpipe, held for a while, and finally let go. He pinched Peter’s fingernails and toenails until they turned black. He pulled out at least one of the baby’s fingernails with pliers. He cut off at least one of the baby’s fingertips with a knife. One of Peter’s ears was partially torn off. Social Services, meanwhile, kept watching.

Steven Barker broke several of Peter’s ribs.

Then he broke Peter’s back.

It takes a lot of force to break a back. A lot. Force equivalent to a car accident, or a fall from a very high place.

Read that again: Steven Barker broke Peter’s back.

Let it sink in.

This happened near the end, and Peter did not walk unaided again. When asked whether she ever realized that her son was partially paralyzed, Tracey Connelly said that she hadn’t noticed. Nope, she did not notice. He lay down just fine in his bed, she said, and he sat just fine where she put him.

By this time, Peter’s hair had been shaved off. This was because of the scabs on his head. And the lice.

Social Services watched and watched. Tracey Connelly was smearing her son’s face with chocolate now, to hide the bruises. I’m sure she thought this was very clever.
Peter went to the hospital. He went there with a broken back and eight broken ribs. But he was cranky. How could the doctor examine such a cranky child? She could not! She sent him home.

At home Peter was cranky. He lay alone in his crib. He cried and he cried.

Peter was seventeen months old. Have you seen a child this age sobbing? The pouty lips, the little gasps, the tears? In an adult, the normal response to this is compassion. The urge to give comfort – that is the normal response.

That was not Steven Barker’s response.

He went into Peter’s room and closed the door. Then he punched Peter in the face. Punched him so hard, in fact, that he removed skin from the baby’s lips and tongue and knocked out a tooth. Peter went quiet.

It was 11:30 on the following morning before Tracey Connelly called for an ambulance. By then Peter’s body was cold and blue, dead already for several hours.
That was August 3, 2007. Only four days after the last visit from Social Services.
 

 
Here are computer-generated images of some of Peter’s injuries. He had more than fifty on his body.

baby peter injury diagram

 
 
 

  
And here’s a detailed illustration showing some of the others:

More Baby Peter injuries

Blogsurfer.us

 

TRAGEDY !

A Tragedy !

BLOGSURFER

CHILDREN – BANNED ! (Nasty, Pesky Things – Keep Them Them Out of Sight)

I just heard the most extraordinary thing ! My eleven year old son’s schoolmate just came to our house to ask him out to play today. He casually told my son he wouldn’t be able to visit him when their family moved into their newly rented house because the landlord had banned any children from being allowed into the house his parents were renting !

Think about this for a moment. An ordinary middle class, very civilised family, both parents working in extremely well paid jobs and with two sons of eleven and fourteen. They decided to sell their own house and rent a house from a private landlord for a year while they look for something attractive to buy.

They find a suitable four bedroomed house in an attractive village in Sussex and they would like to pay the fifteen hundred odd pounds a month to rent it for their family of four for a year.

But the landlord says other children are not allowed to be in the house. How utterly insulting this idiot landlord is. Why does he think he has a right to impose his warped, narrow minded, busybody control freakery on other people ?

What a pathetic, sad individual he must be ! No doubt he must be one of those dreadful people employed by the government whose full time job it is to be an interfering bureaucrat of some sort; paid a high salary to be an official professional control freak on one of those Labour Government pointless job creation schemes that squanders billions of pounds of our money.

Perhaps it is this that gives him delusions about telling people who rent his house what sort of people they can socialise with.

It does seem the countless horde of Labour Government employees – now most of the workforce and still rising – are living in a fantasy World where they all have the delusion their duty is to tell the rest of the population exactly what to do every minute of their lives; to control everyone with a positive blizzard of forms and tickboxes. Databases for everything and everyone with lists of all the details of the entire population’s daily lives. Video cameras malignantly following your every move, wherever you go. A Police State monitoring you, threatening constant arrest and State sponsored violence and thuggery whatever you are doing at the time, however innocent it might be.

My own son has been mercilessly persecuted by the goody goody interferers of the bizarre anti-child brigade ever since I moved to this Sussex market town seven years ago.

- A visit from the police after a member of the public reported my then ten year old son being seen playing in the park ‘too often’ and observed holding small cans of some sort in his hands. I was asked if this meant he was a graffiti sprayer because the cans might be spray paint. They were soft drink cans.

- Reported to social services by the headmaster of the boy’s school when an officious idiot of a teacher told him my then eight year old boy was actually allowed to go and play in the nearby park all by himself without an adult being with him.

- The subsequent visit from a social worker who told me that no child under the age of fourteen should ever be allowed out without an adult being with them !

- The retired ex-headmaster of the local secondary school who is the Chairman and gimlet eyed controller of my allotment association telling me allotments were actually dangerous places for children and they were not allowed there unless their parents rented an allotment.

Even then they were absolutely forbidden to leave their parents allotment and go anywhere else on the site. In addition, the allotment rules would not even allow children on their own parents allotment unless they were actually working on the allotment. They were not allowed to play on their parent’s allotment, only work.

No visiting their friends on nearby allotments then. Hard labour only – or else !

- Official letter of warning from the boy’s headmaster at school that he had been seen riding a bike to school without a ‘permit’.

- The amazing Pizza restaurant – “Sorry Sir. We don’t allow children here except at lunchtime”.

And so it goes on – endlessly. These are only a small fraction of the barrage of anti children complaints I have had to deal with from a population of miserably humourless, self centred, misogynistic fools nurtured into existence by the evils of a politically correct socialist mindset which has gripped the UK in it’s deathly embrace as the Labour Government systematically wrecks what used to be the best country in the World to live in.

Now, it is rapidly becoming one of the worst.

It has also been officially branded by the rest of the World as one of the most unpleasant countries in the World to be a child.

BLOGSURFER

IS BOTTLING FRUIT BETTER THAN FREEZING ?

I know apples normally store well wrapped in paper, but mine are not yet ripe and loads of nearly ripe apples are getting mouldy spots that drill right into the apple until it gets so ill it just drops off the tree. These are so nearly ripe that they are worth preserving after cutting off the mouldy bits.

Also, very annoyingly, my huge apple crop is rapidly diminishing to nothing as all those mouldy apples fall off the tree and I’m being left with very few left on the trees to ripen fully. I think it is the weather conditions encouraging mould. Spuds and tomatoes are already completely wrecked with it.

I have no freezer space. My thirty year old chest freezer had a tantrum when I gave it it’s once in two years clean and it stopped working. My daughter then gave me a newish little under the counter freezer from her old micro flat with it’s extra micro kitchen that was so small it made boiling an egg a challenge.

In my then research into the possibilities of buying a new chest freezer I discovered just how expensive ancient freezers are because they gobble electricity voraciously. I had already noticed mine was not only on all the time, but huge chunks of ice formed on the outside wall at the bottom as well as creeping out of the top and preventing the lid from being closed. It was obviously trying it’s best to heat up the entire planet at my expense.

Although the precious little thing recovered from it’s tantrum when the electric motor eventually dried out and it started working again, it was too late. There was no way I was going to pay about £400 a year in electricity to keep it going when all the modern freezers talk about annual costs of about £25. Anyway, I am so short of money I can’t afford even the most basic electricity bill at present. So, no silly extravagances like ancient power guzzling, manic, hyperactive freezers then.

And, when you have an income which is so low it is impossible to make ends meet anyway, you soon learn a simple rule of basic economics which is, if you can survive without it now, then don’t spend money buying it – whatever it is ! As I already have a very small freezer I cannot justify even thinking of spending anything at all on a larger one unless it pays for itself – which it wont.

I would have frozen all this fruit as I have done in the past, but I thought bottling it was an alternative and it might also preserve taste and texture better too as freezers destroy food over time. They are not what they are cracked up to be ! It also occurred to me that when things are frozen there is a constant ongoing cost of paying for electricity to keep them frozen, but once you have finished the bottling process, there is no further cost at all. Something to bear in mind !

Nobody has really told me the answer to my question. Can you just chuck boiled stuff in sterilised jars just like you do jam. The answer seems to be no. So I did it anyway and wait to see how long it lasts. I don’t suppose botulism will be a problem as it is more likely the fruit might ferment instead. We’ll see.

I have loads of Kilner jars as I used to make tons of jam once. In my efforts to make sure they were completely sterilised I made them too hot (something to do with having a lousy permanently overheating oven with almost no temperature control). So when I started plonking boiling fruit into two very large and expensive ones they just shattered . Aaaaaarrrrgh ! Usually that only happens when people don’t heat them up and just put hot stuff into cold glass jars. But I think my Kilner jars were so hot the glass was almost melting as I poured the boiling fruit in.

I don’t have time at the moment to make jams and chutneys etc, so will just try bottling stuff properly now and stop trying shortcuts as it has all been more hassle than just sticking to the idea of cramming the stuff into bottles and leaving them in the oven to sterilise.

KILLERS OF MURDERED ‘BABY P’ NAMED

Baby P: Peter’s killers named for the first time as Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker.

The killers of Baby Peter will be given new identities at taxpayers’ expense and lifetime protection from the threat of exposure after being named publicly for the first time as Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker.
 

TRACEY CONNELLY AND STEVEN BARKER


Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker subjected Baby Peter to an appalling ordeal that left him with 50 injuries, including a broken back Photo: METROPOLITAN POLICE

The boy’s mother and her boyfriend can finally be identified more than two years after the toddler’s death following the lifting of a court order that prevented their names and photographs being published.

The 17-month-old boy suffered an agonising death in their squalid home after months of abuse. The pair subjected him to an appalling ordeal that left him with 50 injuries, including a broken back.

New details of the suffering that Peter endured can also be disclosed for the first time as well as further examples of how Haringey council and other authorities failed to protect him. These include:

• How Connelly had three other children — two of whom were placed on the “at risk” protection register alongside Peter by social services — but none was taken away from her until the boy died.
• She was pregnant with her fifth child, her first with Barker, when Peter died and gave birth while on remand.

• Social workers failed to realise that Barker was living with the family and abusing Peter for nine months before his death, despite repeated visits from the authorities.

• The authorities also failed to notice when Barker’s brother Owen, a member of the National Front, moved in with his 15-year-old runaway girlfriend five weeks before Peter died.

• Peter was left in his cot for hours on end, was treated worse than a dog, had his finger­tips sliced off with a craft knife, his nails pulled out with pliers and every scrap of his clothing was covered in blood.

• Haringey council tried to prevent Connelly and Barker from being named until 2026 to protect Peter’s siblings but a High Court judge disagreed, saying the “boil must be lanced

The rest of this article by Caroline Gammell and Martin Beckford of the Daily Telegraph can be read by clicking here


10 Aug 2009 Daily Telegraph

My Own Incredible Personal Experiences of Haringey Social Workers’ Incompetence

My partner started becoming mentally ill with manic depression morphing into schizophrenia when our son (currently eleven) was born. After diagnosis I was obliged to contact Social Services for help for both the mother and our three children who she was compromising with her erratic behaviour, having also ‘abducted’ them to a harmful environment, narrowly avoiding accidentally killing them and herself in a car in the process.

Social Services misbehaved in every way possible, starting off by declining to to fulfill their statutory obligations. Subsequently Social Services persuaded my partner to abduct our son against the terms of a court order and to ‘ fight me for custody of our son otherwise she may never see him again” – the words of a brain dead Haringey social worker. She was then living with me and our son with a court order obtained by me with her own consent that our son remain in my care at all times whether she wished to live with us or not. She did, as we have always got on very well and still do. Only her illness interferes in our relationship.

Social Services then persuaded this vulnerable and mentally ill, easily suggestible woman to take legal action she had never wanted to or considered doing to remove our son into her sole care. This had previously been a non-existent idea as we always had a good relationship and I was very busy looking after the illness part of my partner at great cost to me.

The family court judge expressed amazement at the Social Services idea that my partner should have custody of our son, stating that the court was well aware she had a diagnosis of extreme mental illness and was almost certainly unable to safely look after a baby of two years old in her condition. For purely silly and illogical legal reasons, the judge was rather forced by Social Services into agreeing to order custody to the mother, saying the court felt it was entirely unsafe and would allow such custody only if Social Services visited the mother every day and made sure she visited her doctor every week amongst other similar directions put in place by the judge to improve safety for the child and minimise the obvious potential harm that a psychotic, paranoid schizophrenic was likely to do.

A few months later, even Social Services were obliged to remove the child from the mother as he was being seriously neglected and likely to be the victim of extreme harm at any moment as his mother was completely psychotic, paranoid, delusional and dangerous.

At this point Social Services now decided to treat me as though I had previously been an unreliable, bad or neglectful parent who could not be relied upon to look after his own child.

This had never been the case. I had never been accused of anything like that by anyone – not even Social Services – and had been publicly praised by the judge in the family court for being an excellent father. The court had also previously ordered me to have unrestricted access to my my son.

Social Services put my son into foster care and threatened me with having him adopted. I was obliged to take Social Services to court to order they return my son to my care.

This was achieved and my partner subsequently returned to live with us. Unfortunately, the additional (entirely unnecessary) stresses of events made my partner’s illness increasing worse and wrecked the entire family. Her two other children had disappeared to their father who didn’t want them and couldn’t look after them. They both came to significant harm as a direct result which affects them badly to this day. My son has been badly affected by events and the mother’s mind utterly destroyed at this stage. It is no longer possible for her to live with us as a result.

It is clear that Haringey and North Wales Social Services embarked on a course of action that completely destroyed the family, ensuring every family member was emotionally and financially impoverished as a result of their disgusting, vindictive, stupid and very unprofessional behaviour.

But it is the detailed account of everything that happened which condemns Social Services as incompetent fools staffed by people of astounding ignorance, vindictiveness, stupidity and abusiveness.

My experiences of Social Services shows it is no surprise that that so many children like ‘Baby P’, now named as Peter Connelly, have been sadistically murdered by perverts of human beings with Social Services ‘Jobsworths’ smugly looking on and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.

While baby Peter was tortured and murdered – effectively with the tacit connivance of the lazy idiots in Social Services being handsomely paid by the public to specifically safeguard baby Peter and other children at risk of harm from human vermin, nothing at all was done by Social Services to save the two year old boy from death.

Meanwhile, Social Services were pompously engaging in a vast job creation scheme of their making to create countless cases of falsely accused parents whose children were actually being looked after safely and well by their parents.

Vast numbers of children have been wrongly torn from their families and forcibly adopted or put into care solely on the basis of social workers laziness, lies, or ignorance, or political correctness or even all of these put together; as it seems to be the daily habit of social workers to deploy these characteristics in everything they do as a matter of course.

That the Social Services in the UK are an incompetent bunch of dangerous and almost useless fools is borne out by my own experiences of them. But it is also the view expressed by many other parents I have spoken to who have been viciously targeted by the Social Services Jobsworths.

Some of these parents have been so badly treated it defies belief. Many have completely wrongly lost their children to adoption or care as a wave of poisonous political correctness has engulfed Government employees everywhere.

The National Press and many Members of Parliament like campaigner John Hemming M.P. protest loudly about the incompetent stupidity of Social Services and the Stalinist like secrecy of the Family Courts which protect these corrupt and ghastly swarms of control freaks, thugs and venal fools. But nothing much ever changes despite these vociferously loud protests.

Social Services carry on blissfully wrecking people’s lives and failing to protect children who desperately need help and protection.

Just think of the tens of millions of pounds wasted by Social Services on their job creation scheme of imaginatively generated work in dealing with thousands of falsely constructed cases.

My own relatively small and inconsequential case must have consumed several hundred thousands of pounds – all entirely unnecessary waste on a completely fictional case which should never have existed at all and eventually fizzled out like a damp squib anyway, leaving a trail of expensive destruction in it’s wake.

Multiply those sums of money by the many, many falsely constructed cases by Social Services and just think how much more help could be provided to truly needy children.

It is typical of our Labour Government headed by pea brained Gormless Gordon that oceans of public money are squandered on pathetically inadequate and useless bureaucrats endlessly ticking their little tick boxes on their ever increasing numbers of forms and doing absolutely nothing useful at all.

HIGH STREET THIEVES POSING AS BANKS

This was written in February 2008 but disappeared into bloggers hell, somewhere in cyperspace where everything and everyone is insane and the triumph of the computer nerds is supreme.

It has just mysteriously re-appeared yesterday when some unknown computer sent me an electronically generated email from internet purgatory telling me I had some blog I didn’t know I had at all that was being automatically transported (migrated, they called it) from one place on the internet to some other place. There was this thing I now remember writing, so I thought I would post it here, where it should have been in the first place.

Oh, the joys of the internet and this electronic age of computerised, stress inducing garbage inflicted on us all.

Here is that article.

HIGH STREET THIEVES

I really got my knickers in a twist recently because my bank, which is Lloyds Bank, sent me solicitors letters threatening court action for an overdraft of about £600.

They also closed my account and I was left with no means of using money other than cash. This made life impossible. I also could not open another bank account because of the blacklisting of me as having a bad credit record .

The situation seemed dire and really got to me.

The reason for the £600 overdraft ? Every penny of it consisted of the bank’s penalty fees for an unauthorised overdraft which was originally only £5. But even that £5 was part of a sum of about £160 which had been filched from my Lloyds bank account by an insurance company misusing my debit card details for a household insurance policy that was never authorised by me at all.

It was all the result of a completely dishonest mortgage broker trying to ram a dubious mortgage down my throat which I eventually declined to take up. The other part of the total sum filched from me was when I made a one off internet payment of £17 using my debit card and it continued to be debited dishonestlyfrom my account every month for over a year. It was a deliberate theft, common on the internet.

My pleas to my bank in many letters, and personal visits to counter staff asking my bank to cease these unauthorised payments from my account fell on deaf ears. They told me they couldn’t stop the payments. They point blank refused to stop allowing fraudsters to take money from my bank account. How bizarre can you get?

Then I learnt about the bank charges scam and all the legal actions going on throughout the country. I discovered the banks have stolen tens of millions of pounds from thousands of people under the pretence of them being legitimate charges for unauthorised overdrafts. The whole country is up in arms about it.

Recently I learned all the banks have managed to stuff the entire World economy by virtue of extremely bad behaviour and sheer greed. Governments are even complaining about it. The whole World is wondering if the banks have led everyone into complete financial meltdown.

Then for three months recently I failed to pay any monthly payment to my Capital One credit card account due to an oversight on my part. I didn’t use the card and the only outstanding balance on the card was just £13. They charged me penalties amounting to £39. This works out at an interest rate of about an incredible 1200 per cent. That is pure theft.

With experiences like this and feedback from many other people suffering similar problems, I began to realise the entire financial industry had become utterly different from years ago when it had a reputation for honesty and straight dealing. Now it seemed to rely on deviousness, mis-representation and downright fraud to make money.

More and more people are openly complaining about an ever increasing tidal wave of greed as well as obvious deviousness and dishonesty coming from all sectors of the financial industry, and particularly from banks.

When I saw how many people were beginning to fight back I realised the banks had conned vast swathes of the population.

I think the banks are thoroughly dishonest, outrageously expensive to use for any purpose, and extremely damaging to the entire country. It is my opinion that Lloyds Bank, in particular, are thieves. It is about time something was done about it.

Any constructive suggestions anyone ?

FAMILY COURT INJUSTICES TO MEN

So, Family Courts seem as corrupt and unjust in America as they are in the United Kingdom. Could it be the same cloak of secrecy that encourages such evils ?

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded “Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It.” Schlafly also is founder and president of Eagle Forum.

The following article is one she wrote on internet news site WorldNetDaily.com which is an independent news company dedicated to uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty. It remains faithful to the traditional and central role of a free press in a free society – as a light exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power.

Schlafly

Did you know that a family court can order a man to reimburse the government for the welfare money, falsely labeled “child support,” that was paid to the mother of a child to whom he is not related? Did you know that, if he doesn’t pay, a judge can sentence him to debtor’s prison without ever letting him have a jury trial?

Did you know that debtor’s prisons (putting men in prison because they can’t pay a debt) were abolished in the United States before we abolished slavery, but that they exist today to punish men who are too poor to pay what is falsely called “child support”?

Did you know that when corporations can’t pay their debts, they can take bankruptcy, which means they pay off their debts for pennies on the dollar, but a man can never get an alleged “child support” debt forgiven or reduced, even if he is out of a job, penniless and homeless, medically incapacitated, incarcerated (justly or unjustly) or serving in our Armed Forces overseas, can’t afford a lawyer, or never owed the money in the first place?

Did you know that when a woman applying for welfare handouts lies about who the father of her child is, she is never prosecuted for perjury? Did you know that judges can refuse to accept DNA evidence showing that the man she accuses is not the father?

What has been the impact of feminism on the nation? Don’t miss “The War on Fathers: How the ‘feminization of America’ destroys boys, men – and women”

Did you know that alleged “child support” has nothing to do with supporting a child because the mother has no obligation to spend even one dollar of it on a child, and in many cases none of the “support” money ever gets to a child because it goes to fatten the payroll of the child-support bureaucracy?

These are among the injustices the feminists, and their docile liberal male allies, have inflicted on men. The sponsor was former Democratic senator from New Jersey and presidential candidate Bill Bradley.

His name is affixed to the Bradley Amendment, a 1986 federal law that prohibits retroactive reduction of alleged “child support” even in any of the circumstances listed above. The Bradley law denies bankruptcy protections, overrides all statutes of limitation and forbids judicial consideration of obvious inability to pay.

Most Bradley-law victims never come to national attention because, as “Bias” author Bernard Goldberg said, mainstream media toe the feminist propaganda line, among which is the epithet “deadbeat dads.” But one egregious case did make the news this summer.
Frank Hatley was in a Georgia jail for more than a year for failure to pay alleged “child support” even though a DNA test nine years ago plus a second one this year proved that he is not the father. The Aug. 21, 2001, court order, signed by Judge Dane Perkins, acknowledged that Hatley is not the father but nevertheless ordered him to continue paying and never told him he could have a court-appointed lawyer if he could not afford one.

Hatley subsequently paid the government (not the mom or child) thousands of dollars in “child support,” and after he was laid off from his job unloading charcoal grills from shipping containers and reduced to living in his car, he continued making payments out of his unemployment benefits.

But he didn’t pay enough to satisfy the avaricious child-support bureaucrats, so Perkins ruled Hatley in contempt and sent him to jail without any jury trial. With the help of a Legal Services lawyer, he has now been relieved from future assessments and released from jail, but (because of the Bradley Amendment) the government is demanding that Hatley continue paying at the rate of $250 a month until he pays off the $16,398 debt the government claims he accumulated earlier (even though the court then knew he was not the father).

This system is morally and constitutionally wrong, yet all the authorities say the court orders were lawful.

Another type of feminist indignity is the use in divorce cases of false allegations of child sexual abuse in order to gain child custody and the financial windfall that goes with it. Former Vancouver, Wash., police officer Ray Spencer has spent nearly 20 years in prison after being convicted of molesting his two children who are now adults and say it never happened.

The son, who was 9 years old at the time, was questioned, alone for months until he said he had been abused in order to get the detective to leave him alone. The daughter, who was then age 5, said she talked to the detective after he gave her ice cream.

There were many other violations of due process in Spencer’s trial, such as prosecutors withholding medical exams that showed no evidence of abuse and his court-appointed lawyer failing to prepare a defense, but the judge nevertheless sentenced Spencer to two life terms in prison plus 14 years. Spencer was five times denied parole because he refused to admit guilt, a customary parole practice that is maliciously designed to save face for prosecutors who prosecute innocent men.

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded “Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It.” Schlafly also is founder and president of Eagle Forum.

Alphainventions

MORTGAGE LENDERS ARE TRULY WICKED, NASTY, GREEDY AND INHUMAN

I had no idea that mortgage lenders were so wickedly inhumane as this until I came across this video clip from the Oprah Winfrey Show in the United States. Have a look for yourself here at the Oprah Winfrey Show.

This clip shows how the mortgage lenders totally ruin people’s entire lives, not just throwing them out of their repossessed house after luring them into mortgages that are cleverly designed to be rather more like confidence tricks than mortgages, but by depriving them of all their possessions – their whole lifetime’s collection of furniture, family memorabilia, in fact just about everything they own.

This is disgusting. It is medieval and is something that simply shouldn’t be allowed to happen. We are supposed to be a civilised society these days.

Obviously being civilised doesn’t seem to apply to banks and mortgage lenders. They are truly revolting !

GEORGE ORWELL ACCURATELY PREDICTED MODERN TIMES 60 YEARS AGO

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Wrote George Orwell in ‘Politics of the English Language’ in 1946.

A very good description of the uncontrolled greed, corruption and general venality of politicians everywhere who connive to destroy decency, democracy and the progress of civilisation and prosperity and the whole quality of life in general for all of us.

Bearing in mind the point that there is never an excuse for murder, the tens of millions of people Worldwide routinely being killed by war and other conflicts inspired and directed by politicians is pure evil, entirely avoidable and completely unnecessary.

George Orwell also got it right with his views of modern financiers.

“Building societies are probably the cleverest racket of Modern Times. The beauty of the building society swindles is that your victims think you are doing them a kindness. You wallop them and they lick you hand.” Orwell wrote this prescient description of our current poisonously dishonest mortgage market in his novel ‘Coming up For air’ in 1939.

Recent events have proved that the whole banking and financial industry in general is full of cheats, liars and thieves who have milked the whole of the rest of the population of vast sums of money – and they continue to do so, largely because of those corrupt politicians who do absolutely nothing at all to stop it.

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BRITAIN’S NASTY, CORRUPT, TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT

Totalitarianism is form of government that includes control of everything under one authority and allows no opposition, according to the dictionary.

Does this sound identical to the way Gordon Brown’s poisonous Labour Government has been heading steadily since 1997 ?

State sponsored surveillance increasingly intruding into every aspect of our private lives at an exponential rate; officialdom’s ever tightening control of the very language we speak with punishments for infringements; a daily barrage of diktats spewing out from Government telling us how to fill rubbish bins or close their lids under pain of fines for failing to comply exactly, and tens of thousands of other rules and regulations and instructions on how to conduct our daily lives according to the politically correct whims of controlling, power crazed, ignorant, and dangerous Government bureaucrats.

A much better description of Totalitarianism comes from writer Robert Harris in an article about the sixtieth anniversary of Wednesday, June 8th 1949 of the publication of George Orwell’s novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in the Sunday Times last week.

The original ideology behind the Totalitarian impulse “may be Communist or Fascist, or Nationalist or Corporate or Institutional, but the methods by which it proceeds are in each case the same: the stamping out of the capacity for individual thought and freedom, not merely by physical force but by a complete denial of privacy and by the control of all information, even to the extent of policing the language in which thoughts are expressed”, Robert Harris says.

Sounds like Gordon Brown’s poisonously corrupt Government to me ?

And Robert Harris quotes George Orwell writing about popular American political theorist James Burnham in 1946 who said Burham maintains in his book ‘The Machiavellians’ that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia ……. are humbug covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way to power.

Burnham says power always rests upon force and fraud. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.

In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.

Machiavelli and his followers taught that in politics decency simply does not exist, says George Orwell, and it has always been obvious that a planned and centralised society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.

So that explains the awfulness of our Labour government then – in a nutshell !

George Orwell also says “the notion that industrialism must end in monopoly, and that monopoly must imply tyranny, is not a startling one.”

And so that explains the excruciatingly dreadful way big businesses like the supermarkets manipulate markets and extort from consumers as they flood the high streets with shoddy goods and low quality food at inflated prices ?

Man, therefore “is an animal that can act morally when he acts as an individual, but becomes immoral when he acts collectively. But even this generalisation only holds good for the higher groups” George Orwell says Burnham thinks.

“The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.

“Political activity, therefore, is a special kind of behaviour, characterised by its complete unscrupulousness, and occurring only among small groups of the population, especially among dissatisfied groups whose talents do not get free play under the existing form of society.”

This sounds like a good description of a bunch of misfits !

That’ll be our MP’s then – swindlers; and it completely explains their self seeking hypocritical behaviour in making ludicrously dishonest expenses claims for things like floating duck islands and non existent mortgages and so on; yes, that’s it, Swindlers.

The great mass of the people will always be unpolitical, George Orwell reports James Burnham thinking. “In effect, therefore, humanity is divided into two classes: the self-seeking, hypocritical minority, and the brainless mob whose destiny is always to be led or driven, as one gets a pig back to the sty by kicking it on the bottom or by rattling a stick inside a swill-bucket, according to the needs of the moment.

“What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers’.

George Orwell continues, “These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established.

“The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.”

And that’s a neat description of just how and why the European Union is grasping more and more power from Britain with spectacular examples of how we are being deprived of our individual freedoms by this Machiavellian European Superstate in the making, whose sole purpose is purely the ruthless pursuit of power for its own sake.

And then there is America, China and Russia to add to the European Union, making a total of four Superstates in the making as George Orwell predicted.

Could War between these Superstates be just a heartbeat away ?

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Banking’s Systemic Subprime Subterfuge

We have always recognised that banks have to be trustworthy for the system of money to be able to function at all. This is because the banks completely control everything that happens, or can happen to money – how reliable it is and how freely it moves from person to person.

Every time money moves from one person to another, it creates something useful and valuable: real wealth of some sort and employment, enabling workers to use their wages to eat and house themselves.

Millions of people Worldwide are now losing their jobs, their houses and their wages enabling them to eat and survive. Homelessness and starvation is being forced on them, not because they do not want to work; on the contrary, they are pretty desperate to work. Very few people like to be idle.

The only reason these people’s lives are being wantonly destroyed is because the people and organisations in charge of maintaining the reliability and integrity of money have completely wrecked it, wrecked the whole delicate system of trading, rolling back civilisation to poverty and primitive barter as that fragile symbol of trust – money – is destroyed and debased by the very people we all trusted to cherish it on our behalf.

These people are the banks.

Money itself is simply a symbol of trust. It has no other value than to allow one person in possession of some money to pass it on to another person in exchange for something that does have real value – a loaf of bread, or something else that’s really useful, like a house to live in.

Our system of money is now in complete shambolic meltdown because nobody can trust it; it has become unreliable.

Why ?

Because it has become unreliable, individuals and businesses are unable to be certain there will be an adequate flow of money for them to continue to function. Business cannot function without reliable flows of money purchasing it’s products from which it then pays it’s workers, who are then enabled to eat and pay their mortgage.

Money was originally ‘invented’ by banks as merely a trusted symbol of exchange to replace the clumsy idea of barter. They have been in control of it ever since. It is important to be an honest person when handling money as there is always a temptation to find an excuse to keep some or all of it for yourself.

Dishonesty has always been around to some extent, and there have always been people whose job it is to handle money not belonging to them, who have stolen some.

Because theft is so damaging and disruptive, society has always sought to achieve a high degree of honest morality in all public dealings of any kind. Without it, all civilisation crumbles into anarchy, chaos and brutality. Dictatorships, violence, famine and death have always been the consequence throughout history.

In recent times the banks have invented excuse after excuse to construct more and more reasons to take some of our money we entrusted to them for themselves.

Some examples of this, and there are many, might be the quaint idea of inventing something called the penalty charge. This can range from a charge of millions to a business, or a small amount to an individual who fails to precisely control even the pettiest detail of his finances.

This results in banks looking for excuses to ‘justify’ a penalty charge and their artfully constructed self-righteous, twisted, logic then turns their honest customer into an enemy with whom the bank battles with and often then irretrievably harms by wrecking every aspect of that person’s finances.

Every time this little bit of dishonest, fraudulent dealing occurs in some tiny little corner of the financial system, a small amount of trust is destroyed and ripples out far beyond that bank and the customer it is stealing from, magnified beyond recognition as it touches huge numbers of other people.

A good example of the cumulative effect of this is the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage. This is a farce. An artificial construction by banks designed to milk outrageous amounts of money from people unable to defend themselves from what amounts to blatant fraud in a form the law describes as ‘conversion’.

Conversion is simply when you unlawfully ’convert’ property rightfully owned by another to your own use in such a devious manner it cannot be legally seen as obvious common theft because it is disguised. Sounds familiar in your dealing with banks ?

The banks deliberately set out to create this type of mortgage because it is more profitable than the old fashioned type based on honest trust and fair dealing which no longer provided enough profits to fuel the bank’s rapacious greed.

This is how it is done.

A perfectly respectable, reliable, person has an ordinary mortgage with an old fashioned building society – one of those ‘high street’ lenders. That person’s life may be disrupted by common events. It may be divorce, sickness, temporary unemployment, for example.

Nothing that would normally destroy people’s financial lives to the extent of being unable to have enough money to keep the roof over their head and feed themselves. Disruption of this sort normally happens to a huge proportion of the population.

What does a modern bank do when such a person become a few months in arrears with their mortgage ? Why, it first of all makes it more difficult for that person to recover their financial stability as the bank imposes arbitrary ‘penalty’ charges which are designed to rapidly mount up into thousands of pounds.

It then ‘black lists’ the unfortunate individual by notifying the credit agencies that they are financially unreliable. This is used as an excuse by any other financial organisation to make life even more impossible for that person by pushing them further and further into uncontrollable debt by using the excuse to milk them of more money by penalising them financially at every possible opportunity; using sanctimonious self-righteousness to blame the unfortunate individual they are manipulating for what the banks are actually doing themselves.

So, someone who may have a loan for only half the value of their house and be only as few as three months in arrears will have re-possession proceedings brought against them by the the bank. They are threatened with eviction and homelessness, with the inevitable consequences of forced unemployment, family breakup, increased debt and even illness.

The bank evicts them, and the house may remain empty so long it loses value as it deteriorates. Or it is likely to be sold at a considerable loss. That former homeowner is now blacklisted as too uncreditworthy to be lent money again by the ordinary high street mortgage lenders.

Curiously, that same bank just happens to wholly or partially own another company which also lends money for buying houses. But this one only lends to people with ‘impaired’ credit. The same sort of people who have just been refused an ordinary, standard mortgage.

People are also refused standard mortgages for infinitely more trivial reasons. They may have a county court judgement of just a few pounds against them. It may be such a frivolously brought claim they may have chosen to simply contemptuously ignore it.

But such a thing and a myriad other excuses are used by the banks to push people into the more profitable ’sub-prime’ mortgage lending arena with one of those subsidiary companies the banks own.

Or they are pushed into this rapacious ‘sub-prime’ lending market by all sorts of other restrictions manufactured by lenders.

A common one is the borrower not earning enough money to afford the ‘high street lender’s loan. Funny how that doesn’t stop the same financial organisation lending the money to the same ‘unreliable’ , ‘uncreditworthy’ person at higher rates of interest and with huge penalties imposed by another partly or even wholly owned lending business subsidiary to the one that refused the fairer loan !

Now the banks have manipulated someone into a position where the banks can produce an excuse to charge more for a mortgage – much more.

Enticed by a low starting rate of interest that escalates after a while to often as much as double monthly repayments and with penalty charges of thousands of pounds if the borrower has to terminate the mortgage in a year or two, the borrower has nowhere to turn.

All the banks collude to stop him obtaining an honest loan costing less. The banks want their extra profits ! And here is a mug who can’t complain and has nowhere to turn to and the banks know it. Don’t they just.

They have carefully manipulated their affairs by jointly creating this stranglehold over money by pooling their resources and their information to enable them to work together to create this extra profitable ‘sub-prime’ lending market. Pretty much exactly the same techniques used by the door to door rip off loan shark illegally charging annual percentage rates of thousands of per cent to impoverished workers.

It is exactly the same process at work. Fraud, theft, manipulation, threats, fear. These immoral sub-prime lenders have much in common with criminal door to door loan sharks and other thieves. Their victims are caught like flies in spiders webs. There is no escape.

But wait. It doesn’t just end there does it ? Having established this wicked system of modern banking that provides such huge profits to the banks, they wanted more. Greed is good they seemed to think. Yes, that’s what they said. Greed is good !

So they started using the same ludicrous types of manipulation on each other as lending between banks escalated beyond reason or comprehension to prop up the fragile system of deceit the banks were busy creating.

The banking system seemed to become more and more like a giant ‘Ponzi’ scheme where banks borrowed money from other banks to repay their own debts before it was discovered they had no money left at all to meet their obligations, because they had lent the lot as they forced increasingly large amounts of loans onto a gullible population who simply couldn’t understand what was going on.

All people could see was the value of houses increasing to levels of un-affordability where everyone was forced to borrow gigantic amounts of money just to have a home to live in.

But, like all ‘Ponzi’ or pyramid selling schemes based on fraud, the banking system was becoming more and more fragile. It was so riddled with double dealing, fraud, dishonesty and mistrust, banks became too fearful of even each other’s reliability to lend to each other anymore. The banks had successfully created a system based on deceit, mistrust and lies which had also spread into the whole wider community of individuals and business.

The Global banking system went into meltdown as money disappeared into the banks from wherever they could grasp it. The biggest con trick of all was persuading Governments ‘to bail them out’ by giving huge amounts of money – hundred of billions of pounds to stop them going bust and then even more of our money disappearing into oblivion.

The banks kept it for themselves where it is actually useless. Money is only useful and only performs it’s function when it keeps moving from person to person. The banks stopped the World money supply from moving.

So, in the same way the banks are the places where money is created to make trade and commerce become possible, so it is that money is destroyed and is now completely vanishing from existence by the banks being able to reverse the process.

That is exactly what the banks have done. It is the biggest fraud in history.

Looking for someone to blame other than themselves, the banks immediately blamed the ‘sub-prime’ borrowers.

The banks claimed it was all their fault because they were unreliable individuals who couldn’t afford to keep up the payments on the loans they should never have had in the first place; mainly because they were too poor to be able to afford them.

All those very bad borrowers had misled the poor innocent banks into lending them money. It was all their fault, the banks said. But they weren’t too poor for the banks to take their money, were they ?

The banks are liars. Sub-prime was deliberately created by the banks as a means to make more money and take advantage of people. and the banks in their breathtaking greed were too stupid to know when to stop, so they still haven’t stopped.

They are still foreclosing on homeowners even if there is loads of equity remaining in the property. Business loans are forcibly being demanded to be prematurely repaid to the banks and further new loans are rare and generally mostly unavailable.

So, the result is World-wide economic meltdown and poverty and misery of all sorts. Word wide trade and commerce is being destroyed by banks being irresponsible, greedy, and nasty.

Thank you very much, the banks.

PSSSST

Consider this.

A little clue it cannot be sub-prime lenders responsible for the gigantic sums of money disappearing into oblivion is simply that the amounts of money now vanishing into a black hole is apparently reaching into trillions -many trillions. It is a sum my calculator cannot understand or even cope with. So I haven’t much hope of understanding it either. Nor have you.

Let’s do some maths. If the average house price is £200 000 and the loan to buy it is 100 per cent, then one million sub-prime borrowers failing to pay a single penny of that back, ever, means a total loss to the banks of 200 000 million pounds or 200 billion pounds.

Of course this calculation is a complete fiction, because usually the banks re-possess the homes and get all their money back and then some. Sometimes, just sometimes, the banks will not be able to sell the homes for the full amount of the loan and there will be a loss. But the banks still won’t lose that money without pursuing the former homeowner for years to recover anything still owed from their wages.

The banks will not be suffering much in the way of loss from re-possessions and I imagine any losses are more than compensated by profit. So where might this loss they all whinge about be ? Search me ! Perhaps they might like to tell us ?

Here is a slightly more realistic calculation which tells another part of the story. The Council of Mortgage Lenders here in the UK say that each re-possessed house costs £35 000 to repossess. So each bad sub-prime mortgage loan is costing £35 000 and not actually the full value of the property at all.

Even that figure is misleading because it, apparently, is what the CML say the cost is, but they carefully bend the truth by omitting to mention that whole cost is usually born only by the borrower and never by the lender, unless the sale price of the property falls below the value of the loan; something almost unheard of here in the UK in normal circumstances.

But, assuming there is that cost of £35 000, and not arguing about who bears it, multiplying it by one million feckless sub-prime borrowers having their homes repossessed makes a total figure of 35 thousand million or just thirty five billion pounds,

Do you recall the hundreds of billions, even trillions of pounds forthcoming recently from Governments to subsidise the banks ? Seems to be a bit of a discrepancy here somewhere, don’t you think ?

Figures of annual repossessions in the UK were running at about 50 000 homes a year until a few months ago. Nothing like that fictional figure of one million used above. So what does fifty thousand repossessions look like costing at the official Council of Mortgage Lenders figure of £35 000 ?

Why, that comes down to only one thousand, seven hundred and fifty million pounds or 1.75 billion pounds; virtually all of which is borne by the borrower and is not a loss to the lender at all.

Frankly, I doubt if lenders even lose ten per cent of that and that would reduce the figure of apparent loss to just one hundred and seventy five million. Tiny, miniature, compared with the eye watering losses the banks are complaining about and the Governments are pumping into the banks to keep them from going broke.

As America has about five times the population of the UK you might, roughly, multiply that figure by five to get an approximate figure for the USA. At 1.75 billion it’s nothing like the losses banks are claiming sub -prime mortgages have cost them, is it ?

That’s thousands of millions, or hundreds of billions, even trillions, remember ?

The inescapable conclusion is someone is not telling the truth ! I wonder who that could be ?

I think it might be the banks.

I was always told that people who didn’t tell the truth were called liars.

If the banks are lying, and it looks like they are, then how can they be trusted to be in charge of the money supply ?

SAINSBURY’S BEHAVE APPALLINGLY – AGAIN !

- TRY SOMETHING NEW TODAY, PERSECUTE A CUSTOMER!

aaaaaargh !

Big supermarkets like Sainsbury’s are no longer satisfied with selling shoddy products at inflated prices and using strong arm tactics to drive every other small local independent food shop out of business so the they can control the entire domestic grocery shopping market.

They are now becoming obsessed with a delusion that they have a right to control and abuse their customers at will – as well as extort ‘fines’ from them for using Sainsbury’s car parks or failing to abide by the precise ‘rules’ about car parks which Sainsbury’s dream up.

Below is a letter I sent to Sainsbury’s today describing a ridiculously abusive item of their behaviour experienced recently.

To: Jerome.Kenyon@sainsburys.co.uk

Dear Mr Jerome Kenyon,

On the fourth of April 2009, at about 21.30 I made some purchases at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s.

I tendered my car parking card, as usual for, swiping. I have a distinct and unequivocal memory of doing so, because I remember the till operator handed it back to me together with the till receipt and change, and my hands were vaguely full of dealing with packing shopping at the the same time. So, being unable to handle all these items at the same time, I distinctly remember the till operator dropping the parking card accidentally, and then only handing me the change and receipt which I bundled into my wallet together as I always do.

Because of the kerfuffle I have described ( which always tends to take place as till operators usually ignore the fact you are packing shopping away and just thrust the receipt and change at you without the normal politeness of waiting, expecting you to deal with that at the same time – a usual feature of every supermarket !) I was so involved in getting my shopping out of the way for the next customer and putting my wallet away, that I failed to notice at the time that I had not now been given the parking card which had been swiped, and the till operator had forgotten to give it to me as she had put it to one side in order to wait for my hands to complete the other tasks so that I could then take the parking card.

When I then went to my car and discovered I didn’t have the parking card needed to release me from the car park, I then remembered I hadn’t been given it back by the till operator.

Not a problem, you might think. I certainly didn’t think it was as I went back to the store to ask for either that card or another so that I get could get out of the car park.

Unfortunately, your staff at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s have shown themselves to be persistently aggressive both to me and to many other customers that I have observed in the seven years I have lived here. So, they did manufacture a very big problem indeed.

In the twenty years of living at my North London address and using Sainsbury’s and various other supermarkets, I never, ever, saw or experienced this consistently aggressive, controlling and idiotic behaviour that I have experienced at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s.

So your staff went out of their way to create a problem. This is exactly what happened.

I went to the customer help desk and explained I had lost my parking card somewhere between the till and now and couldn’t, therefore, get out of the car park. I showed my receipt which showed I had just spent £41.

The customer service person, one ‘Michelle’ (she refused to provide her surname so rather stupidly cannot be properly identified as an individual) sent someone off to the till I had used to retrieve the card. This person came back saying there was no sign of the card.

This idiotic customer service person, then asked me to pay ten pounds to be released from the car park ( I had the receipt, only a few minutes old, showing I had spent £41). When I pointed this out, she then asked for a £5 fee to be paid for a lost card. I pointed out that I had not lost it, but that the till operator had failed to return it to me and that I distinctly remembered exactly what had happened and how she had apparently forgotten to return it.

This Michelle person became instantly aggressive and hectoring and quite shrill, doing what all brain dead bureaucrats do in imagining she was doing her job properly and obeying the ‘rules’ relating to car parking; and failing utterly to use one solitary brain cell to understand that what she was doing was an utter parody of what Sainsbury’s intend in the management of their car park.

When I protested that this was ludicrous, this person was very, very, unpleasant, argumentative and unyielding.

She was thoroughly rude and talked down to me in the most demeaning and unpleasant manner designed to humiliate me and show me she was excercising her ‘control freak’, power crazed mentality.

She absolutely insisted I pay up an extra fee, or remain trapped in the car park.

I was completely polite in every way in the manner I spoke to this person, and in the course of me remonstrating that it was ridiculous to demand a fee to allow me to leave the car park under the circumstances, I simply used an index finger to point in her general direction as I said I was adamant I would refuse to pay this wickedly oppressive fee.

This total idiot then instantly latched onto the (completely wrong) idea that I was being violent and aggressive simply by virtue of me pointing a finger to emphasise a point in a perfectly normal piece of human communications behaviour, where hands wave about in various ways while talking to other people – body language comprising well over 50% of communication and verbal language comprising as little as a mere 30% on occasion.

She instantly said , the minute I pointed this errant finger, downwards at the counter as it happens, that she was refusing to speak to me because “I was being violent and abusive” (which I absolutely was not) and told me she was calling the manager and grabbed the ‘phone in a dramatic fashion as though she was about to be physically attacked, and then called for the manager.

How you can say I was “violent and abusive” for simply pointing a finger to emphasise I was absolutely adamant I would not pay this extortion, I cannot imagine.

What is clear to me is that this dim woman has got it into her head that anyone pointing a finger or generally gesturing with hands, is being aggressive and therefore can be restrained, attacked, thrown out of a store or even, perhaps arrested and charged with violent assault. I am not merely being flippant or exaggerating here, because all of those things follow on from a true situation of a person being actually genuinely threatened with a real threat of violence.

In this case it was entirely in the fevered, politically correct, childish, and immensely stupid little brain of a completely inadequate person who made it plain she thinks anyone pointing a finger in this manner is fair game to be accused of aggression and violence.

The duty manger, Mr Paul or Peter Stares, appeared and immediately made things worse.

Without the slightest attempt to find out what had been going on he said “you shouldn’t be shopping here” and told me I had been banned from the store and told me to leave.

I told him leaving this lunatic place was the only thing I wished to do right now but I was being prevented as Sainsbury’s were apparently determined to keep me trapped in the car park. I also informed him it was completely untrue I had ever been banned from Sainsburys.

This banning was another fiction your aggressive staff had erroneously dreamt up a year ago which was the subject of my previous complaint to you on June 17 2008; whereby Sainsbury’s had apologised to me for this being untrue.

Mr Stares then asked the customer service person (Michelle) for a car park release card so I could leave. She told him she did not possess any as she had run out of them.

This, then, would seem to the reason she had behaved in this disgusting and appalling manner towards me in the first place. The stupid woman didn’t have a card to give me, so this led her into this dreadful torrent of abuse by her, artificially constructed in her little pea brain and furthered by a completely brain dead idea that anyone using a finger to gesticulate with in the course of a conversation is being aggressive and abusive.

Frankly, I am nauseated by all this and I wonder what you might like to do about it.

I am forced to use Sainsbury’s whether I like it or not, and I am sick and tired of the horrendous attitudes of your staff, who seem to have lost all sense of reason and understanding of normal, decent, civilised behaviour. And I am now left wondering, every time I shop in Sainsbury’s, whether you staff are going to attack me and cause a scene again as they obviously have the habit of doing.

It occurs to me the only explanation for this unusual and rather weird behaviour of staff is quite likely to be the constant brainwashing they receive from Sainsbury’s under the guise of ‘training’ – where Sainsbury’s are ‘training’ staff into a ‘them and us’ mentality. ‘Them’ being those irritating customers that “us’ at Sainsbury’s need to have complete control over to obey Sainsbury’s every whim.

That is certainly the message that unequivocally comes across as I routinely see other customers humiliated by Sainsbury’s staff; in particular by being persecuted by Sainsbury’s staff when customers use the Sainsbury’s car park while they do their shopping.

I frequently see people trapped at the exit barrier being refused to be able to leave by ’security’ people who constantly go on about how they are ‘just obeying the rules’ when people who are clearly shoppers and not people misusing the car park are trapped at the barrier, which then causes a huge queue to form as every one else cannot leave the car park either. It is a disgusting way to treat your customers.

I find all of this deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable.

Mother denied all access to her children

Here is the Sunday Times story on parental alienation !

Today ( 10 May 2009) on the front page of the Sunday Times, is the story many of us are very familiar with. The article is titled ” Wife of financier denied access to their children”, by Daniel Foggo.

Then in the same paper, on page 6, in the section headed NEWS, there is a further elaboration of the story, under the heading” Mum jailed for telling son she loves him”, reported again, by Daniel Foggo.

What hasn’t been reported is that at an early stage, when the mother was ’set-up’ by her husband, she informed her member of Parliament, ( a very senior MP), that the social worker involved with the case had moved into the matrimonial home, after she had been kicked out.

The senior MP took up the matter with the local authority, who after about 6 months wrote to the MP and informed him that ” the social worker had now moved out” !

So the husband had arranged for the social worker involved in the case to be pliant , in more ways than one!

This is what the Family Court secrecy is concealing.

It is a wonder that the MPs involved the scandal of MPs expenses, have not invoked Family Court secrecy. Had they done so, they, the corrupt Labour Party, Gordon Brown, Hazel Blears, Phil Woolas and that disgraceful Speaker, Gorbals Mick, would have been able to keep their corrupt practices away from disclosure.

It’s not just me that thinks it’s a serious business, but obviously everyone involved in this other story ! Including the courts.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case and others of a similar nature with squabbling parents or social workers squabbling with parents, it is wicked and disgusting that parents are jailed for the most utterly trivial matters by our Government; which now seems to have become a hybrid of Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Nazi control freak Germany.

From The Sunday Times

May 10, 2009

Daniel Foggo

A COURT has denied the former wife of a rich City financier all access to their three children after she was found to be turning them against him.

In an extraordinary ruling, the woman, who was also judged to be too indulgent a parent, has been legally barred from seeing her children for three years. She was jailed for approaching one of them in the street and telling him she loved him in breach of a court order. She is facing a possible return to jail this summer for posting a video about her plight on the internet.

Read the rest of this article at the Sunday Times by clicking on the link below

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6256709.ece

From The Sunday Times

May 10, 2009

Mum jailed for telling son she loves him

A woman has been denied access to her children for three years, accused of trying to turn them against their father.

Daniel Foggo

AS the wife of a successful City financier with three young boys, she seemed to have it all.

Yet after a bitter divorce and a protracted battle with Britain’s family courts system, the woman now finds herself bereft. She no longer lives in an imposing home counties farmhouse and for the past three years she has been denied any direct access to her children.

Barred from approaching them in any way, she has been repeatedly arrested for breaching the terms of the injunction against her.

Read the rest of this article at the Sunday Times by clicking on the link below

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6256499.ece

http://www.parentalalienation.org.uk/index.html

http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/

From Jack Frost ….Author: ” The Gulag Of The Family Courts”…Book 1

Parents Abandoning Children to Work

Poisonous seduction of consumer society greed for more, and more, and more; more of everything; – except happiness and contentment !

I think that running a home with kids and doing it properly is a full time job. If you did a proper, scientific study of the real and actual hours needed to do the job I wonder how many hours a week that would be. Does anyone know ?

I’m willing to bet it is going to be more than the notional forty hours of a typical working week.

And before this is considered, I think the average ‘modern’ idea of what is involved in running a home with kids is a bit peculiar because people have become so lazy they simply don’t do half the things they should be doing anyway.

Like cooking real meals with real food instead of micro waving that expensive ready made rubbish from the supermarket.

If running a home properly is a full time job, then it follows that an expectation of both parents having another full time job outside the home will cause problems, reducing the quality of family life and producing stress on the whole family.

There seems to be a quaint notion that as long as kids are fed and watered and dumped somewhere to be ‘looked after’ by some disinterested establishment providing ‘child minding’ services that is perfectly fine.

Parents are then free to work.

But the damage caused by the entire nation being gradually brainwashed over the past five decades into abandoning any idea of running family homes properly and looking after kids the way nature intended they be looked after – mostly by parents, is incredible.

This is the main cause of the current generation of children as a whole generating a tidal wave of violence, crime and general dysfunction and a workforce so ill educated, miserable, and lacking in work ethic, common sense or initiative, that it is next to useless.

I am utterly appalled at the way children are neglected as they are brought up surrounded by a conspiracy of consumer greed carefully nurtured by dimwitted governments and big business constantly poisoning people’s minds with persuasive brain-dead marketing lies.

This corrupting nonsense is now so embedded in the national psyche that the Government thinks it sounds perfectly reasonable to imagine that all single parents could somehow find the time to have a full time job and look after children alone; and that both parents in a two parent household should also both work full time, using all that money they earn to ‘dump’ the kids on some ‘child minder’ somewhere.

Never mind it causes immense psychological damage to the children and parents as well as frequently causing demonstrable physical damage too.

The way this country expects to bring up children is sick. Just look at the results !

Computers, eh ?

That bloody computer really got me today in the end. It must have been the most time wasting, silly day in my entire computing life. I just can’t believe what the stupid things do. I had a busy day with loads of seriously urgent things to do and not one of them has been done.

The fundamental reason is that you set out to do the equivalent of tidying your (old fashioned,real, desk) which should only take a few minutes before starting the day’s work. That always used to involve me reading two or three newspapers too, which only took half an hour and was part of my work. perhaps a couple of irritating letters are written to get rid of them and the mail is opened – you know the sort of thing.

But in the crazy world of computers, that sort of thing leads you by the nose from one thing to another; you sit with arms folded waiting for the bloody web pages to load (five minutes for one today and then the error message the ’server cant be bothered to respond’.

Then there are the web pages with the vital bit of information you need cunningly hidden so it takes an hour pratting about trying to find it. Then you give up. Most software is so ghastly it defies belief. The result is extra-ordinary inefficiency and induced nervous breakdown because just about everything you try and is thwarted by the electronic idiot sitting on your desk.

Deepabayard’s Weblog

This is something I came across on the web. It amply illustrates the shallow idiotic madness of the computing age which overloads us with meaninglessly stupid information posing as something relevant.

Or, perhaps the writer is a schizophrenic. I hope so; because if they are not God help us all.

September 3, 2008

Seth Godin for SEO- Imputation and Adverse-Coldcock

Filed under: berkshire hathaway, carolyn, love story, magazin, single parents, world bank — Tags: world bank, berkshire hathaway, single parents, carolyn, magazin, love story — deepabayard @ 5:17 pm

Plumb this onetime Make holiday, jammed chirographer and bra respecting viral retailing, Seth Godin, reported this stance by virtue of SEO:
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VERY BIG TERROR PLOT NOT VERY BIG OR TERRIFYING OR A PLOT, ADMIT POLICE




THE very big terror plot uncovered by police last week is not big, does not involve terrorists and is not a plot of any kind, it it has emerged.


Quick resigned after jeopardising an operation that turned out to be a waste of time anyway. Brilliant.

As nine brown men were deported for having beards, the police blamed the Home Office, the Home Office blamed MI5 and MI5 warned everyone it could kill them with its thumb.



An inquiry will now be launched into why the prime minister was allowed to scare the shit out of everyone, though experts insist it may just have had something to do with the news agenda.



A police spokesman said: “We were hoping to charge them with conspiracy to go to the shops to buy crisps and Tizer, but according to our lawyers that that’s not an actual offence, as yet.



”We have therefore taken the precautionary step of sending these men and their potentially explosive beards back from whence they came.”



He added: “Come to think of it, Bob Quick must be absolutely f*****g livid. Whadya reckon?”



A spokesman for home secretary Jacqui Smith said: “Embarrassed? No, we’re way, way beyond embarrassment at this stage.

”That’s a bit like asking a streaker if he’s embarrassed because he hasn’t shaved.”

The Mortgage Meltdown

CBS News December 14, 2008

Scott Pelley reports on the mortgage crisis that’s far from over, with a second wave of expected defaults on the way that could deepen the bottom of the U.S. recession.

Now that more and more people are openly using words like fraud to describe the behaviour of the banks, why is nothing being done about them ?

The True Sources of Wealth

BY GUEST WRITER TRIUMVIR SAPIENTIAE

When we start relying on financial trickery rather than production as the source of our wealth, we’re in trouble.

It’s nearly universal for our politicians to tell us that we need to get back to creating wealth. This much is true; sadly, however, our politicians want to get back to creating wealth by getting people to borrow more money to buy more stuff, most of which was made in foreign countries by foreign workers, and most of which they couldn’t afford even if they weren’t going into still more debt in order to buy it.

Why does our age, alone among all, consider increased consumer debt and the increase in consumption that goes along with it to be “creating wealth”? Isn’t this truly merely consuming wealth? And given that the vast majority of these consumer goods that we’re purchasing with our borrowed stimulus funds are made in foreign factories by foreign workers, while our own citizens are occupied predominantly with serving each other (increasingly foreign-produced) food and selling each other incomprehensible financial documents (not to mention helping to import the foreign products that we’re doing all this in order to buy), isn’t this consumption of wealth without ever replacing it with anything?

BY TRIUMVIR SAPIENTIAE

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE

OFFICIAL – BRITAIN NOW POLICE STATE

Run by thugs on the orders of “Adolf’ aka control freak dictator Gordon Brown and corrupt friends

Britain was always famous throughout the civilised World for being very democratic, a champion of liberty and completely tolerant of free speech. Not any more.

Under the repressive jackboot of sour faced dictator Gordon Brown and his bunch of like minded, Corrupt, pornography obsessed, money grubbing, self seeking, intellectually challenged, busybody control freaks, Britain has become a police state where the Government seeks to interfere in even the most petty details of everyone’s daily life.

Like all dictatorships, the government sponsored control of daily life extends bit by little bit until it is a mountain of rules and regulations with increasingly draconian penalties for what is laughingly described as ‘breaking the law’. The ‘law’ is what Gordon Brown says it is to suit him, not what the democratic majority of this country voted for.

Disobey Government dictats now and you will be coshed into submission by police on the streets or even randomly shot to death in tube trains.

Video footage shown on television news taken at the G20 demonstration last week clearly shows police coshing Ian Tomlinson from behind and violently flinging him to the ground. He died just a few minutes later. He was seen trying to walk home after work through the streets of London with his hands in his pockets and doing absolutely nothing to warrant police interfering with him in any way whatever. He wasn’t even a demonstrator – just a man walking home from work.

Equally, law abiding Jean Charles de Mendezes innocently travelling through London to work in July 2005 was simply gratuitously shot to death in a tube train by mindlessly stupid State employed thugs masquerading as police.

The Daily Telegraph reports today ‘that senior police officers admit the video footage of Mr Tomlinson being struck to the ground for no apparent reason “looks ugly”.

‘They question whether there were other events which preceded it, involving Mr Tomlinson, and therefore whether pushing him to the ground was unprovoked.

‘Andy Hayman, retired police chief, said: “The Commissioner must ask serious questions about the style of policing. If left unchecked, we have a more violent crowd in uniform than the crowd demonstrating.”

This is a polite and diplomatic way of saying the police force are out of control state sponsored thugs, ready to use random and extreme violence for every trivial reason or even no reason at all. Pretty similar to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo really !

It wasn’t just Ian Tomlinson being persecuted by police brutality last week either. The police were seen violently attacking hundreds of people at random in order to beat them into submission and force them to remain imprisoned all day in a small area surrounded by violent and aggressive police until nightfall. People were seen being attacked and beaten with police coshes for no lawful reason at all.

One woman was seen on television news being violently beaten by a policeman smashing his baton across her back merely for speaking to him; absolutely extraordinary !

The intention of the police was to deliberately force demonstrators and anybody else in the area, to go without food and water or access to toilets for the entire day so as to inflict ‘punishment’ on the demonstrators by making life as unpleasant and as uncomfortable and painful as possible without actually coshing all of them – just a few ! ‘To encourage the others’ as the saying goes.

Terrify a few people with a good coshing. Beat the living day lights out of them with brutal police batons, and everyone else will be so terrified they will be cowed into submission, coralled like cattle until exhausted.

This is plainly illegal on several counts and would have been unthinkable before the Labour Party Communist style Dictatorship under scheming Gordon Brown.

Sounds like a case of Police assault to me. Anyone going to bring a case for unlawful assault and or imprisonment against the police ? I would if I had been there.

In fact I very nearly was – with my ten year old son ! Would the police have corralled him like an animal all day without water, food or access to a loo ? Would they have beaten him with a vicious cosh too to force him to stay imprisoned ?

Obviously no law abiding citizen can now be certain they will not be randomly attacked by a violent police force. The UK is no longer safe from State inspired police brutality.

Isn’t it time we all stood up to these uncivilised power hungry fools destroying the whole Country and everything that made Britain a great place to live ?

This Government is disgusting. Get rid of it before it’s too late.

New Hampshire Judge Orders Website ML-Implode To Divulge Identities of Anonymous Posters

March 31, 2009 – For Immediate Release

LAS VEGAS – A New Hampshire Superior Court Judge has ordered Implode-Explode Heavy Industries, Inc., the owner of the popular mortgage industry crash site Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter (ml-implode.com) to give up the identities of persons who provided information to the site about The Mortgage Specialists, Inc. of Plaistow New Hampshire.

Rockingham County Judge Kenneth R. McHugh also ordered that the allegedly “secret” and “defamatory” content about The Mortgage Specialists would have to stay down permanently.

The information consists of an anonymous posting on the ML-Implode forum about The Mortgage Specialists and the publishing of the company’s 2007 “Loan Chart” sent in by an informant and placed online by the Implode-O-Meter staff.

The Mortgage Specialists alleged in their complaint the forum posts were defamatory, and the 2007 Loan Chart detailing financial statistics was secret. ML-Implode immediately and voluntarily removed the information to assuage MoSpec’s concerns, despite its continuing assertion that it still had the right to post them. However The Mortgage Specialists persisted in demanding the submitters’ identities and a promise to permanently keep the information offline. ML-implode refused. The Mortgage Specialists filed suit on November 12, 2008, signed by company President Michael Gill.

Judge McHugh stated in his order that since the Mortgage Specialists did not hold the Implode-O-Meter culpable or ask for monetary damages, their request to divulge the identities of the persons in question was “reasonable.” The Judge further stated:

The maintenance of a free press does not give a publisher the right to protect the identity of someone who has provided it with unauthorized or defamatory information.”

Judge McHugh’s order was issued without a full hearing on the merits of The Mortgage Specialists’ claims. Specifically, plaintiffs had not yet established that any of the postings were defamatory or that the Loan Chart information posted was in fact confidential, as ML-Implode’s challenges were limited to whether the New Hampshire court had jurisdiction over ML-Implode and whether the plaintiff’s requested relief would violate the First Amendment.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Note from Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter :

(The order was made regardless of the fact that the underlying allegations (defamation, breach of secrecy) were never proven:

http://ml-implode.com/article/mchugh_order

In other words, operators of forums or other online publications may be compelled to take down posts and give up identities before it is even shown defamation occurred or “secrecy” was breached.

We are appealing to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

This is quite a bad precedent for bloggers or those who run forums. It is very easy to come up with wrong-minded and unfounded allegations like the above. The mainstream media should be concerned too, though they are less likely to be picked on, for obvious reasons (still, they could end up in court a lot longer for user posts to their online articles that might “upset” someone).

Feel free to cover this or spread the news around.)

IMPLODE O METER

Or click here to see the home page of The award winning USA Website that exposes the fraudulent practices of the banking and mortgage industries.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH IS BECOMING A JOKE – A COMIC NOT WORTH READING

I am about to leave the Telegraph blogesphere as well as the daily paper for good because of the awful way they are run.

The last straw is the removal of many of my blog posts here which, as a journalist, I know to be perfectly acceptable in the pages of any normal newspaper; not libelous or ad hominem etc. Just robust, mainly political, views.

Many of the posts remained happily in place for ages. Then disappeared.

I understand, but can only guess really, because the Telegraph is too rude and ignorant to bother to tell me why these posts are are removed, that they are removed because some reader complains.

That is quite extraordinary – that any reader can remove any post because they personally disagree with it. Has the Telegraph completely lost its marbles.

Or is this just another example of big business outsourcing work (the moderating of Telegraph blogs) to some back street Mickey Mouse outfit somewhere deep in the slums of an Asian city – where the workers only appear to speak English, but actually have virtually no ability whatever to understand the language at all. Thus making a complete pigs ear of nonsense out of everything they deal with.

For some time now I have found the Telegraph becoming more and more unreadable as it turns into a silly comic, a parody of what it used to be.

Frankly, I am now beginning to find it an utter waste of time.

Banks Caused Financial Collapse by Using Thuggery, Dishonesty and Fraud

All we hear about from the banks is how all those dreadful sub-prime mortgage borrowers caused the Wordwide financial collapse that is now wrecking millions of people’s lives around the globe.

It’s all their fault, the banks try to persuade us. The sub-prime borrowers started all this by not repaying their loans, the banks say.

But now all sorts of other borrowers, Big business, little business, the corner shop – even governments and banks are finding themselves unable to find enough money to pay their way in life. They can no longer pay their employees or their own borrowings.

Even people without any loans at all are simply finding they no longer have the amounts of money they used to have, and so they no longer have enough money to buy things with. So every business, every shop is suffering shrinking income as business everywhere shudders to a grinding halt.

So, the banks were wrong then. It wasn’t sub-prime mortgage borrowers who caused this economic collapse. So who was it ?

It can’t have been a sudden conspiracy by all the sub-prime borrowers, as well as the rest of the business world and governments too, getting together in a huddle and deciding all at once not to repay their loans; can it ?

There is a key element to all these financial problems that I have never seen articulated and I think really ought to be put into the public domain, It is this.

Virtually all the ridiculous financial problems are caused by events that occur after people fall into arrears with loans from banks. This is because the entire financial industry has taken upon itself the role of judge, jury, executioner and God. There is nothing much to stop them except courts, and courts are generally not very good at doing that.

What courts can do depends so much on the legal abilities of the people bringing a case before it, because a court is a passive thing which is there to be persuaded to decide what to do by the strongest argument put before it.

A borrower is immediately ‘criminalised’ by lenders and this label hangs around the neck of the person in financial difficulties to make even themselves feel as though ‘there must be something they have done that is wrong’.

For some bizarre reason the financial industry collectively believes borrowers in difficulties, which are almost always just caused by the simple lack of income borrowers expected would be available to pay any loans, are there to be treated like vermin.

The financial institutions believe the appropriate way borrowers in difficulties should be treated is with extreme aggression and violence, using the tactics of thuggery, dishonesty and fraud. It seems financial institutions also believe that when borrowers experience even the slightest hiccup in repaying loans, that it is an excuse to simply extort extra money from the borrower that amounts to what is no more than criminal fraud dressed up with pompous self righteousness.

The poisonous way financial institutions behave causes a complete breakdown of the borrowers attempts to sort out their personal life and their efforts to pay debts are frequently deliberately made impossible by lenders who thwart reasonable attempts by borrowers by the manner in which the lenders bully, harass, stalk, threaten and generally contrive to destroy borrowers lives.

A large part of the problem is the psychology of abuse which the financial institutions think they have a divine right to inflict on people. This abuse breaks down all communication and dramatically diminishes the borrowers abilities to repay loans.

It instantly creates a situation of hurtling the borrower into a place where the borrowers themselves, believe they are sub-standard people, made to believe they are failures by the disgusting behaviour of the financial institutions. It immediately becomes a ‘them and us’ battle. The banks are on one side and the hapless borrower – the grotesque, sub-human enemy – on the other side; to be exterminated and squashed into oblivion by the steam rolling corporate power of the mighty bank; answerable to no one but itself. Even the government is powerless to control them.

It is exactly this process, writ large, that has produced the World wide economic meltdown. The banks have applied this behaviour I have tried to describe on an increasingly massive scale. They started with hurling abuse at a relatively small number of sub-prime borrowers, a special class of loans the banks dishonestly designed to be especially easy to allow increased amounts of extortion from the borrowers forced into taking out those loans.

Then, as the banks deliberately contrived to use all that small print they had carefully designed into the terms of those fraudulent loans to criminally extort increasing amounts of money from their victims, the corrupting stink of lies, deviousness, and dishonesty and theft spread stealthily from where the banks had deliberately created it – those awful sub-prime mortgage loans, mainly – into the dealings the banks did between themselves. Being criminally dishonest, just became part of the way the banks did all their everyday business.

Suddenly all the banks started to realise they could no longer trust each other about anything because the dishonesty they had created was spreading into loans they made to each other. No one could now rely on the banking system at all to be trusted to deal honestly and reliably in anything at all. Their lies and deceit were also beginning to be discovered by the press and Governments.

The banks had succeeded in destroying the whole World Economy by their sheer dishonest, grasping, greedy, lying, poisonous, criminal nastiness.

The whole problem -everything to do with money – is driven by psychology. And banks have warped that and bent it and manipulated it in order to extort increasing amounts of money from everyone in a myriad different ways.

The bank’s greed went too far and caused the entire system of money to self-destruct.

The only way of repairing it is to completely remove control of the World money supply from the utterly irresponsible, dishonest banks.)

Global Financial Meltdown Update

NEWS FLASH…..NEWS FLASH….NEWS FLASH…..NEWS FLASH…..NEWS FLASH

Friday, 10 October 2008/or possibly March 24th 2009/not quite sure really, but what the heck it doesn’t really matter does it?

Global financial meltdown update from OLLYS ONIONS


New details of bank rescue emerge:

• Eleventy hundred billion pounds/dollars/whatever injected into/exchanged for/given away or something. More cash to follow.
•
• Iceland to be abolished (shop as well as country, to make absolutely sure).
•
• Scotland to be banned from having banks.
•
• Credit default swaps to be converted into credit default squirrels, in the hope they take all the toxic debt and bury it in flowerbeds. Collateralised debt obligations to become collateralised debt orangutans, so that Indonesia can deal with the problem.
•
• Banks to institute “once you give you can’t give back” rule to ease lending.
•
• Dow Jones, FTSE, Nikkei, etc to be recalibrated, so that fewer points are better, and 1 is now best.
•
• Co-ordinated worldwide reduction of 75.5% in the number of people who know where the *@&*;$! all this is going to end up.

Prime Targets in the Vicious Circle of Blame

Sunday March 22, 2009, Dateline NBC aired a piece called “Inside the Financial Fiasco,” in which Chris Hanson finally takes a break from exposing sexual predators to take a closer look at the current housing mess.

NBC attempts to assign blame for the mortgage meltdown, and also tries to make it seem like they have finally identified the handful people who were the “only ones who knew” what lay in store for the economy when Wall Street embarked on the derivatives end-run that fueled the crisis.

So let’s go down the list of people that are prime candidates in the vicious circle of blame, and what their role was in the making of this fiasco.

Click here to read the rest of this interesting article By Guest Author Scott J. Wilson at:

YOUR MORTGAGE OR YOUR LIFE

The Ignorance and Immorality of Banking Executives

Here are two pricelessly childish comments on my previous article from two individuals with a rather puerile outlook on life illustrating the sheer ignorance of many people – particularly those in the financial industry.

The comments clearly show the immoral banking industry thinks it is quite okay to dishonestly extort money from people if those people can be persuaded to volunteer themselves to sign up for racketeering ‘financial products’.

Jamie MacNab naively tells us that,

“Correction : people took out loans from these banks because they thought they were getting a good deal ; they could have gone elsewhere.

Correction : the banks are being sued because the Council believes that it will be the British taxpayer who will foot the bill.”

And ‘Quincunx’ breathlessly says,

“The last time I investigated, borrowing money from banks was not compulsory, even in Ohio.”

I say;

Jamie, and Quincunx,

People have a fundamental need to find somewhere to live. It boils down to renting or buying. Buying might easily be considered the most intelligent long term decision. You cannot avoid making these decisions of logic so far. There is absolutely no choice. You exist. You have to have a roof over your head.

But, according to your logic, of course, it would be possible to say you could actually choose simply to live in an open field (if you can find one where you won’t be chucked off). That way you don’t have to worry about the hassle of finding money every month to pay a mortgage or the rent to a landlord.

But that has certain drawbacks, doesn’t it ?

‘These people’ you describe as though they are some kind of dim, grasping, feckless, subspecies of human, quite different from you, did not take out these mortgages ‘because they thought they had a good deal’.

They took them out because they were forced to take them out if they wanted any kind of mortgage at all because the banks contrived to deny them ordinary decent mortgages with normal decent civilised terms.

The banks thought by labelling people as ‘unreliable’ by virtue of a falsely constructed ‘credit rating’ based on virtually meaningless nonsense dreamed up by complete idiots obsessed with that magic word ‘computers’ and it’s attendant corporate infobabble, ‘information technology’, reducing life to meaningless tick boxes on forms, it gave the banks an excuse to rob people blind. The banks did it out of pure greed.

In virtually every case of a subprime mortgage it seemed the right thing to do at the time and the mortgage holder believed monthly payments could be met, ,just like he would have thought he would be able to find the same amount of money to pay monthly rent to a landlord.

The mortgage was often actually a smaller monthly sum to pay than paying rent for a house you didn’t own.

So it was definitely the right thing to do – to take out a subprime mortgage rather than no mortgage at all.

Then, you have to consider the brokers arranging the mortgages saying how the hapless subprime mortgage holder could expect to change his mortgage to a different lender after a couple of years when the charmingly described low ‘teaser’ rate of interest rose dramatically, propelling monthly mortgage payments instantly into the stratosphere, often to become completely impossible to meet. That was a lie.

So, Jamie, you are completely, comprehensively and spectacularly wrong. These mortgage holders are victims of a rotten, corrupt, greedy, dishonest banking system.

The mortgage holders positively could NOT go anywhere else to get a normal mortgage. The banks prevented that.

The banks deliberately set out to trap increasing numbers of people into higher and extortionate lending processes using the same sort of logic and persuasion that ordinary criminal extortionists used to use to blackmail people with.

And I’m afraid the logic of suggesting that people go to court to sue others because someone else is paying the bill, so that makes it all OK, is quite puerile.

That bill will only be paid if the court finds it is true the banks acted wrongly and are at fault. If they are not, the British taxpayer or any one else wont be paying any bills at all, will they ?

These two mentally challenged individuals clearly show how dishonest and dim so many people in the financial industry – particularly the banks – can be.

Heartless Aggression and Spite by Banks Goads City Council to Take Banks to Court

Cleveland City Council In Ohio, USA, is suing the Royal Bank of Scotland and other banks.

Why ?

Because those banks destroyed large swathes of Cleveland City.

How ?

The banks lent money to people to buy houses. The loans were artfully constructed by the banks to be fraudulent so as to milk the maximum possible amount of money from the bank’s unsuspecting victims taking out those mortgages.

The banks knew their victims would take out the wickedly dishonest mortgages because they had no choice. Choice had been denied to them by the banks.

The mortgage victims had been forced into them by virtue of the banks forming a cartel where banks colluded with each other to deny ever larger numbers of the population ordinary, normal, and reasonable mortgages. The banks invented all sorts of mealy mouthed excuses to deny ordinary mortgages, pushing the bounds of credulity bit by bit as they strangled the housing market with dishonesty at every opportunity.

This forced increasing amounts of people desperate to have a home to live in to be forced into these dishonest loan shark style mortgages they knew were completely wrong, nasty, and utterly, utterly destructive.

These dishonest mortgages were designed to steal increasing amounts of money from the hapless victims because the mortgages were arranged in such a way as to increase repayments almost exponentially in a manner virtually all normal working people would find impossible to keep up with.

The mortgages always increased automatically anyway after an initial period, sometimes literally doubling monthly repayments.

Then, when borrowers had difficulty keeping up with repayments, the banks thought they had some kind of divine right to sanctimoniously ‘penalise’ the borrower by increasing repayments even more to breathtakingly fraudulent levels by inventing a whole raft of unrealistic, dishonest excuses, liberally laced with a good dose of pure lies.

This rapidly led to ruthlessly speedy repossession of the houses by the bank. This allowed them to steal even more money from the borrowers they were busy persecuting by charging the creatively described ‘early redemption penalty fee’; as though the borrower had wantonly inflicted some awful commercial insult or burden on the bank for which they had to be penalised for and the poor bank compensated for the dreadful inconvenience imposed on it by the borrower forcing the bank to evict them from their own home.

The banks also used repossession as a means of inventing a whole load of other ‘fees’ like the mythically dreamed up ‘repossession management fee’ which, being charged monthly, could soon mount up into thousands of additional pounds extorted from the borrower.

Now, here comes the really interesting bit. The banks didn’t seem to care that when they repossessed the houses in rapidly increasing numbers the houses would become more and more difficult to sell. In fact whole streets of houses in Cleveland were repossessed and could not be sold. The houses, with families evicted from them, were left unmaintained and became vandalised. They rotted away and soon became uninhabitable as all buildings do when left empty and abandoned.

It wasn’t too long before many homes passed the point of no return and became fit only for demolition. It happens very quickly to any home left empty.

So gigantic areas of the City of Cleveland became an urban wasteland where, previously, there had been neat, well looked after attractive family homes.

Meanwhile, the families had been evicted, making employment for those families next to impossible. I mean, how easily could you or anyone else hold down any sort of job when you are thrown out of your home and onto the streets – forced by a bank to become a homeless vagrant ?

So Cleveland City Council were faced with dealing with wholesale destruction of their City by the banks and also having to deal with an ever increasing tide of homeless people and families with small children being forced to claim emergency welfare payments from the Council just to survive. Oh, and then there was the exponential increase in crime caused by this process.

All of these evils caused entirely by the banks, without any help from any one else.

The funny thing about all these repossessions is, because the houses cannot be sold, the mortgage loan is not repaid to the bank. This makes the act of repossession completely pointless.

It would seem the only reason banks will always repossess even when it causes catastrophe, is simply out of spite.

So, because the banks have caused this to happen all over the World, the global economy now lies shattered, with poverty and deprivation stalking the World and threatening global conflict. That’s war and death in ordinary language.

All thanks to the banks colluding with each other to inflict a wicked regime of extortion backed by heartless aggression and spite.

That is why Cleveland City Council are suing the Royal Bank of Scotland and other banks.

Good for them !

Perhaps a lot of other people – particularly those mortgage holders comprehensively fleeced by the extortion of the banks, for instance – should also take legal action against what are, at the end of the day criminals. Yes, the banks have indulged in criminal and fraudulent behaviour. They extorted money from people by dishonest means. That makes them criminals.

Criminals should be taken to court, punished and be forced to compensate the victims of their crimes.

World at War – Gormless Gordon Brown’s Third Reich

Watching the episode of the ‘World at War’ tonight in which Hitler gradually expands his idea of hatred of Jews step by logical step into murdering them in the most obscene manner merely as a bureaucratic solution to ridding the German State of their presence forcibly brought home to me how all Governments use their powers to inflict greater or lesser degrees of evil on all of us at any time throughout history. None more so than our Labour Government.

Once people have the legal power vested in them to interfere and control and dictate the lives of others and employ armies of petty officials ‘just doing their job’ to inflict their personal ideas on the daily minutiae of how others should do as they are instructed by the awesome power of the State, freedom, individuality, decency, common sense and everything that is good about life rapidly disappears.

World War Two was one such incomprehensible obscenity caused by the evils of political bureaucracy gone mad. There are many others in more modern times. The lunacy of George Bush and Tony Blair both deciding to successfully convince their Governments to invade Iraq and Afghanistan to wantonly kill and destroy and have the young soldiers so ordered to kill be, themselves, killed in return are one example and offensive in the extreme.

Muslim States today drive a hatred of non Muslims and call for the the violent extermination of non Muslims by killing people who don’t wish to be Muslims – which is precisely the same as Hitler’s ranting about Jews. It is clear that many Muslim extremists would be very quick to obliterate New York or London with a nuclear bomb if they were able to. It is only a matter of time before they are in possession of nuclear bombs and then it is certain they will use them in that murderous way.

And nobody ever seems to even try to do anything at all to prevent this mechanism of misusing political power to inflict evil from continuing to being hijacked and grasped by the undesirable inadequates who become politicians; people with a deep seated wish to remove freedom from others and dictate how others should live their daily lives.

But it isn’t just about the more dramatic things like wars. There is the bureaucratic grind of killing freedom and poisoning daily life bit by bit with the slow death of a thousand small cuts; ‘laws’ which are no more than the demented ideas of small minded busybody, interfering dimwit bureaucrats who delight in telling other people what to do.

Tony Blair and accomplice Gormless Gordon Brown have systematically wrecked the United Kingdom, imposing thousands of ‘regulations’ and ‘targets’ for everything and all sorts of new rules and regulations to destroy everybody’s freedom. So vast is their interference in everyone’s lives that hardly anything at all still functions properly in the UK.

It is their nasty minded attempts to control every part of our lives that forcibly reminds me they are barely different from the demented behaviour of the Third Reich. The similarities in behaviour are positively startling.

A direct result of the corrupt Labour Government is the news today about the complete incompetence of the corrupt Staffordshire hospital which is reported to have caused the deaths of hundreds of people as it pursued Labour Government ‘Targets’ instead of getting on with the job of providing competent NHS healthcare. Instead, they concentrated on saving money, rather than providing adequate medical attention to sick people.

Another item of Labour insanity under Dictator Brown is the latest idea to inflict a sort of permanent house arrest on any person not paying things like parking fines by denying them their basic human right to ordinary freedoms by preventing them leaving the country for any reason; you know, seeing relatives living overseas, holidays, any ordinary sort of thing like that.

Then there is the hilariously idiotic idea of controlling people’s silly and bad behaviour of drinking too much alcohol by manipulating the prices of cheaper alcohol to achieve a minimum price per unit to make it more expensive for poorer people to drink it, thereby keeping them a bit more sober.

So it’s alright then to get regularly drunk if you’re rich enough not to be bothered by minimum prices for cheap and nasty alcohol which only the plebs drink anyway.

You couldn’t make it up really, could you ? It is social engineering straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 novel of totalitarian government terrorism. State sponsored bullying is another way of putting it.

I wonder if anyone else has managed to work out that the more you get morons like the Labour Government trying to control people in such ludicrous ways, the more society disintegrates into complete chaos, criminality and immorality around us.

You only have to look at this same culture of power crazed, narcissistic greed and stupidity nurtured by the banks under the close tutelage of this labour Government which connived with the banks as they comprehensively set about fleecing us all to realise how dangerous and destructive the Labour government has been.

It is this ethos of corruption and theft that has allowed the banks to wreck the entire World Economy.

If you stop to think for just a moment, you will realise that we have all become so used to the banks being blatant thieves, that we have accepted their activities as normal. Obviously this acceptance must be wrong as their behaviour was so grotesque it has plunged the whole World into spiralling, out of control poverty, which no one knows how to stop.

SOCIAL SERVICES FULL OF IGNORANT, INCOMPETENT IDIOTS RUINING PEOPLE’S LIVES

Lord Laming is being too polite and diplomatic about Social Services being inadequate and requiring immediate improvements in his report on Social Services published on March 12th..

But then public decency prevents him from using the sort of language that naturally comes to mind on discovering the true awfulness of the state of the UK-wide Social Services empire of ignorant, lazy, incompetent control freaks.

Utter fools – who routinely allow children to die while sanctimoniously smashing families to pieces by wrongly ripping children away from parents with completely false and even meaningless accusations; having them adopted or putting them in foster care where they are often totally abused and hugely damaged for the rest of their lives.

For example, I can unequivocally report some of my own experiences of Social Services in action. There was Haringey, north London, social worker Conrad Barzey who deliberately and maliciously lied in a report of his to the Family Court.

I personally saw how he told a fragile, mentally ill woman only a week at home after being in an acute psychiatric hospital ward to employ a lawyer ‘to fight for custody of her son; otherwise she may never see him again’.

This, despite the fact she was happily living with and being heroically looked after by her partner and father of her son, and the couple were demonstrably a couple, living together in a good relationship, with no plans to break up or live apart. And the mother had already expressly told a court she wanted the father to have sole legal custody as a safeguard against her erratic mental illness.

Social Services had not been given any brief by anyone to interfere in the life of the family, which had simply gone to court to obtain an order that sole custody of the three children be given to the father – with the complete agreement of the Mother – so the children would be safe from any erratic behaviour caused by the Mother’s severe mental illness.

Of course, it was no surprise the woman rapidly degenerated into a major mental breakdown, illegally abducting her son against the existing order of the family court, setting in chain a series of events that comprehensively wrecked for ever the lives of all three children, the Mother, Father and other extended family members.

Oh, and it cost the taxpayer an outrageous sum of money – hundreds of thousands of pounds- for no particular reason at all. Just pointless expenditure to ruin people’s lives and do precisely nothing useful at all.

But it was a great job creation scheme for loads of Government employees while it lasted, wasn’t it ?

Then there was Susan Dicks, Senior social worker in North Wales Social Services in Denbighshire. Again, I witnessed her pathological rudeness, appallingly malevolent and incompetent behaviour, and her social services employees behaving in the most breathtakingly nasty, spiteful, stupid, foolishly incompetent way imaginable.

They managed to somehow contrive to conjure up out of thin air a potpourri of evils, wholly constructed by them alone. The permanent damage they inflicted on three children and two parents – as well as collateral damage in the further reaches of the family – were spectacular. They were sheer, incompetent, stupid, idiotic, form filling bureaucratic idiots. totally unfit to do the job they were supposed to be doing.

They managed to destroy the whole family – forever; made the Mother’s mental illness worse, and inflicted untold miseries on the three children.

In another case, I witnessed Buckinghamshire Social Services employ the same devious tactics of conjuring up the completely imaginary scenario that two parents whose three children had been forcefully seized and adopted by Social Services, were planning to abduct and fly them out of the country, presenting it to court as fact and demanding both parents be sent to prison for plotting to abduct their own children.

When the court discovered there was no evidence whatever for this utterly malevolent false accusation, Buckinghamshire Social Services were forced to withdraw their lies.

When I spoke to senior Bucks social worker Margaret (whose surname escapes me at present, but I will find it shortly), responsible for removing the children in the first place under the most highly doubtful, dubious and flimsiest possible excuses, she recoiled like a rattlesnake and fixed me with a withering, poisonous look of sheer contempt for daring to even speak to her.

I thought her withered, venomous looking face exuded spite and hatred of everything around her and just one look at her made it clear to me she was a dangerous menace and one of the worst possible people to be working as a social worker in any capacity at all.

The rotten State of Britain – ‘nation of form fillers watched by quarter of world’s CCTV cameras’

By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor Daily Telegraph 10 Mar 2009

Britain has become a bureaucratic and authoritarian state watched over by a quarter of the world’s CCTV cameras, a study of Labour’s decade in power claims.

National debt is running at £175,000 per household, five times more than thought, while each year the Government has passed 3,500 regulations, along with 100,000 pages of rules and explanation.

‘The Rotten State of Britain’ claims to be the first “deeply researched factual account” of Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s time in office.

The author Eammon Butler, a director of the leading think tank the Adam Smith Institute, claimed that his book had been turned down by two publishers because of the “unconventional” nature of the content.

He said: “A new form of centralised government and authoritarian government has been created that is worse than ever in Britain’s recent history.”

Among the claims in the book are that Britain has a quarter of the world’s CCTV cameras, the largest of any country and that taxes have risen by 51 per cent since 1997.

Motorist stopped by police for laughing

By Nigel Bunyan in the Daily Telegraph 05 Mar 2009

A motorist was stopped by a police officer and questioned because he was laughing at the wheel.

When Mr Saunders got out of his car, the policeman told him: ‘Laughing while driving a car can be an offence.

There is a link between a murdered boy and a laughing motorist

From Philip Johnston writing in the Daily Telegraph Mar 5, 2009

Here are three stories from today’s newspaper. What is the connection?

First, 65 people sentenced to jail for life have gone on to commit further serious crimes, including murder, when they have been released from jail on licence since 1997. Second, a serial knife attacker is convicted of the murder of Rob Knox, 18, despite complaints being made to the police about his behaviour. Third, a motorist is pulled over by a police officer and questioned – because he is “laughing too much”. The connection? Our criminal justice system has become so divorced from its purpose that dangerous offenders are not dealt with properly while perfectly innocent behaviour is treated as suspect because it is easy to target. It no longer protects the general public.

This is not a specious comparison because it is all interconnected. When dangerous criminals are released on life licence they are supposed to be properly supervised by the probation service yet we have many examples of a failure to carry out basic checks.

In the case of Karl Bishop, the killer of Mr Knox, he had been jailed for four years for wounding but was released after less than two years. He murdered the young Harry Potter actor a year later. The point here is that since Bishop was released at the half-way point, he was always subject to recall to prison if he re-offended. The police were told that he was a suspect in a number of knifings and robberies yet did nothing about it. He was never questioned or arrested despite his history of serial offending. Several police officers, we are told, have been reprimanded and the Metropolitan Police says “lessons have been learned”.

What possible lesson needs to be learned other than to carry out the primary functions of policing, which are the prevention of crime and the apprehension of criminals? How have we come to the point where a motorist is pulled over and questioned for laughing while a would-be killer is allowed to remain free to snuff out a young life and destroy a family? The only people laughing are the criminals.

Is The Credit Crunch a Cereal and Where Can I Get It ?

I keep hearing credit crunch. Apparently the most popular cereal today. but I cannot find it at Tesco’s. Is this cereal too expensive to be in Tesco?

Should I try Waitrose ?

Wronged parents need the oxygen of publicity

From The Times

March 6, 2009

We hear the tragic details of children left in danger. But we must not silence the families of those removed unjustly

By Camilla Cavendish

“They’re ripping lives apart and no one knows,” says one kind colleague who has rashly offered to return some of the phone calls I get from people trying to get their children back from social services, or to stop them being taken away. She is staggered by the volume of misery, powerlessness and desperation that this issue provokes almost every day. And that it is almost invisible outside.

We all see the tragedies that go the other way. Baby P is imprinted on our minds. When the Audit Commission warned yesterday that thousands of children may be at risk of neglect and abuse in parts of the country because of shambolic child protection systems, we all have vivid images of the horror that can result if social workers do not intervene.

Yet we have almost no idea of what happens when the same shambolic systems intervene in the wrong lives.

When children die, they have no “privacy” left, so the media tell their story. But if children are taken from loving families and placed with strangers, their “privacy” makes their views the property of the State, to be translated only by the State.

I know one child, now back with his mother, who was told by social workers that she didn’t want him any more because she had a new baby. I have heard others say, on reaching 18, that they had assumed they were in care because they were evil. Many suffer the cruel ratchet of family contact visits being relentlessly reduced from maybe a few hours to an hour a week, to an hour a fortnight – awkward meetings in municipal rooms. This is done to wean children from their parents, for ostensibly good reasons but it also helps the State to claim that the “family bond” is weak and that the child would be happier with strangers. Of these things done in our name, we know almost nothing.

When we do find out, it is often too late. On Tuesday I went to the Court of Appeal to observe a strange case in which two teenage boys are protesting that the State is punishing them by keeping them in care.

The council apparently became concerned that the boys had refused to see their mother after she left the family home. A judge decided that their father was poisoning the boys’ minds, encouraged by a psychiatrist who, it was said in court, had exceeded her remit. They were taken into care. The boys have since run away from two foster homes, repeatedly stating that they want to live with dad, not mum. The system has deprived them of both.

The mute expression of disbelief and fury on the face of the older son on Tuesday, when the judges dismissed the appeal, was eloquent. By that stage, my feelings mirrored his. But it was hard to be sure. This was the first time any of the evidence had been made public, because only now has it gone to appeal.

We need proper regulation of the care system. The Audit Commission report demonstrates that regulators are too weak to improve performance in children’s services. We need a regulator who can spot problems early and make social workers accountable. We also need scrutiny of the courts. Here, there is progress. From next month secrecy will no longer be the default mode. Jack Straw is the first Lord Chancellor to have had the courage to stand up to vested interests and insist that all family courts be open to the media.

“If justice is open,” he told The Times at Christmas, “there is a greater chance that standards will rise and that egregious practices may be spotted before they become harmful.” He is also freeing parents to seek advice from a wide range of people, including MPs, some of whom dare not touch constituents’ cases at present. The ability to see who is involved will allow campaigners to track whether some experts and councils routinely jump to questionable conclusions.

Mr Straw is making a historic change from secrecy to openness. As of April 1, the onus will be on judges to restrict the press only if absolutely necessary. So it is strange that his proposals contain a sting in the tail. When court proceedings end, he is considering changing the default setting from openness to secrecy – by reversing a 2006 Court of Appeal ruling called Clayton v Clayton.

This states that parents and children who want to tell their stories can be named at the end of a case (as long as the children are not in care or have not been adopted). Judges can impose reporting restrictions, if they fear that an egotistical parent might take advantage of a child’s privacy; so there is still protection for children. But the ruling put parents in civil cases in a similar position to those in criminal ones – such as Sally Clark and Angela Cannings, who were cleared of killing their babies in 2003 after a huge campaign in which television played a vital role.

TV is a tremendously powerful medium for demonstrating suffering and mistakes. It was crucial to Nicky and Mark Webster – who made headlines two weeks ago for trying to overturn the adoption of their three eldest children – in being allowed to keep their fourth child. The Websters owe their success not to the Clayton ruling but to the courage of the reporter John Sweeney and the BBC in getting round the law, publicising the case for a brief period when the couple fled to Ireland and putting so much into the public domain that it became a public interest matter.

But the Clayton ruling has helped others, such as Fran Lyon. She was an Edinburgh student who was threatened with losing her baby because she was said to be in danger of developing Munchausen’s syndrome, a diagnosis disputed by her own psychiatrist.

What matters most is being able to prevent miscarriages of justice. By opening up the family courts, Mr Straw is taking two huge steps towards that. But reversing the Clayton ruling would be a step back. If we have to alter voices and black out faces, we will be treating wronged parents like IRA terrorists. That would be a victory for the privacy lobby, but not for justice.

SILLYFLATION – THE FASHIONABLE NEW IMPORT FROM ZIMBABWE !

You too can will shortly be carrying your loose change around in a wheelbarrow just to buy a loaf of bread or pint of milk, exactly as they have been doing for ages in Zimbabwe.

Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, announced today that Goofy Gordon and the Darling Chancellor has cooked up another wheeze with the Bank of England to destroy the UK economy even more than it already has been by the greedy, unprincipled, immoral, banks.

Gordon’s great idea, with Mervyn King’s connivance, is to print lots and lots more bank notes. This is because the banks are hoarding all the money they can lay their sticky, dishonest little fingers on and no one else has any money to buy anything with.

No doubt the banks will get their hands on that new money too for a while, and the Government will be forced to print more and more pretty little bank notes with the fairytale idea that all those impressively printed and colourful little bits of paper will have real value and worth, and people will be convinced they are rich enough again to be able to spend money to buy things, employ people to make them, and generally kick-start the economy.

Garbage ! What it really means is the economy will nosedive even further and inflation never before experienced outside of Third World comedy economies like Zimbabwe will take root in the UK.

Well done Gordon and cronies. You’ve done it again !

What would do wonders for solving the economy here and the rest of the World would be to arrest a few senior bankers and charge them with criminal fraud and throw them in jail for a while. That might encourage banks to stop behaving like thieves and try and be a bit more honest in their dealings.

It is purely the deceit and dishonesty of the banks which have caused this global economic crisis, so the people responsible should be punished. They undermined everybody’s trust in money and the entire system of banking as they committed more and more fraud of one sort or another. They ended up not even being able to trust each other. There’s no trust among thieves, the old saying goes.

That certainly proved right in the case of the banks !

It might be a good idea to let the whole lot of them go bankrupt and completely reform the entire banking system at the same time.

The banks have proved they cannot be trusted to run the financial system, so it needs to be done differently, more intelligently, and by more honest organisations.

It really is difficult for someone who is not into bars etc. to meet suitable middle aged men/women.

Ha ! No it isn’t.

When people say they can’t seem to meet members of the opposite sex, I think it is ridiculous.

What they really mean is they haven’t met anyone they fancy as a potential partner. There are a huge number of reasons for not so far having met a potential partner, starting with the ability to actually just meet a lot of people in the first place from which to have a pool of people to size up.

So, all anyone has to do is to get out there and meet a large number of different people, some of whom will be single and ‘in the market’. Others won’t be ‘in the market’ because they already have partners, but might be so dumbstruck by a new acquaintance, they leave existing partners and latch onto you and you them.

So, it is all about just meeting people ennit !

Therefore any activity, social or work, which involves exposure to the maximum number of people offers the opportunity to meet potential partners.

All you have to do is talk to them. That’s the process of sussing them out. Are they single; question one; what do they do for a living; question two …..

You know the sort of thing, sussing them out. As the cross examination proceeds, a decision is being made by both people whether they might want to become friends. And we all know where becoming ‘just friends’ can lead !

There was once upon a time a very clever device invented aimed at refining this process to speed it all up as much as possible and make it a bit more efficient.

It’s called ‘the party’ !

This is a great idea for meeting hordes of people in a short space of time. So, you can go to a half decent party, meet about a hundred people, chat to maybe half of them, come away after of two hours of intensive chatter and mutual cross examinations and maybe, if you’re lucky, an invitation or two to some more parties and a couple of people who want to keep in touch with you.

Ergo, your social circle is already expanding ! Simple really.

If you are a single unattached recluse (like me) stuck in a rut with absolutely no social life whatever, the chances of meeting a potential partner are virtually zilch.

So get out there and socialise or something.

Anything that involves meeting people will do – even bars. But while bars are a possibility, they are only a slight possibility because most people go to bars with their friends and chatter amongst themselves.

A single person grimly nursing a drink in the corner, is going to find it seriously difficult to break in to one of these chattering groups; and if they do, they can’t just go in there and say ‘ Hi, I’m a sad, lonely, bitter and twisted single person, desperate to make friends with anybody’.

Even if they don’t actually use those words, but butt in and say something cheerily, like, ‘Hi, I spend loads of time in this bar and I notice from what you were saying that you’re all new around here. Let me introduce myself ‘, the secret hidden body language you exude from every cell of your person still gives out the message loud and clear that you are a desperate, lonely has been who will do anything to smarm their way into someone’s -anyone’s – acquaintance.

So it not really a starter, is it ? Better go to that party instead, where the rules are all different. There, you are not only allowed to introduce yourself to complete strangers, but are actually expected to. In fact, if you don’t, you are likely to be thought of as a bit of an oddball.

As well as ‘the party’, any activity that involves meeting people is good. You could try getting out of bed in the mornings and going to work. That helps, sometimes. Being friendly and helpful in general to other people when you do meet them is always useful because they are then automatically inclined to invite you places – like the nearby Starbucks coffee shop to have a natter over a cup of coffee or something.

Get a hobby of some kind and dream up other ways of finding excuses to meet like minded people; it works a treat !

The only problem with all this, is that, if you are a sad, lonely, bitter and twisted single person, oozing envy at all those happy go lucky, cheerful couples, it will show.

So when you meet other single people, who are most likely to be vaguely similar, you will exchange bitter and twisted tales about each other’s lives explaining just why you are bitter and twisted because you are on you own.

So that’s the way both of you will stay – just endlessly exchanging hard luck tales of lonely single life.

Married people are always immensely more attractive to members of the opposite sex. When I was married I was constantly bombarded with endless unwanted propositions from even more unlikely bimbettes.

Now I’m middle age, sagging and single, oh and penniless, having had my finances completely trashed by rapacious, destructive former partners, I’m thoroughly bitter and twisted, reclusive and don’t even know where to begin my rehabilitation.

Any offers out there ?

Bimbettes not welcome.

Sinister Evil of Government Bureaucracy

Government imposed bureaucracy is reaching levels of surreal fantasy that persistently undermine all our lives in a sinister, but almost invisible way.

TO BE CONTINUED LATER

Tesco Thought Police Ban Mum From Buying Alcohol With Teen Daughter

KAREN Dumelow is 46. She looks younger. She is at a branch of Tesco with her 14-yerar-lold daughter Emily. She is buying two bottle of wine (white).

The cashier asks for ID. Staff will not sell Mr Dumelow the wine unless her companion can prove she is of legal age to drink it. Can she work the pole? Tesco is tough on thought crime.

Karen Dumelow is by trade a fraud investigator. Emily does not retrieve a fake ID. No ID; no wine.

Says mum to the Porstmouth News:

“The checkout assistant asked Emily for ID and I just told her that obviously she didn’t have any because she is only 14 years old.”

Obviously.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was crazy. Do you have to leave your children at home if you want to buy alcohol now?”

Well, no. If you leave them alone, it might be against the law. Is there booze in the house in an unlocked cabinet? Best to get the booze delivered. And carry all prescription medication with you at all times. And lock your child in their room. No, don’t do that. There might be a fire, or worse, a step uncle or neighbour in high Gary Glitter paedo boots peeping through the upstairs window…

Emily is sent to the car. Yeah, with the car keys! Or was it already unlocked? Either way, for shame! Mrs Dumelow asks:

“I was paying for the shopping, not her, how extreme can something get? I would never purchase alcohol for an under-age person. The part that incensed me the most was that literally one minute later I bought the wine from the same till – it was unbelievable. All I had to do was send my daughter to the car and all of a sudden everything was OK.”

Says Tesco:

“We work hard to prevent under-age sales, including proxy sales where adults purchase alcohol for under-18s. However in this instance we got it wrong and sincerely apologise.”

The Mail is outraged. Elsewhere in the Mail:

This what the country has come to. In every walk of life there is a complete lack of common sense, let alone freedom. I spend a lot of time in the former USSR, and life is freer there! Believe it!
- Sandy

Word to Tesco staff… you don’t run the country.
- David, Essex,

No, the Mail does:

Brown launches undercover police Christmas blitz on underage drinking

‘Parents responsible for underage drinking’

Parents are to blame for under-age binge drinking and so are drunken stars, says pubs boss

Labour has created a ‘timebomb generation’ of teenagers hooked on casual sex, drugs and binge-drinking, claim Tories

Teachers told to spot children suffering a hangover

And:

Tesco bans parents from buying alcohol if they are with their OWN children

A Mail reader writes:

WONDERFUL! Good for you Tesco’s! Alcohol should not be sold together with other goods at all. It should be sold separately, in a separate, closed off unit. It’s called an “off licence.”

Or a park.

Trouble In Store &; Supermarket

source

Anorak News

BANK OF AMERICA HEIRESS BLASTS BANK LEADERS AS ‘IDIOTS’

By CBS News Reporter Hank Plante

The granddaughter of the man who founded Bank of America in San Francisco in the early 1900s called the bank’s current condition “totally repulsive” and blasted the bank’s management for being “idiots.”

The harsh criticism from Virginia Hammerness, the heiress to A.P. Giannini’s family fortune and a significant stockholder in the bank he launched, came during an interview Monday with CBS 5.

She reflected on how her grandfather founded B of A as the Bank of Italy in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1904 as a reaction to the fact that the big eastern banks wouldn’t lend to middle class immigrants like Italians.

Hammerness was outspoken about what has happened to the bank that is her family’s legacy, saying she had little doubt that Giannini was “rolling over in his grave.”

She added that her father, who succeeded her grandfather as bank president and “gave his life for the bank,” would have had a similar reaction upon seeing today’s decline of the institution.

“I think its totally repulsive,” Hammerness said when asked what she thinks of Bank of America now. “What idiots, what kind of idiots are running that bank?”

Hammerness directed some of her criticsm at the bank’s decision to go ahead with the purchase of the near-bankrupt Merill Lynch brokerage, even after learning that huge bonuses were paid out to Lynch employees right after the deal was announced.

“They bought it and then, you know, they found out before the deal was consumated that the head of Merrill Lynch paid all those bonuses to people. Bank of America should have said forget it,” said Hammerness.

Huge bonuses were not her grandfather’s way of doing business, she said.

A.P. Giannini gave away millions, but died with an estate of only $500,000. He turned down a $1.7 million dollar bonus that the bank wanted to give him, saying they should use it to help their customers instead.

Gianniani became a legend right after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. After his bank burned down, he set up a wooden plank on two barrels along the street and made loans. All it took was a handshake and he later said every loan was repaid.

But Hammerness wondered aloud whether she would even be able to get a loan today from Bank of America.

“If i just went in as Mrs. Hammerness, I don’t know, I might not be able to,” she observed. “It’s just bad, it’s greed, greed, greed.”

While she doesn’t favor nationalization — a government takeover of the banking industry — Hammerness said she is worried that the bank’s ongoing decline could leave little in the future for the other heirs in her family.

“I just think what’s happening is just nauseating really. I feel so sorry for my children, my grandchilden, my great grandchildren and everybody else’s,” she said.

When asked if she still puts her money in the Bank of America, the Giannini heiress responded: “Well, of course. But I have no loyalty to it. It’s just there because I’m too lazy to go somewhere else… That’s the honest to God truth, just too lazy to move it somewhere else.”

Be Very Afraid of Anal Penetrating KILLER Office Chairs Made in China

Boy Killed By Anal Penetrating Chair

IN China, a fourteen-year-old boy was killed when chair he was sitting on exploded.

Parts of the chair entered the boy’s rectum. The result was extensive bleeding. And it killed him.

The killer chair is a gas cylinder type, of the type seen at computer work stations. In blue.

The height is altered by an adjustable cylinder containing highly pressurised gas. It is this that exploded.

In 2007 another chair exploded, propelling a 20cm part into the backside of a 68-year-old man. He lived.

Made in China. Buyer beware…

Source

Anorak News

LOAN SHARKS – PREDATORY MORTGAGE LENDING

Today’s news is full of the UK Government setting up a ‘telephone help line’ for people who are victims of ‘loan sharks to call. How cute ! Isn’t Mr Gordon Brown and his Government such a nice, caring bunch of politicians?

But if they were so concerned about unlicensed door to door loan sharks why didn’t the government do something about them before ? They have always been a nasty bunch of grasping thieves, so what’s new ?

You don’t need a telephone ‘help line’ for an illegal criminal activity of fraud to be dealt with. But you do need the police to get out there and do the job we taxpayers pay them to do. Telephone ‘help lines’ are always a way to keep people like the police busy answering telephone calls and filling out lots of forms and ticking lots of boxes after asking loads of nonsensical and irrelevant questions of the individual conned into making a telephone call to such a useless ’service’.

All that activity and box ticking helps them meet those ‘targets’ which Gordon Brown’s silly bunch of dangerous twits are so fond of imagining means they are actually doing something useful.

But, just wait a minute . Loan sharks, predatory lending. A dreadful, fraudulent criminal activity to be sure !

So why hasn’t the Government done anything about curbing the fraudulent, dishonest and criminal activities of the banks and other large financial institutions ?

It is the collective behaviour of the entire financial industry which has brought the whole World economy to it’s knees, driving millions of people into poverty, joblessness, homelessness and Gods knows what sewer of other awful deprivations.

Why hasn’t the Government stopped the completely fraudulent nature of that laughingly described ’sub-prime’ mortgage lending which is what kick-started the World wide financial Crisis in the first place ? Why isn’t the Government doing something about it right now, before it gets even worse ?

After all, sub-prime mortgage lending is just another version of loan sharking. It is a means by which mortgage lenders use fairy tale nonsense finance babble to substitute for honesty and straight dealing. It is deliberately designed to ensnare home buyers into their sub-prime clutches so the banks can extort ludicrous and unrealistic high interest rates, followed by sudden leaps in monthly repayments which the banks know borrowers will find incredibly difficult to meet.

This in turn allows the banks to turn the screws of extortion – just like those criminal loan sharks – by charging huge amounts of extra money based on utter fiction; knowing it will drive the hapless borrowers further into financial oblivion, repossession and homelessness- and almost inevitably joblessness as well; because holding down a job while being thrown out of your home onto the street is a bit of a tricky proposition.

The mortgage lenders say they do everything they can to help people who are in difficulties with their mortgage repayments. But that is a lie. They do nothing of the sort. What they do is to deliberately drive people further and further into financial difficulty. They employ people like teenagers in call centres to ask a standard list of questions, just about exactly the same for every mortgage lender.

These questions are all about ‘have you got the money today. Will you pay your mortgage by credit card now to stop us taking legal action to repossess you’ etc. The nature of the call centre teenagers is obstructive, insulting and meaningless; deliberately designed to be as stressful as possible and making it impossible for the borrower not to sink into a state of severe stress and almost certain depression.

These calls are not about borrowers negotiating the best possible means of being able to maintain their home loan by talking to responsible, mature bank employees with the authority to be able to sort out the best possible solution for the mortgage to be maintained.

One of these unpleasant loan sharks, part of that Lehman Bros empire that sparked the Global Financial Crisis, told a mortgage holder in difficulties, “Nothing you can say to us will make any difference. We are going to repossess your house regardless’.

Doesn’t sound like negotiation to me. Doesn’t sound like doing all they can to help a borrower in genuine difficulties either.

It does sound like the language of a door to door criminal loan shark using whatever threatening behaviour is available to find excuses to extort more and more money out of hapless victims.

When will the Government do something to stop this loan shark mortgage extortion engineered by the banks ?

BANKS ARE VINDICTIVE, WITHOUT CONSCIENCE OR MORALITY, WARPING SOCIETY

Wantonly, viciously, Spitefully, destroying people’s lives and the whole economy as well.

The UK council of Mortgage Lenders reports today that only £700 million worth of new mortgages were lent during January this year. Taking a very approximate average mortgage of £200 000, that represents just 3 500 individual mortgages granted in the UK during January 2009.

I know each month’s figures are different and may increase in later months; they also may not. But this just gives a general indication of where things area heading.

Multiplied by the twelve months of the year that makes just 42 000 individual mortgages granted for the purchase of houses in the UK for the whole of 2009. The level of repossessions alone is already way above 50 000 a year and estimated to be over 70 000 in 2009.

The bottom line is that nearly everyone wanting to sell a house will find it almost impossible to find a buyer, and everyone wanting to buy a house will also find it almost impossible to obtain a mortgage sufficient to fund the purchase.

Which only goes to show that the banks, so obsessed with throwing families out of their homes and onto the streets, are obscenely spiteful, nasty, power crazed and vindictive organisations without conscience, humanity or any sense of human decency, morality or dignity.

The repossessed houses will mostly remain unsold and empty, just like thousands of houses have in America. They will be exposed to deterioration, neglect and vandalism and likely to progressively lose value and become more unsaleable. The homeless families will cost the Government even more money in social housing of some sort. Employment becomes virtually impossible when you become homeless.

The children of those families will be traumatised and suffer lifelong psychological damage, contributing further to the downward spiral of civilisation our society is already suffering from. Entirely thanks to the disgustingly materialistic way of life forced on us by the banks and other financial institutions that set the economic agenda and drive big business to warp society into becoming fiercely, pointlessly, wastefully spendthrift; never giving but a passing thought as to how to wisely spend the fruits of progress, technology, profit and increased leisure.

The banks are just wantonly, viciously, Spitefully, destroying people’s lives and the whole economy as well.

Ever since the spinning Jenny freed workers from unremitting, backbreaking, soulless toil to the potential for a better life, the financiers and accountants have stolen that freedom away from us by continuously inventing new ways of stealing the profits of improved technology and progress, pocketing it for themselves and squandering it in a breathless race to become even more garishly, pointlessly, meaninglessly extravagant.

GIVING INCOMPETENT BANKS ALL OUR MONEY

All this debt then. Trillions and trillions of losses by banks to be compensated for by Governments providing trillions of pounds of financial support (loans) to all those wicked banks so as to prevent the financial system collapsing completely.

Mmmmmmn!

So Governments are giving the banks lots of our money which we are told will take us a generation to repay and keep us and our children in abject poverty as we provide all this money to the banks.

Errrrrrr ! So the banks get all this money. We lose all this money. And what exactly do the banks do with it all ? Apart from paying themselves a lot of obscene bonuses. We can gloss over that as being a relatively trivial amount of money even if it is morally obscene.

So we give the banks our money then so as to keep them from going bust and completely wrecking the financial system.

But that means my personal financial system is already beginning to be wrecked and will get worse in the next thirty years as I struggle to pay all those taxes needed to replace the huge amount of money the Government is giving the banks.

So why give the money to the banks in the first place. I would rather hang onto my own money and let those bastards go bankrupt as soon as possible because they are worthless leeches that have damaged the very core of civilisation.

The system needs radical reform, starting with letting the parasites called banks disappear into oblivion, together with their poisonous ideas.

For teens in prison, life sentence means no parole

FEBRUARY 27, 2009 • 5:26 PM

By Meg Laughlin, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, March 1, 2009

The retired judge lives in the deep woods southeast of Tampa, a quarter-mile down a narrow dirt road. Late in the afternoon, J. Rogers Padgett is brooding on how much he misses the courtroom.

He’s heard hundreds upon hundreds of cases over the years, so it’s a long shot when he’s asked if he recalls an armed robbery case from eight years ago. The defendant was a kid named Kenneth Young.

Yes, the judge says, he remembers it well. Young was all of 14 when he helped a 25-year-old crack dealer pull armed robberies of hotels around Tampa Bay. Young would take down the video surveillance cameras and grab the cash while the boss held a gun on the clerks and barked orders. No shots were ever fired.

Padgett remembers the address of one of the hotels, the pile of video cameras in the back seat of the crack dealer’s car when he and Young were arrested, Young’s annoying courtroom behavior as he tried to avoid trial. And he remembers sentencing Young to life in prison.

What he does not remember is that it was life in prison with no chance of ever getting out. Padgett ruminates on it a minute and volunteers something extraordinary:

He says he made a mistake. He never meant to send Young away forever.

“I didn’t think when I gave Kenneth Young life that it was life without parole,” said Padgett. “At this point, I’d sign a clemency petition for him to be considered for release.”

The judge’s words are like manna from heaven when they are relayed to Young’s attorney, Paolo Annino.

A law professor at Florida State University’s Public Interest Law Center, Annino and some of his students have crafted a legislative bill that could help Young and about 300 more Florida inmates who got life or hefty sentences when they were kids.

Called the Second Chance Act for Children in Prison of 2009, the bill says that those who were 15 or younger and sentenced to at least 10 years in prison without parole should be considered for release if they’ve committed no other crime, shown remorse, stayed out of trouble in prison and participated in educational programs.

Kenneth Young is their poster child.

“Remember,” Annino says, “this bill is for inmates like Kenneth to be considered for release, not necessarily released.”

The bill favors children who were “an accomplice to the offense or a relatively minor participant … or acting under extreme duress or domination of another person.”

The testimony in Young’s case made it clear that the crack dealer was running the show, with Young in a subservient role. For his part in the robberies, Young got $50 cash, a pair of Air Jordans and a six-pack of Heineken.

Former hotel night clerk Michael Traupmann told the St. Petersburg Times that it always bothered him that “the boy” got such a harsh sentence. “He was pretty harmless,” said Traupmann. “If I could help him, I would.”

Now, so would Padgett.

• • •

A few weeks ago, as the sun set behind oaks in the judge’s yard, he said that when he came to the bench in the 1970s, a life sentence didn’t necessarily mean life. Inmates routinely were granted early release. It was that way through the ’80s.

Padgett said he knew that a change in the ’90s meant that a life sentence for first-degree murder and sexual battery truly meant life. But he said he thought it was for capital crimes only; he didn’t realize it applied when he sentenced Young to life for armed robbery.

“I didn’t know he was stuck,” the judge said. “I thought corrections officials had the latitude to look at his record down the road and let him out if he did well in prison, which is how it should be.”

As it turns out, Young has done well in prison. In eight years, he has stayed out of trouble, cared for sick inmates and taken every class available to him.

Sgt. Kimberly Engleking at Lake Correctional Institution, where Young is incarcerated, described him as “well-behaved, polite, quiet and respectful — never a problem.”

The only negative mark in his prison file came on a Sunday morning two years ago, when he didn’t make his bed one time. He said he didn’t think he was required to on a weekend and was not disciplined.

Annino said he can understand how Padgett missed the change in sentencing guidelines that affected Young. “There wasn’t a lot of education going on about parole being abolished for crimes that weren’t capital crimes,” he said.

“But it takes someone with Padgett’s character to admit what he didn’t know.”

• • •

The Florida Legislature is conservative, not customarily generous with prison inmates of any age.

The bill Annino and his law students were pushing died in a legislative committee last year. But Annino says increased support of Republicans makes him think the bill will fare better this year.

The Senate sponsor is Jim King, a former Senate president and one-time House GOP leader who knows how to get things done in the Legislature.

Serving on the Senate Criminal Justice Committee the past few years, King says he’s been bothered by several laws that inhibit the rehabilitation of inmates. He says the bill has a good chance to pass because many lawmakers feel the current system wastes lives.

“A kid under 15 who has been sent to prison could and probably would be a totally different person than they were when they first got sentenced,” King said. “This would give them a shot at living a normal life.”

The House sponsor is Mike Weinstein, a freshman Republican who has been a prosecutor in Jacksonville for 15 years.

Weinstein says he “thought deeply about it” before he decided to get behind the bill. What made him decide to commit to it was the age of the kids. “If we can’t rehabilitate a percentage of kids who were 15 or younger when they committed a crime, we have to ask ourselves if we can rehabilitate anyone,” he said.

The bill says that if adolescent offenders are granted parole, they have to complete a two-year re-entry program before being fully released.

Annino and his law students are also working on a clemency petition for Young.

“In a lot of ways, prison has been good for me,” Young wrote in a letter a few months ago. “As a kid locked up with a bunch of adult men, I quickly learned what it feels like to be a victim, which made me really understand how the hotel victims felt.”

• • •

When Young was to be sentenced for armed robbery in 2001, prosecutor Curtis Allen told Padgett that Young could be sentenced anywhere from 51 months to life. Allen asked for life.

Young’s attorney, Mark Reinhold, asked Padgett to sentence Young as a juvenile, to seven years, because of his age, because he had no prior criminal history and because of his secondary role.

Padgett sided with the prosecutor. “I feel you’re dangerous,” he told Young. “I’m going to take you out of circulation for the rest of your natural life.”

Reinhold says that as he and Young left the courtroom, his client asked him what that meant. “I had to tell him he was going to die in prison,” Reinhold says, “which made him scream and cry like the child he was.”

Now, Padgett says he was talking tough that day to scare Young, but he didn’t think he was sending him away to die in prison. He hopes either the legislative bill or a clemency hearing will give Young a second chance.

Said the judge: “Just tell me where to sign.”

SOURCE:TAMPABAY.COM

Problematizing Israel’s “Right to Exist”

By Guest Author Semyon Dukach

Given that Israel was created largely as a response to a relatively recent, deliberate, and partly successful attempt to murder every Jew in the world, it is particularly easy to associate Israel’s right to exist with that fundamental right to life, and to hold people who deny it in great contempt. But is it in fact a reasonable association?

Taking a closer look at the language, the right to exist of a certain country is a very different thing than the right to life of its inhabitants. Specifically, Israel’s right to exist refers to the right of the nation to call itself “Israel”, and by implication to consider itself a Jewish state. And that unfortunate framework demands that all others, particularly the large and growing Arab population of both Israel proper as well as of its occupied territories, also consider the nation they live in to be a Jewish state.

Click Here to Read the full article by Semyon Dukach
on the your mortgage or your life Blog

WHO CREATED THIS GIGANTIC BAD DEBT ?

Just a little question. It’s about all this bad debt and losses claimed by the banks.

Where are they ?

Impossibly large figures of losses are being mentioned. This morning BBC Radio Four news, interviewing Chancellor Alistair Darling about the billions of pounds being supplied by the Government to the Royal Bank of Scotland to stop it going bankrupt, mentioned how all these gigantic bank losses around the World appeared since American bank Lehman Bros became bankrupt with huge losses of it’s own just a few months ago.

The UK and American governments talk about trillions of pounds of support to the banking system because of bad debt reported by the banks. Other Governments around the entire World are also dealing with economic meltdown in every country as banks generate bigger and bigger losses by the day.

So, exactly where are all these bad debts the banks are talking about ?

Did every sub-prime mortgage holder and senior business executive mysteriously conspire to suddenly stop paying back their loans to the banks because Lehman Bros went bust ? We are all told these trillions of pounds of losses have appeared as a result of the banking system becoming rotten because Lemans were ‘allowed’ to go bust.

How did this event stop factories making things, shops selling them and workers being employed and spending their wages ? Or putting it another way; seeing as how the Global economy was prospering, with trade expanding and more jobs produced as increasing amounts of real wealth were being created, how was all this real wealth of frenetic trade and economic activity suddenly destroyed ? Who did destroy it all ? What destroyed it ? Who or what really wrecked the World economy and forced businesses to go bust, people lose their homes and jobs and poverty spread rapidly everywhere like a disease.

It wasn’t the factories and other businesses, madly busy trying to meet rising demand for more and more products. It wasn’t the busy little workers beavering away being paid to work long hours busily doing useful things.

Everyone still wanted to make things to sell to other people, to have jobs and be paid, and mortgage holders of any kind were always pretty keen to pay their mortgages using those wages from their jobs.

So, if the business owners and their workers – the people who actually create real wealth – wanted to carry on creating real wealth, how were they stopped from doing the very thing they wanted to continue to do most of all ?

And those mortgage holders, initially blamed by the banks for being the cause of all the problems; didn’t all of them want to carry on paying their mortgages so they could stay in their homes and not be thrown out onto the street as homeless vagrants ?

I expect they did, don’t you ? I expect all those businesses really wanted to carry on employing people and prospering because there is always, but always, an insatiable and completely unlimited demand by the human population as a whole, for more and more gizmos and artifacts; better food, less poverty, more homes for the billions of homeless, more medical care – in fact just more of everything so as to improve and advance human civilisation.

But an apparently invisible force has now appeared, stopping all these hard working wealth creating businesses and workers from functioning. Many are forced into poverty, bankruptcy, foreclosure, homelessness, suicide and hopelessness; all because they are being forcibly prevented from working to create that wealth they crave to produce for themselves and the rest of humanity.

I wonder what that invisible force is ?

Humans, being the sort of restless creatures they are, fear idleness above all else. They must always be doing something; and the first thing to do is provide the material comforts of a home, enough food and clothing and medical care. There is still a long way to go before every member of the human race achieves those goals. So a lot of work still to do for everyone. That’s a lot of economic activity to be busy with for a long time into the future. Plenty to keep us all busy for a very long time then !

Now all these frantically busy people making all the real wealth appear from their labours, might have borrowed money from the banks to enable them to work harder, expand trade faster and generally oil the wheels of commerce. After all, it is money which is essential for trade to exist beyond the crude stage of stone age bartering of goods.

But, in those halcyon days before Lehman Bros investment bank collapsed (that’s just a few months ago, to remind you again) all these businesses and mortgage holders were happily paying their loans to the banks and there were not trillions of pounds worth of bad debt swilling around caused by hordes of people refusing or unwilling or unable to pay their loans back to the banks, making them all go bankrupt.

So all this unmanageable debt was not created by business and mortgage holders then. They wanted to pay their loans back and they were doing exactly that.

So where, precisely, did all this bad debt come from ? It wasn’t all there before Lehmans went bust, or before a couple of years ago. All the debt around then was ‘good’ debt, being paid back to the banks that loaned the money in the first place. How was it suddenly created ? Who created all this bad debt ?

Could someone just answer this question ?

IS THIS A BANKER WHOSE CUSTOMERS FOUND OUT HE WAS JUST ANOTHER FRAUDSTER STEALING THEIR MONEY ?

OR WHY FAT, GREEDY BANKERS SHOULD NEVER BUNGEE JUMP !

Your Mortgage Or Your Life

AN ONGOING SAGA FROM PROZAC AND SERTRALINE.

BY GUEST WRITER – PALMER ON PROZAC

THE SITE FOR SORE EYES GUIDE TO

PEOPLE WHO…

Don’t people piss you off?

I don’t mean certain types of people, I mean generally.

There are myriad types of people on this planet, the vast majority of whom I don’t know – thank a deity.

Because the ones I do come across have a very near escape from an untimely, and pretty horrific, death, I can tell you. Their hum-drum lives are extended a little more because of me. I feel kinda proud about it. I have the power of life and death over hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. And all this without them knowing. Or me getting concurrent life sentences for doing what would come very naturally, sometimes.

Let’s get started and see if you, too, can join this elite club of having omnipotent tendencies in your day-to-day lives. See if you are more like me than you care or dare to admit.

People who…
by Prozac

You’re in a queue and getting near the front. You become aware of someone walking up and standing behind you. They then move to one side and you see them a little better. They’re usually small and weasel-like; sometimes they mutter to themselves; sometimes they don’t and look relatively normal.

After the queue moves up again, they begin to slowly move towards your side, instead of behind you (which, forgive me if I’m wrong, is the usual queue-type format). As the queue inches towards the till, bank clerk or whatever, they inch forward so that they’re slightly in front of you, though still maintaining their position at your side.

Ever come across one? Did you restrain yourself? Or are you reading this sat next to a big, sweaty man named Bubba, whose bitch you are!!

I often wonder if these people actually believe that you don’t notice them. And if they carry on inching, they can get before you. Wrong on all accounts, I’m afraid.

As well as being a little lacking in the neurone area, they have also evolved a thick skin. You can cough, look at them, and say, “I’m before you, mate,” in the most threatening manner and they still look at you with a vacant grin or cheesy smile.

I once tried all of the above and met with the cheesy/vacant look. In a bit of devilment I then said, “My yak needs re-shoeing!” – Vacant/cheesy grin. “My panda has haemorrhoids” – Vacant/cheesy grin. “I’m gonna rip the face off the front of your head if you move another inch past me.” – Result!

Thick skin 0 – Prozac 1.

See, these people aren’t so nearly lacking in social niceties, like language, as others would have you believe. I feel as though I’m doing a public service – teaching those with learning disabilities or special needs. I’m a goddam philanthropist.

Of course, if your linguistic skills aren’t as well developed as mine, you could always twat ‘em!

People who…
by Prozac

You know. They know you. They know they know you. You know they know they know you. Yet they sometimes walk past you, after you’ve nodded, or said “Hi”, without acknowledging your presence.

I thought maybe it was an unsaid social ritual, you know the kind of thing, someone steps on YOUR toe in a queue and YOU say, “Sorry!”

I thought maybe some people are required by some arcane ritualistic law that they can only let on to you once every five or six times. I counted the times they let on. I counted the times they didn’t. There wasn’t a correlation, unless my grasp of Fibonacci numbers is lacking.

I thought that maybe they’d been struck down by deafness and I hadn’t been told.

I thought that maybe I’d been struck down by deafness and I hadn’t been told – then again, would I have been able to hear anyone telling me that? Oh, those imponderables of the universe!

But no.

I thought all sorts of things before the conclusion hit me. They were fucking ignorant.

Simple as that.

Kinda takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it, though? I really wanted to leap in front of them, waving my genitals while foaming at the mouth and speaking in tongues. I’ll bet they’d let on then!

People who…
by Prozac

Design urinals.

I’m sorry for leaving out 50% of our species, here and aiming this part of the rant at males but, come on! I have never in my entire life used a urinal and not been splashed. I’ve leaned in at the oddest of angles. I’ve vectored in, in a way that would have made a Stealth Bomber navigator proud to know my willie. I’ve stood as far back as I’ve dared without urinating on the floor.

Splashed!

I’ve ran in and paralleled the urinal while carrying on running past, willie in hand all the while. I’ve darted to and fro, weeing in spurts as I approach ‘ground zero’. I’ve borrowed someone else’s willie. I’ve watched other people (a humbling experience) using a urinal.

Splashed!

The people who design urinals should be suspended over a steaming vat of urine. Then they’d get a small taste (with luck) of what we poor guys go through every time we want to spend a penny. That’s a misnomer if ever I heard one. It costs a hell of a lot more than that to get the material-rotting enzymes in your average uric acid outlet out of your favourite trousers.

Thank a deity that I’m not young and courting any more. Those days were a nightmare. Dodging, weaving – covering your genitals with your coat to hide the embarrassing stains that looked like a bottle of lemonade had exploded in your underwear. I’m glad I’m now incontinent and forgetful and couldn’t care less who sees me in whatever state I happen to be in at the time. “I don’t recall peeing myself,” I can truthfully say. “Someone must have held me down and pissed my pants! What weirdos there are in the world today…”

PALMER ON PROZAC is a freelance writer from Stockport, England. You can see more of his observations and Rants on THE SITE FOR SORE EYES soon. His views and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the owners of this Site. When not hurling insults at the rest of humanity, he dabbles in social work, giving generously to down and outs, and kissing as many babies as you can cram into a Tupperware box.

Social workers who snatched four-day-old baby put her up for adoption over unproven abuse claim

SUNDAY MIRROR EXCLUSIVE by Lori Campbell and Martyn Halle 14/02/2009


A mum and dad have been told they will never see their young daughter again… after she was snatched away at only four days old.

This is the ITV news story here, broadcast on February 17th 2009

Tiny Baby A was taken from her mum by social workers who claimed the tot, who we will call Emily, was at risk in the family home.

Not because of the mum’s failure to care for her – but because of a six-year-old unproven claim that her husband had injured his son from a previous marriage.

Yet, although interviewed by police, he never faced a criminal court over that allegation. And he has even been allowed unsupervised access to watch his boy grow up.

Now the High Court, in a devastating civil court ruling, has decided that a decision to forcibly adopt Emily – now aged four – away from her parents (who we are calling Tania and Stephen) must stand.

Revealing her agony for the first time, mum Tania said: “I had my beautiful baby girl snatched from me at just four days old. Only a mother could understand the horror of that.

“My only crime is that I love and trust my husband. I don’t believe he could ever harm a child, and the courts have been unable to prove it. I have already missed years of Emily’s childhood.”

Stephen, in his 40s, married Tania, in her mid-20s, in 2003. Almost a year after their wedding Tania gave birth to Emily in hospital and they were overjoyed to take her home two days later. But they were to enjoy just two days alone with their little girl before she was taken from them. Social workers claimed there was a danger her dad would hurt her because of the case six years earlier.

Stephen had been married before and has a 10-year-old son, Jamie. When he was eight weeks old, Jamie was taken to hospital with a suspected brain injury and was found to have suffered bleeding behind his eyes. The episode left him permanently disabled, and he now has cerebral palsy. A medical expert said that he had been shaken viciously.

Stephen, who also has a 12-year-old daughter from the previous marriage, said: “Doctors couldn’t tell for certain what was wrong with Jamie. But one came up with a theory it could be ‘shaken baby syndrome’, even though there was no conclusive evidence.

“My wife and I were told that care proceedings were being started. It was heartbreaking to be accused of harming your own child. I vehemently denied doing anything wrong, but no one listened.”

A whole year later – during which time Jamie stayed with his parents and came to no further harm – the couple were taken to a family court in London, where a judge concluded on the basis of an expert’s opinion that the child’s injuries had been caused by one of his parents.

The possibility that the baby had an inherited condition, provoking the same symptoms, was never explored.

And the theory put forward by the family’s lawyers that he banged his head on a baby bouncer while playing with another child was not accepted.

However, social workers in Enfield, North London, finally allowed Jamie to remain with his birth parents under daily supervision. And seven months later the local authority was impressed enough with their parenting to drop the visits.

And there the story might have ended if Stephen and his wife hadn’t split up at the end of 2000. They were granted, and still enjoy, joint custody of the boy and remain good friends. Stephen, whose first wife also backs his adoption fight, sees Jamie regularly and often spends time with him alone.

It was only when – almost four years later – Stephen remarried and his new wife Tania became pregnant that the social workers reappeared. Stephen, who himself has multiple sclerosis and walks with a stick, said: “Tania has no other children and we were both overjoyed to be having a baby.”

Then, when she was eight months pregnant, Stephen developed a heart problem and had to be rushed to hospital. He says social workers visited him at his bedside and handed him a letter saying they were starting emergency childcare proceedings for their unborn child.

I could barely breathe because of the shock,” he says. “It had been six years since Jamie’s case and I’d had no contact with social workers.”

Emily was born in December 2004. When she was just four days old, social workers burst into their home and took her away.

Tania said: “Stephen’s parents were visiting. We were missing an ingredient for dinner, and Stephen and his dad popped to the shops. While they were out  social workers knocked on the door. They walked straight in, picked up Emily in her moses basket and walked out again.

“I was screaming and crying, begging them not to take her, grabbing at their arms.”

Social workers warned Tania she would only stand a chance of getting Emily back if she left her husband.

“We had no choice,” said Tania. “We decided I would go to live with my parents a few miles away and we would fight in court to be reunited as a family.”

Emily was returned to Tania the following day after a court injunction was obtained ordering Stephen to keep away from her.

But social workers were unhappy that Tania and her family remained close to Stephen.

“I often visited Stephen on my own, which was allowed under the injunction,” she said.

“He asked me to text him if Emily ever woke in the night because he wanted to be involved, and I did that. But for some reason, social workers wanted me to hate him and cut him out of our lives.”

Four months later, in April 2005, Emily was taken from her mother for a second time. Tania had been branded unfit to look after Emily simply because she trusted her husband.

Tania said: “I had taken Emily to visit my grandparents. But while I was there, two police cars turned up with a social worker. They burst into the house and snatched Emily from me again. I was in shock – I couldn’t believe what was happening. They said I had been ‘conspiring’ with Stephen. They thought we were going to kidnap Emily.”

Social workers said Tania was too mild-mannered to be able to protect Emily from Stephen. At that point Emily was put into a foster home, and Stephen and Tania were allowed to visit her once a week for an hour.

“It was so emotional,” said Tania. “I tried my hardest to be happy around Emily. But I cried uncontrollably before and after we saw her.”

The couple have video footage taken on July 18, 2006, of them with Emily, and say they look happy and at ease together. At one point, they say the little girl puts her arms out to her mother, who picks her up and kisses her.

Touchingly, Tania says when she asks Emily where her daddy is, the toddler turns and points at Stephen. But already the clock was ticking towards their daughter’s adoption.

Within a few weeks, the couple were told new parents were being sought for their little girl. And they were horrified when they came across an advert in a glossy magazine offering her up for adoption.

The beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl was smiling at them from the page. The accompanying blurb described her as a bright, happy girl who likes swimming and games.

A phone number was printed alongside for anyone interested in becoming her parents. Tania said: “Our daughter was essentially being put up for sale in a magazine and under her own name. We hadn’t even been warned. It was despicable.”

At the time Enfield officials took Emily away, councils were under pressure to raise the number of children they had adopted by 50 per cent.

Tony Blair had promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve targets. The aim was to get older children in care homes into new families.

But councils found it easier to place babies and cute toddlers such as Emily, and thousands of children under four were removed from their families across the country.

In October 2006 the couple saw Emily for the last time.

Stephen, his eyes filling with tears, said: “We didn’t know that then. We had arranged to see her, but the meeting was suddenly cancelled five minutes beforehand. Presumably a new family had been found. We didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye. It breaks my heart to think she doesn’t know why we aren’t there for her.”

In a desperate bid to beat the system, Stephen and Tania took Enfield Council  to the Court of Appeal in March 2007. They asked for a stay of execution on the adoption while their case was heard by the European Court of Human Rights. But it was refused.

The couple did not give up there. Last month they were allowed to challenge the initial accusation against Stephen at the High Court. There they were backed by top europathologist Dr Waney Squier, who believes there is no evidence that the boy’s injuries were caused by her father.

In the three-day hearing, Dr Squier told the court the injuries were not consistent with Shaken Baby Syndrome. She said that, crucially, he had no other marks or injuries on his body to suggest he had been shaken violently.

She told the court that 85 per cent of autopsies in shaking cases have additional bruising or other injury. And she said the force required to produce bleeding behind the eyes would inevitably cause damage to the neck. 

But the local authority’s expert Dr Neil Stoodley disagreed and said the injuries were consistent with SBS.
However the argument was based just on medical notes, because Jamie’s original brain scans had been lost.

The couple lost their final chance of halting the adoption when Mr Justice Mark Hedley, who described the decision as “agonising”, sided with the council and upheld the care order.

In what he described as a “dreadful conundrum”, he said: “Wrongly to find that there has been an NAHI (non-accidental head injury) is to risk tearing apart an innocent family – a shocking thing to happen.

“Likewise, wrongly failing to find NAHI where such in fact occurred is to risk returning a child to a situation of high or even fatal risk, as notorious cases have sadly demonstrated.

“The consequences of a judicial error in these cases are calamitous.”

The judge praised the parents’ persistence, saying: “The father’s belief in his innocence and the injustice done to his family is genuinely held.”

He also said there was not enough evidence for police to bring a trial on the initial child-abuse allegations. But he said there was still no new evidence to undermine the original findings. 

The couple have vowed to appeal against the decision, but they are running out of time. Once Emily is officially adopted, it is British law that she can never be returned to her parents – even if they are found innocent.

Clinging on to each other in their living room, with walls covered in photos of Emily, the couple say they cannot bear to have another child.

Stephen said: “My health is getting worse and I do not want to go through the agony of having another baby taken away from us by the state.”

The couple are prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights if their appeal fails.

But Stephen said: “The European court cannot reunite us with our daughter – all we would get is monetary compensation, which means nothing to us when all we want is our little girl back.”

-For legal reasons, the real names of the people involved have been changed to protect their identities.

“lori.campbell @ sundaymirror.co.uk”

BLOG EDITOR’S NOTE:

( These ‘legal reasons’ allow wicked and incompetent social workers, highly questionable ‘expert witnesses’ in the pay of social workers and the family courts, to operate in complete secrecy and to be protected from the public scrutiny which used to be the essential cornerstone of British Justice and Democracy. Not any more !

Our UK Socialist inspired Totalitarian State continues to erode our freedoms one by one as it seeks to control every aspect of citizens lives.)

ARROGANT AND GREEDY BANKERS DISREGARD LAW AND MORALITY

AND COULDN’T CARE LESS IF THEY RUIN NATIONS AS THEY MAKE THEMSELVES RICH AT EVERYONE ELSE’S EXPENSE

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes it’s laws”

Mayer Anselm Rothschild…Banker.

Go here to learn about the corrupt Banking system

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8

CRIMINAL BANKS GET AWAY WITH SMUG ‘APOLOGY’ TO PARLIAMENT

A word of explanation about this credit crunch. Everyone is arguing about the causes and who is to blame – without really making a lot of progress.

Except there does seem to be a general idea that it is somehow something to do with the banks. But the banks are having none of that and say it is not their fault.

Some people, particularly bankers, like to put about the idea that it is all the Government’s fault for being too spendthrift and incompetent. The Government is spendthrift and incompetent and very,very wasteful and destructive of anything it gets its sticky little fingers into. That’s true.

But all governments have always had degrees of idiocy and incompetence and it usually doesn’t destroy entire economies on a Global scale. No, however silly the government is it is not directly responsible for the economic collapse. Although it must bear responsibility for failing to control the fraudulent and dishonest behaviour of banks, and is therefore certainly indirectly responsible.

The greedy and unpleasant specimens of humanity currently being questioned by the Parliamentary Select Committee seem to be quite reluctant to understand how they are responsible for leading their dishonest and rapacious banks into contributing to the World economic collapse.

Let us see if we can work out just who really is responsible for all the financial chaos, loss of homes, jobs and the cause of untold misery for millions and millions of people Worldwide.

It isn’t all those workers losing their jobs. No, most people desperately want to work; and nearly all of them would work like dogs if they could be paid decent wages and allowed to keep most of what they earn instead of having it stolen by the poisonous and grasping hand of the State led by power hungry busybody inadequates pompously interfering in everyone’s lives.

It isn’t all the businesses going bust or shrinking as they find they have fewer and fewer buyers for their products. You see, all those workers without jobs no longer have money to buy things and all those businesses struggling to survive also cannot sell enough of what they produce for exactly the same reason – less and less money around in everyone’s pockets to buy things whether it is one business buying services from another business or an individual buying household goodies.

After all people like buying things and businesses really love selling as much as they can and making a nice little profit in the process. It’s called errr, prosperity, I think.

Usually, with rare exceptions, both businesses and individuals take lots of care to vaguely balance their expenditures against their income. Quite simply, they have to, otherwise they evaporate immediately and become non functioning economic has beens in the blink of an eye.

Every single financial transaction for any individual or any business depends completely on the banks and their total control of every single bit of currency in everyone’s possession.

It isn’t the government that controls the creation of money and the entire banking system and therefore the growth in trade an prosperity. It is the banks.

One of the first bankers to realise this was one of those Rothchilds. He said he couldn’t care less about what governments did or thought because he realised if banks could exercise control over the money supply, the banks would have complete power over governments and could do as they pleased. They could even tell governments what to do.

How right Rothchild was ! Banks have been doing as they please ever since.

Just look at that greasy little manipulating ex boss of the HBOS bank. He sacked a senior member of staff who expressed concern over the unsavoury behaviour of the HBOS bank to keep him quiet. Is that a display of greed and dishonesty ? It seems very much like it to me. The HBOS Chief wanted to carry on fleecing people of as much money as possible, no matter how wrong, how dishonest or how much damage it might do. This same nasty little creature is now an advisor to Gordon Brown and all those other weasels in Government.

They have now worked out ways of increasingly their stranglehold over even the pettiest financial transaction to the extent it is almost impossible to use money to pay someone without first of all paying a bank for the privilege of using your own money. The banks even have the cheek to force people to pay fees for taking their own cash out of their own bank accounts.

Just a a few years ago the banks even dreamed up the surreal idea of charging fairytale ‘penalty’ fees after designing the entire banking system to make it impossible for people to avoid endless mistakes being made. Clever idea that, and everyone somehow swallowed the confidence trick as all the banks colluded to swindle people out of billions of pounds – which they did.

The banks are now being taken to court over this particular little swindle and so far it looks as though they are losing.

If they do lose it would be because it is a swindle. It is unfair, it is dishonest and it is nasty and greedy. How else could you possibly describe it ?

What else can you call charging an impoverished young student or elderly pensioner hundreds of pounds for a an accidental unintended overdraft of perhaps only a few pence sometimes even caused entirely by the bank itself, but blatant theft.

The banks are, without doubt liars and thieves on an epic scale. And we have allowed them to get away with it.

Everyone has to obey the rules to join in the game of becoming prosperous otherwise they are rapidly excluded.

Except of course, those banks ! This is because the banks make up the rules as they go along. They can do this because they control every single movement of money from person to person or business to business. It is the banks, indeed, which create all the money everyone needs to use in the first place.

So the banks are deluded into imagining it is all their money and they have a divine right to grab as much of it as they can snatch every time it comes within their grasp.

Most people in the real world think doing something like that is theft. Law courts tend to throw people into prison for expropriating other people’s money that doesn’t belong to them; but not the banks. They seem to be mysteriously immune from being labeled criminal.

So, the banks control every aspect of the economy directly or indirectly. They create all the money in use, more or less. So why the Credit Crunch ?

Simple, the banks suddenly panicked as they realised their dishonesty and distortion of money had gone too far and was uncontrollable as they were now in the business of fleecing each other as well as the public. The banks couldn’t trust each other any more, so they thought all their borrowers couldn’t be trusted either.

The banks stopped lending to each other and kept hold of what money they could. As the supply of money dried up banks stopped lending to businesses and recalled loans at every opportunity. They couldn’t care less if forcing people to give back loans they were relying on to keep their business going destroyed jobs. The banks didn’t care if they ruined people’s lives by making them homeless when they were evicted from their houses.

The banks ruthlessly started removing gigantic amounts of money from the financial system, instantly wrecking businesses and individual’s ability to trade with each other and be able to have a job.

I’d say the banks were a pretty evil bunch of criminally inclined bastards. What do you think ?

2008 – DOOM AND GLOOM

What will 2009 bring?

By Guest Blogger ‘Making Money Sense’

Sunday 8th February 2009

For most of us, 2008 was a difficult and nerve-racking year, and we were all glad to see the back of it, but is 2009 likely to be any better? The Credit Crunch and all its attendant problems are far from over and despite the two base rate reductions last month and again last week things still look very bleak.

So, what can we expect in the months to come? The predictions are that the base rate will drop further, possibly even following the Americans down to 0%, but will this help? Those fortunate enough to already have Tracker rate mortgages will benefit, and lenders will no doubt again be pressured into passing on these reductions and drop mortgage rates across the board. But in reality, this is an illusion. Few will benefit from reduced mortgage rates, just as few have benefited from the last three drops in the bank rate. Why? Because mortgage lenders in particular are giving with one hand and taking back with the other. Along with the reduced rates are the lower loan-to-value ratios, and with the drop in property values, the majority of people no longer qualify for the rates offered, so we are back to square one.

Lenders are also tightening their criteria to ridiculous lengths. I’m sure we all agree that handing out huge loans to the self-employed odd-job man who self-certified his income at £200k is little short of insane. That’s the kind of irresponsible lending that was the primary cause of the mess we are now in. But, taking things to the other extreme, as one well-known high-street lender is doing, doesn’t help anyone. The said lender, having dropped their Standard Variable Rate to less than 5% is now calculating ALL mortgage applications at 7% on a Repayment basis. This means that someone applying for an Interest Only mortgage for £150k on a Tracker rate of 4% would in actual fact be paying £500 per month. However, in order to qualify for the mortgage he would have prove he could pay £1200 per month to get it!

Everything the government has apparently done to help the cash-strapped public is an illusion and lenders are not sympathetic to their problems. I have clients who are desperate to reduce their costs by remortgaging and consolidating, but although this makes absolute sense from an affordability point of view, its seems lenders are no longer using affordability as a yardstick for assessing a mortgage or loan. They’ve tightened up their criteria to the point where they might just as well hang out a sign saying “no more mortgages, loans or finance until further notice”. At least it would save everyone the frustration of applying for mortgages and then being declined on some stupid technicality.

Alastair Darling threatened to force banks and lenders to help the public, and whilst no-one wants to see the financial institutions nationalized, perhaps that’s the necessary evil needed to turn things around. The last time the world was in this situation, it took WWII to pull us out ….. desperate times call for desperate measures …. but if they had to chose, the majority of people would prefer nationalised banking to another World War!

So maybe its time we all took the time to exercise our rights and start putting pressure on our MP’s to get the government to do something practical, even if it does mean the government taking control of banking in the short-term.

In the meantime, the next blog will explore ways in which we can help ourselves to stave off the horrors of repossession and bankruptcy.

THE ONE EYED SCOTTISH IDIOT

When a particular person is Scottish, has only one working eye, and is most definitely perceived as a complete idiot by tens of thousands of people, possibly even millions, because he has caused immense damage to the whole of the British nation with his stupidity, is it gratuitously offensive to describe him as a one eyed Scottish idiot ?

Gordon Brown is an idiot, he is Scottish, and he is one eyed. But that narrow minded group of people – the politically correct – would not like their hero described quite truthfully by BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson as a one eyed Scottish idiot because, as always, they would like to censor free speech.

It’s part of their Orwellian dream of controlling ‘thoughtcrime’. It is another example of how creeping erosion of all our freedoms starts by all dictatorships preventing freedom of thought and expression, punishing people for saying things the Government doesn’t like to hear. It tends to make the masses restless and rebellious against their power crazed political masters.

We had Carol Thatcher being sacked with huge public fanfare by the politically correct and pompously narrow minded BBC for using the word Gollywog to describe the visual appearance of someone who does actually look just like the cartoon character dreamt up over half a century ago and turned into a popular and much loved soft toy for a whole generation of children.

In a parody of a police state where every small minded, ignorant person is encouraged to be a willing and enthusiastic informant, that ghastly BBC nitwit Adrian Chiles and equally ghastly Jo Brand, specialists in snide comments and lavatorial ‘humour, overheard Carol Thatcher make the ordinary and unremarkable throw away comment about a ‘Gollywog’ look- a -like.

With breathless self importance they ’snitched’ and reported the awful ‘thoughtcrime’ to their ‘bosses’. A shrill harpy of a senior BBC executive was then wheeled onto the ‘Today’ programme to explain how important it was that Adrian Chiles and Jo Brand should be protected from being offended by Carol Thatcher or anyone else mentioning the popular soft toy, fondly remembered as part of every child’s life when Carol was growing up a generation ago.

I suppose we should be grateful that Carol Thatcher only lost her job, instead of being thrown in jail, tortured and murdered by our oppressive socialist regime. But no doubt that will happen eventually as Britain is remorselessly turned into a third world totalitarian dictatorship by socialist misfits like Gordon Brown – the one eyed Scottish idiot, and his equally intellectually challenged cronies.

GOVERNMENT IS REALLY GOOD AT WASTING MONEY

I heard an item on Radio Four this morning about how we deal with young criminals. Apparently, we are very fond of arbitrarily imprisoning them in droves instead of actually trying to help them become decent citizens.

Each one costs , so Radio Four Said, £200 000 a year to imprison. That’s over £500 per day. HMMMMMMMMN !!!

Old fashioned boarding schools only cost a fraction of that.

Give me £500 day for each offender and I will absolutely guarantee to do a better job of turning them into decent people without torturing them with oppressive state institutional bureauocratic nonsense. AND I’ll become a millionaire, and then STILL give the taxpayer back about half the £500 a day it currently spends.

More later.

CAN WE SOLVE THE HOUSING CRISIS- YES WE CAN

Here is an interesting idea which might help stabilise the housing market and prevent the huge social poison of families being wickedly evicted from their home by nasty minded, grasping mortgage lenders with no concept of human decency between the lot of them.

Politicians Criminal Complicity in Bankers Greed – And Stupidity

Someone wrote this comment on BBC Reporter Robert Peston’s Blog yesterday and I thought it neatly summed up the causes of the current World wide financial meltdown and was well worth repeating.

‘I’m not a clever man. I didn’t go to University. I haven’t got any A levels. B ut I can see what is wrong and I can see that what we are doing is wrong.

This entire crisis has been caused by 3 things – greed, criminal complicity and stupidity.

The bankers greed, the politicians criminal complicity and our stupidity.

The banks knew what they were doing and did it on purpose. This cannot be an accident. Therefore to give them billions and allow them to continue as before means it is going to continue to get worse and worse.

The government with their ‘light touch of regulation’ didn’t cause it but they are wholy responsible. The basic rule – as every worker will tell you – is never trust anyone where money is concerned. So why did the governments behave like morons and believe they could trust the banks ?’

BANKS CREATED THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN AND RECESSION

and all the poverty and misery that results from their actions.

Let me shed a little light on the financial crisis.

Money itself is simply a symbol of trust. It has no other value than to allow one person in possession of some money to pass it on to another person in exchange for something that does have real value – a loaf of bread, or something else that’s really useful, like a house to live in.

Our system of money is now in complete shambolic meltdown because nobody can trust it; it has become unreliable. Why ?

Because it has become unreliable, individuals and businesses are unable to be certain there will be an adequate flow of money for them to continue to function. Business cannot function without reliable flows of money purchasing it’s products from which it then pays it’s workers, who are then enabled to eat and pay their mortgage.

Money was originally ‘invented’ by banks as merely a trusted symbol of exchange to replace the clumsy idea of barter. They have been in control of it ever since. It is important to be an honest person when handling money as there is always a temptation to find an excuse to keep some or all of it for yourself.

Dishonesty has always been around to some extent, and there have always been people whose job it is to handle money not belonging to them, who have stolen some.

Because theft is so damaging and disruptive, society has always sought to achieve a high degree of honest morality in all public dealings of any kind. Without it, all civilisation crumbles into anarchy, chaos and brutality. Dictatorships, violence, famine and death have always been the consequence throughout history.

We have always recognised that banks have to be trustworthy for the system of money to be able to function at all. This is because the banks completely control everything that happens, or can happen to money – how reliable it is and how freely it moves from person to person.

Every time money moves from one person to another, it creates something useful and valuable; real wealth of some sort. Employment, enabling workers to use their wages to eat and house themselves.

Millions of people Worldwide are now losing their jobs, their houses and their wages enabling them to eat and survive. Homelessness and starvation is being forced on them, not because they do not want to work; on the contrary, they are pretty desperate to work. Very few people like to be idle.

The only reason these people’s lives are being wantonly destroyed is because the people and organisations in charge of maintaining the reliability and integrity of money have completely wrecked it.

Wrecked the whole delicate system of trading, rolling back civilisation to poverty and primitive barter as that fragile symbol of trust – money – is destroyed and debased by the very people we all trusted to cherish it on our behalf.

These people are the banks.

In recent times the banks have invented excuse after excuse to construct more and more reasons to take some of our money we entrusted to them for themselves.

Some examples of this, and there are many, might be the quaint idea of inventing something called the penalty charge. This can range from a charge of millions to a business, or a small amount to an individual who fails to precisely control even the pettiest detail of his finances.

This results in banks looking for excuses to ‘justify’ a penalty charge and their artfully constructed self-righteous, twisted, logic then turns their honest customer into an enemy with whom the bank battles with and often then irretrievably harms by wrecking every aspect of that person’s finances.

Every time this little bit of dishonest, fraudulent dealing occurs in some tiny little corner of the financial system, a small amount of trust is destroyed and ripples out far beyond that bank and the customer it is stealing from, magnified beyond recognition as it touches huge numbers of other people.

A good example of the cumulative effect of this is the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage. This is a farce. An artificial construction by banks designed to milk outrageous amounts of money from people unable to defend themselves from what amounts to blatant fraud in a form the law describes as ‘conversion’.

Conversion is simply when you unlawfully ’convert’ property rightfully owned by another to your own use in such a devious manner it cannot be legally seen as obvious common theft because it is disguised. Sounds familiar in your dealing with banks ?

The banks deliberately set out to create this type of mortgage because it is more profitable than the old fashioned type based on honest trust and fair dealing which no longer provided enough profits to fuel the bank’s rapacious greed.

This is how it is done.

A perfectly respectable, reliable, person has an ordinary mortgage with an old fashioned building society – one of those ‘high street’ lenders. That person’s life may be disrupted by common events. It may be divorce, sickness, temporary unemployment, for example. Nothing that would normally destroy people’s financial lives to the extent of being unable to have enough money to keep the roof over their head and feed themselves. Disruption of this sort normally happens to a huge proportion of the population.

What does a modern bank do when such a person become a few months in arrears with their mortgage ? Why, it first of all makes it more difficult for that person to recover their financial stability as the bank imposes arbitrary ‘penalty’ charges which are designed to rapidly mount up into thousands of pounds.

It then ‘black lists’ the unfortunate individual by notifying the credit agencies that they are financially unreliable. This is used as an excuse by any other financial organisation to make life even more impossible for that person by pushing them further and further into uncontrollable debt by using the excuse to milk them of more money by penalising them financially at every possible opportunity; using sanctimonious self-righteousness to blame the unfortunate individual they are manipulating for what the banks are actually doing themselves.

So, someone who may have a loan for only half the value of their house and be only as few as three months in arrears will have re-possession proceedings brought against them by the the bank. They are threatened with eviction and homelessness, with the inevitable consequences of forced unemployment, family breakup, increased debt and even illness.

The bank evicts them, and the house may remain empty so long it loses value as it deteriorates. Or it is likely to be sold at a considerable loss. That former homeowner is now blacklisted as too uncreditworthy to be lent money again by the ordinary high street mortgage lenders.

Curiously, that same bank just happens to wholly or partially own another company which also lends money for buying houses. But this one only lends to people with ‘impaired’ credit. The same sort of people who have just been refused an ordinary, standard mortgage.

People are also refused standard mortgages for infinitely more trivial reasons. They may have a county court judgement of just a few pounds against them. It may be such a frivolously brought claim they may have chosen to simply contemptuously ignore it.

But such a thing and a myriad other excuses are used by the banks to push people into the more profitable ’sub-prime’ mortgage lending arena with one of those subsidiary companies the banks own.

Or they are pushed into this rapacious ‘sub-prime’ lending market by all sorts of other restrictions manufactured by lenders.

A common one is the borrower not earning enough money to afford the ‘high street lender’s loan. Funny how that doesn’t stop the same financial organisation lending the money to the same ‘unreliable’ , ‘uncreditworthy’ person at higher rates of interest and with huge penalties imposed by another partly or even wholly owned lending business subsidiary to the one that refused the fairer loan !

Now the banks have manipulated someone into a position where the banks can produce an excuse to charge more for a mortgage – much more.

Enticed by a low starting rate of interest that escalates after a while to often as much as double monthly repayments and with penalty charges of thousands of pounds if the borrower has to terminate the mortgage in a year or two, the borrower has nowhere to turn.

All the banks collude to stop him obtaining an honest loan costing less. The banks want their extra profits ! And here is a mug who can’t complain and has nowhere to turn to and the banks know it. Don’t they just.

They have carefully manipulated their affairs by jointly creating this stranglehold over money by pooling their resources and their information to enable them to work together to create this extra profitable ‘sub-prime’ lending market. Pretty much exactly the same techniques used by the door to door rip off loan shark illegally charging annual percentage rates of thousands of per cent to impoverished workers.

It is exactly the same process at work. Fraud, theft, manipulation, threats, fear. These immoral sub-prime lenders have much in common with criminal door to door loan sharks and other thieves. Their victims are caught like flies in spiders webs. There is no escape.

But wait. It doesn’t just end there does it ? Having established this wicked system of modern banking that provides such huge profits to the banks, they wanted more. Greed is good they seemed to think. Yes, that’s what they said. Greed is good !

So they started using the same ludicrous types of manipulation on each other as lending between banks escalated beyond reason or comprehension to prop up the fragile system of deceit the banks were busy creating.

The banking system seemed to become more and more like a giant ‘Ponzi’ scheme where banks borrowed money from other banks to repay their own debts before it was discovered they had no money left at all to meet their obligations, because they had lent the lot as they forced increasingly large amounts of loans onto a gullible population who simply couldn’t understand what was going on.

All people could see was the value of houses increasing to levels of un-affordability where everyone was forced to borrow gigantic amounts of money just to have a home to live in.

But, like all ‘Ponzi’ or pyramid selling schemes based on fraud, the banking system was becoming more and more fragile. It was so riddled with double dealing, fraud, dishonesty and mistrust, banks became too fearful of even each other’s reliability to lend to each other anymore. The banks had successfully created a system based on deceit, mistrust and lies which had also spread into the whole wider community of individuals and business.

The Global banking system went into meltdown as money disappeared into the banks from wherever they could grasp it. The biggest con trick of all was persuading Governments ‘to bail them out’ by giving huge amounts of money – hundred of billions of pounds to stop them going bust and then even more of our money disappearing into oblivion.

The banks kept it for themselves where it is actually useless. Money is only useful and only performs it’s function when it keeps moving from person to person. The banks stopped the World money supply from moving.

So, in the same way the banks are the places where money is created to make trade and commerce become possible, so it is that money is destroyed and is now completely vanishing from existence by the banks being able to reverse the process.

That is exactly what the banks have done. It is the biggest fraud in history.

Looking for someone to blame other than themselves, the banks immediately blamed the ‘sub-prime’ borrowers.

The banks claimed it was all their fault because they were unreliable individuals who couldn’t afford to keep up the payments on the loans they should never have had in the first place; mainly because they were too poor to be able to afford them.

All those very bad borrowers had misled the poor innocent banks into lending them money. It was all their fault, the banks said. But they weren’t too poor for the banks to take their money, were they ?

The banks are liars. Sub-prime was deliberately created by the banks as a means to make more money and take advantage of people. and the banks in their breathtaking greed were too stupid to know when to stop, so they still haven’t stopped.

They are still foreclosing on homeowners even if there is loads of equity remaining in the property. Business loans are forcibly being demanded to be prematurely repaid to the banks and further new loans are rare and generally mostly unavailable.

So, the result is World-wide economic meltdown and poverty and misery of all sorts. Word wide trade and commerce is being destroyed by banks being irresponsible, greedy, and nasty.

Thank you very much, the banks.

PSSSST

Consider this.

A little clue it cannot be sub-prime lenders responsible for the gigantic sums of money disappearing into oblivion is simply that the amounts of money now vanishing into a black hole is apparently reaching into trillions -many trillions. It is a sum my calculator cannot understand or even cope with. So I haven’t much hope of understanding it either. Nor have you.

Let’s do some maths. If the average house price is £200 000 and the loan to buy it is 100 per cent, then one million sub-prime borrowers failing to pay a single penny of that back, ever, means a total loss to the banks of 200 000 million pounds or 200 billion pounds.

Of course this calculation is a complete fiction, because usually the banks re-possess the homes and get all their money back and then some. Sometimes, just sometimes, the banks will not be able to sell the homes for the full amount of the loan and there will be a loss. But the banks still won’t lose that money without pursuing the former homeowner for years to recover anything still owed from their wages.

The banks will not be suffering much in the way of loss from re-possessions and I imagine any losses are more than compensated by profit. So where might this loss they all whinge about be ? Search me ! Perhaps they might like to tell us ?

Here is a slightly more realistic calculation which tells another part of the story. The Council of Mortgage Lenders here in the UK say that each re-possessed house costs £35 000 to repossess. So each bad sub-prime mortgage loan is costing £35 000 and not actually the full value of the property at all.

Even that figure is misleading because it, apparently, is what the CML say the cost is, but they carefully bend the truth by omitting to mention that whole cost is usually born only by the borrower and never by the lender, unless the sale price of the property falls below the value of the loan; something almost unheard of here in the UK in normal circumstances.

But, assuming there is that cost of £35 000, and not arguing about who bears it, multiplying it by one million feckless sub-prime borrowers having their homes repossessed makes a total figure of 35 thousand million or just thirty five billion pounds,

Do you recall the hundreds of billions, even trillions of pounds forthcoming recently from Governments to subsidise the banks ? Seems to be a bit of a discrepancy here somewhere, don’t you think ?

Figures of annual repossessions in the UK were running at about 50 000 homes a year until a few months ago. Nothing like that fictional figure of one million used above. So what does fifty thousand repossessions look like costing at the official Council of Mortgage Lenders figure of £35 000 ?

Why, that comes down to only one thousand, seven hundred and fifty million pounds or 1.75 billion pounds; virtually all of which is borne by the borrower and is not a loss to the lender at all.

Frankly, I doubt if lenders even lose ten per cent of that and that would reduce the figure of apparent loss to just one hundred and seventy five million. Tiny, miniature, compared with the eye watering losses the banks are complaining about and the Governments are pumping into the banks to keep them from going broke. As America has about five times the population of the UK you might, roughly, multiply that figure by five to get an approximate figure for the USA. At 1.75 billion it’s nothing like the losses banks are claiming sub -prime mortgages have cost them, is it ?

That’s thousands of millions, or hundreds of billions, even trillions, remember ?

The inescapable conclusion is someone is not telling the truth ! I wonder who that could be ?

I think it might be the banks.

I was always told that people who didn’t tell the truth were called liars.

If the banks are lying, and it looks like they are, then how can they be trusted to be in charge of the money supply ?

BANKS CAUSED WORLD FINANCIAL COLLAPSE- NOT MORTGAGE BORROWERS

You might have noticed how, when the ludicrously described ‘Credit Crunch’ began a little while ago it was all blamed by the banks on those feckless individuals who took out laughingly called ‘sub-prime’ mortgages to buy houses.

But now the entire World financial system is in collapse with the global economy grinding to a halt, companies going bust and millions of people losing their jobs and houses with cataclysmic poverty stalking the Globe.

It is no longer just ‘those feckless individuals’ with sub-prime mortgages who are unable to pay their debts. It is viable, previously profitable businesses all over the World, even whole countries going bankrupt; forced into financial chaos by banks interfering and controlling borrower’s affairs, as the banks panic at the sheer enormity of what they have contrived to destroy through their greed and fraud.

Now the banks seem to be blaming each other, because the sheer scale of the Worldwide financial collapse has simply dwarfed the number of genuinely ‘feckless’ people who shouldn’t have taken out loans to buy their houses . There never were really that many people who were genuinely unreliable about paying their mortgages in the first place.

A closer look at what is now going on reveals that banks misused the power they gained over any group of people they persuaded to borrow money from them. The banks manipulated whole populations of borrowers created out of the banks brutal use of the psychology of persuasion.

Everyone was ruthlessly conned and brainwashed by the banks into imagining that it was OK, even necessary, to spend nothing but borrowed money for absolutely every purchase. All the ‘real’ money people and businesses actually earned for themselves was therefore controlled by the banks. All earned money was already fully committed to the banks to pay off existing bank loans before it was even earned.

So, the banks controlled ever more of the economy, both individual’s personal domestic expenditure and also that of every business. Everyone was expected to constantly increase their borrowing to enable the banks to create more money so the banks could take ever larger profits for themselves. Pure, raw greed ruled throughout the entire financial industry. Fraud became something institutionalised in virtually every part of financial services as the scale of dishonesty and graft grew larger day by day.

What has happened is the banks have been caught out trying to lie their way out of a problem entirely of their own creation. It never was a situation caused by sub-prime mortgages and hordes of dishonest home owners as the banks would like us all to believe.

The fact is the entire World economy is completely dependent on a system of money which very few people understand. Governments mostly don’t understand it and certainly few ordinary individuals understand it. Even most of the people working for banks don’t understand it, and even economists don’t seem to understand it as they often argue amongst themselves about how economics actually work.

Banks are entirely responsible for shaping the economic system and are the only custodians of the system of money. It is something they, themselves, designed in the first place. They designed it as an immense confidence trick which they could only get away with if they displayed reliability, probity and apparent total honesty of the highest degree.

The system relied on the banks restraining their greed; and so it worked more or less reasonably well when a fundamental requirement of working for a bank was honesty and integrity. Integrity, honesty and reliability have now been entirely swept into oblivion by the banks. ‘Greed is good’, they trumpet self righteously from their pompous, rubbery, bloated, personages as they pocket their enormous bonuses.

Greed and dishonesty took hold of the banks in recent years as they corrupted the entire financial system with a moral degradation of breathtaking dimensions.

It was they who invented the sub-prime mortgage as a device to milk even more money from their increasingly hard pressed population of modern customer-serfs now owned by the banks instead of mediaeval robber barons.

The banks simply devised one scheme after another to tighten their stranglehold over every single financial transaction made. The banks made it increasingly impossible for anyone to escape their clutches or for anyone to avoid using them for even the pettiest of financial transactions.

The beauty of that was that the banks could increasingly justify taking a cut of every transaction they were involved in. Their ‘cut’ became larger and larger as they discovered they could push the limits of credulity beyond their wildest dreams of greed.

They brainwashed everyone into believing it was a normal way of life to routinely use ‘credit cards’ (simply a clever device to force loans onto people who neither wanted them or needed them). They invented the quaint idea of ‘penalty’ charges that could run into thousands of per cent in annual interest terms. No one questioned them, let alone stopped their rapacious, destructive, nasty, greed.

We were all completely bemused and baffled – caught like rabbits in the headlights of confabulated nonsense jargon and incomprehensible, arcane, rubbishy, banking language used to disguise the reality of blatant theft.

They further brainwashed people into believing it was somehow a good idea to borrow money to buy all the usual everyday things of life immediately and pay for them later. This way the banks could take a percentage of everything anyone spent on absolutely anything at all.

They neglected to inform people it would mean they would be paying for everything twice or three times over. The banks didn’t want anyone to realise it was much cheaper to actually save up to buy everyday domestic items.

As the banks conned every increasingly gigantic amounts of money out of the population, they had to keep on lending ever larger sums somewhere as the last thing you can do with money is store it inertly in a bank vault or under your bed where it is of no earthly use to anyone.

So the banks invented ever more abstract forms of money and lending that flew around the World financial systems from bank to bank like an insane, manic pass the parcel game as the minute any bank was in possession of any actual money it had to get rid of it as fast as possible in the form of a loan to someone, somewhere. It didn’t matter who or where as long as they got rid of the cash as fast as possible – anywhere.

So, larger and larger mountains of cash were manufactured by the banks originally designed confidence trick of ‘Fractional Reserve Banking’ successfully foisted on Governments and populations the World over.

No one seemed to understand that it meant banks had the ability literally manufacture unlimited amounts of money as long as they could find someone to lend it to, meanwhile shaving off their own cut. More loans made, more of a cut for the banks – more profit, bigger bonuses. No loans, no banker’s cut; simple.

And now the banks have found it is wildly out of control. Their inherent dishonesty means they can no longer even trust each other. If honesty and integrity had been maintained there would have been no financial crisis. It was entirely caused by banker’s greed and manipulation of the system of money away from reality and into the realms of pure fantasy.

It is the banks, and the banks alone who are responsible for the awful consequences of global Economic meltdown.

The banks have destroyed everyone’s confidence in money and the financial system as a whole. Isn’t it about time someone did something about them ?

DEMENTED UK GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES ‘NHS CONSTITUTION’

Hotfoot from listening to this morning’s 6 a.m. news I have this latest little gem of insane stupidity from Gordon Brown and Co. – those morons in charge of the UK government who are intent on completely destroying this country as fast and comprehensively as they possibly can.

Goofy Gordon’s Government has announced a momentously time wasting and entirely silly document apparently called the ‘NHS Constitution’.

I think their empty little brains must have been so full of yesterday’s grand American Presidential inauguration they thought it would be clever to launch something called a ‘Constitution’ to show everyone how clever and important they are too.

So, instead of the NHS spending it’s time and money getting on with the business of saving patients lives by providing the medical treatment it was set up to provide, it has found a new way of avoiding spending money on treating patients and re-directing it instead into even more creatively mad bureaucracy.

I have no doubt this breathlessly important ‘NHS Constitution’ has cost a lot of time and money and employed loads of mindless bureaucrats for ages. The document talks about ‘patients rights and obligations’ and ‘responsibilities’ and tells us ‘what to expect’ from the NHS.

I thought we expected medical care from the NHS. Apparently not. It now seems there is an urgent need to be told the majority of the NHS funding and other activities will be moving further and further away from paying doctors to look after patients and more towards being a job creation scheme for bureaucrats.

I am sure we all feel much better to be told what we can now expect from the NHS. Most people fondly imagined, I suppose, that they expected a good standard of medical care from the NHS.

No doubt everyone will be much relieved to be told in this manically self important NHS Consititution ‘document’ that all they can now expect is even faster deterioration of the NHS as getting any medical treatment at all becomes more and more difficult or impossible, as NHS ‘Resources’ are ‘Rationed’ away from providing useful medical treatment and towards expanding the NHS bureaucracy instead.

ISRAEL AND GAZA – A SERIOUSLY NASTY SITUATION -

HMMMMN !

Israel is being Seriously nasty. It is disgusting that children are being randomly killed in Gaza and homes being destroyed. The death toll is inhumane and horrible; unforgivable .

BUT, what choice did Israel have ?

Hamas in Gaza were continuously firing rockets into Israel long before Israel lost patience and fired back.

So who is really at fault here ?

Any person or State continuously firing murderous rockets randomly into a civilian population and killing them is uncivilised and stupid, primitive and ignorant.

If this continues, it seems there is ultimately no choice whatever but to retaliate with equally obscene violence to end it.

Think About it !

What would you do ?

Just sit there and do nothing ?

Let the rockets from Hamas continue ?

Do let me know !

A Life Without Mum

At 16, Clover Stroud’s idyllic childhood was shattered when a riding accident left her mother severely brain-damaged. Now, 15 years on, funding for her care is being withdrawn. Can that be right?

By Clover Stroud

The Guardian, Saturday 6 January 2007

In the late morning of November 25 1991, my mother was riding on a disused airfield in Gloucestershire when her horse slipped and fell on a strip of concrete. She was wearing a riding hat but her head took the full impact. She was admitted to intensive care in Bristol in a deep coma, and was operated on that afternoon. Her prognosis was very bleak. The neurologist operated on Mum a second and third time over the next two months. We wish he had not.

Her reawakening, four months later, was very slow: there was never a movie moment when she opened her eyes and normality returned. Mum never came back, and she never looked like herself again either. Flaps of her skull were cut away to relieve the pressure in her brain and she had a big scar running from one ear to the other over the top of her shaved head. One of her eyes was partly shut, and has never reopened. So as she awakened she stared at us – her five children and my father – from her one good eye, looking frightened, angry, alone, because she, like us, was trying to work out what had happened, who she had become.

I am the youngest of five children. Mum had my oldest sister when she was in her 20s, and me in her 40s, and what she loved was chaotic family life. She had three children, my siblings Emma, Sophy and Tom, before getting divorced and moving to Oxford. It was the late 60s, and she and her best friend, Felicity, swapped babysitting and hotpants, wore their hair long and straight and ate a lot of cheesecake. She met my father, 11 years her junior, when he was still a student. They got married before he finished his finals and then my sister Nell and I were born.

We moved to Wiltshire when I was seven. Mum had an innate ability to create a very strong home, but would never have stressed over matching sheets and pillowcases. She filled the house with messy bunches of wild flowers and a lot of people. Everyone fell for her, because she made every day into something magic without seeming to try. Of course there must have been arguments, because that is the stuffing of family life, but even in the generically stormy teenage years, I didn’t fight with her. If I am making my early life sound romantic, that is because it was. When I feel anger or despair about what has happened to her, I remember that I was very privileged to have had her as a mother for as long as I did.

I was 16 when the accident happened and in the first year of my A-levels. Nell was on her year off before university. Life changed absolutely in the space of one morning. I can’t remember much about the time immediately after the accident, about the weeks we spent beside her body in intensive care, but someone told me that shock and trauma can make you forget a lot of things. But when she did slowly wake up, she was totally changed and entirely mentally disabled.

We all talked about what would happen when she got better. Then we imagined we would be unlocked from this awful parallel world of brain-damage units and rehabilitation centres, incontinence pads and a dribbling, confused, damaged woman who in some strange, shadowy way resembled the woman she was, but in most ways did not.

Writing this, 15 years later and Mum’s condition unchanged – if anything much worse – it seems laughable, pathetically optimistic, that we estimated her full recovery might, at the very worst, take two years. Denial, I suppose, is what we were in. And survival mode, too. When you are looking at the reality of long-term, chronic brain damage, you will do anything you can to survive.

I am now 31 and I have two young children of my own. I look back on the time before her accident as an entirely different life. Part of this is the inevitable nostalgia of an adult reviewing childhood, but what happened to Mum did profoundly change my life and my sensibilities. It is not true that every cloud has a silver lining, because nothing good, nothing positive, has come from what happened to her. It is just a nightmare, for her, for us all, that goes on and on.

Five months after the initial operations, the NHS declared that Mum, doubly incontinent, confused, disfigured, deeply brain-damaged forever, could be sent home to be looked after by Nell and me. She was awake, so they saw her surgery as a success.

A year after the accident, my sister Emma took Mum to the surgeon who had operated on her, to show him the condition she had been left in. He refused to see her. If this was saving a life at any cost, then that cost was too high.

Mum came back to live at home with a nurse. We changed her nappies, and tried to pretend that life was OK, even though the house smelt of hospitals and pee and an unnamed damage that we still couldn’t really contemplate. I did my A-levels, and Nell went to university. None of us wanted to be at home, and then a sort of late teenage rebellion set in, because it was the early 1990s and the rave scene was huge. Dancing all night in a muddy field was the most effective way Nell and I found to block out the reality of the Gothic hospital that our home had become.

But after two years everyone conceded that Mum was too sick, too deranged and damaged to live at home. So my dad sold our house, bought himself a houseboat in London and spent the change on a small terraced house in Oxford, where Nell and I both had places at university. Mum, needing skilled, full-time nursing, was awarded full NHS funding, and moved into a rehabilitation centre.

Seven years ago, she moved again, to an EMI – elderly and mentally infirm – unit in Norfolk. All of us have visited her as much as we can over the past decade. After I finished university I got married very quickly and had two children, now three and six. I got divorced almost as rapidly, and now live in Oxford in the same house that my dad bought, which Mum partly owns.

Visiting Mum is difficult. She cannot speak, write or communicate. She is epileptic as a result of the accident and doubly incontinent. She is disfigured, her head swollen, and now both her eyes are half-closed. She had to have all her teeth removed last year, she dribbles a lot, her tongue lolls and she is on a largely pureed diet. When she eats, she chokes, her tongue out. She does not recognise me, except for a moaning sound of sadness that she sometimes makes when I come into her room. I find it quite hard to remember the person that she was, the sound of her voice, the things we laughed about. She used to love babies, but when I first arrived with my son, she sat on her hands and wouldn’t look at me or touch him. I don’t know who she is.

Mum would have hated the idea of what she has become and the life it has created. There is no doubt that death would have been preferable. It would have been dignified, and you couldn’t construct a more sad living present for a person than the one that Mum lives in. Eight years ago, when she was a little more mobile, she got hold of some medication and took an overdose. She went into a coma, again, and in hospital her stomach was pumped. For what? To perpetuate this living death? When she came round again, her brain damage seemed to be more profound, and she has deteriorated even more since then.

Knowing that she was getting the nursing she needed was the one consolation after her accident, but recently that has changed. Early last year, Wiltshire Primary Care Trust (PCT), part of the NHS that had granted Mum full funding 15 years ago due to the severity of her injuries, informed me that within 28 days they would cease her funding. They claimed she no longer fulfilled the Continuing Health Care criteria to qualify for funding. No social worker has been actively involved with Mum in the past decade, even through her suicide attempt, and later an allegation of abuse at the rehabilitation centre involving a police inquiry. So the first time in many years that a social worker or member of the PCT had come to see her was to assess her for the removal of her funding. When we appealed against this decision, she was visited again by a PCT nurse who didn’t meet her, as she had been rushed into hospital that night, but he looked through her notes, talked to one of her nurses and me, and then filled in a form in which he stated that her needs were no longer “intense, unpredictable or complex”, three of the key criteria to qualify her for ongoing funding. After that the PCT relinquished responsibility for her without any formal discharge of responsibility. She was just dumped, even though social services never accepted responsibility for Mum.

Events became even more critical in late November, as we were told her nursing home was closing in early December. I found another home in Wiltshire, and stopped work, spending a month on the telephone with the PCT, pleading with them to reinstate her funding, pending the result of the appeal in January 2007, so that I could move her to a new home. Their refusal was categorical and felt deeply inhumane, as within days she would be homeless. I was advised they were acting unlawfully by ceasing responsibility for her while the appeal was in process, but I was also powerless in the face of the bureaucracy of the NHS. So they were acting unlawfully, but what could I do? Call the police?

When the PCT nurse told me that he would be going on leave for a week, and with her home closing within three days, I realised I would have to take dramatic, practical action. On December 1, I left my children with a friend in Oxford, and my sister Emma and I drove Mum to the offices of the PCT in Wiltshire, where I was prepared to leave her, because I did not have an option. The sight of Mum – damaged, frightened, vulnerable – forced them to concede, and Alison Knowles, Director of Performance Improvement and Commissioning, agreed that the PCT and social services should jointly pick up her funding until the result of the appeal in January.

The appeal about Mum’s funding is next week, and fighting her case has taken over my life. I have not worked since last November. I am a single parent supporting two children, and because I live in the house partly owned by Mum, I am facing losing my home. I know that this is a familiar story to a lot of people. Care for elderly or sick relatives cripples families already buckling under the emotional consequences of that sickness. Longevity is a family trait and Mum may well live for another 25 years. I don’t know how to shoulder such long-term financial responsibility, as her fees are more than £26,000 a year.

My story is not an isolated case. This is the way the NHS works today.

Care and the NHS

The 1946 NHS Act and 1948 National Assistance Act established two parallel systems of care: the NHS, which provides care free at the point of delivery, and local authority-funded social care, which is means-tested. Successive governments have exploited this division to cut costs and reduce NHS provision, redefining health care as social care. As long-stay NHS hospitals have been closed, funding has been moved from the NHS and local authorities to for-profit corporations.

Today the NHS in England has fewer than 190,000 available beds (most for acute hospital care); in 1948 there were 450,000 (which included long-stay beds). The mainly for-profit sector, meanwhile, has been subsidised to provide in excess of 360,000 long-stay beds. Today the NHS is responsible for fully funding fewer than 21,000 people with long-term care needs – most people in long-stay beds must pay until their assets are exhausted.

The 1990 NHS and Community Care Act was designed to reduce funding and restrict eligibility for NHS-funded care further through the formal assessments of need. In 1997, the incoming Labour government established a royal commission on long-term care, but rejected the core recommendation that personal care be free. Since then, the health ombudsman, health select committee and the Law Society have published reports drawing attention to the unfairnesses and confusion in government policy and the distress caused to thousands, yet nothing has been done. Now the courts have stepped in. The judgments highlight that government policy and procedures are being applied unlawfully, and that people whose primary need is for health care should receive fully funded care.

More than 4,000 complaints have been received by the health ombudsman – complaints can only be made once all avenues have been exhausted.

· Allyson Pollock – author of NHS plc: the Privatisation of Our Health Care (Verso)

PITY THE POOR OVERWORKED BRITS GOING THROUGH THIS CREDIT CRUNCH

On Robert Peston’s BBC blog today I saw this post here. The poor soul was so hard done by, what with having to work a whole forty hours a week, that I thought their complaint merited a reply from me to put it in perspective. So here is their post followed by my reply to it. You’ll get the point when you read it.

It seems the BBC found my post unacceptable for some strange reason though, so it wasn’t actually posted. Curious that ?

BBC economic reporter Robert Peston’s blog is here at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/01/ms_no_ordinary_downturn.html

The Wierd post in question (number 62 if you want to find it ) is copied here.

62. At 10:38am on 07 Jan 2009, irishbluebird wrote:

“I refer to “angelbusman’s” comment earlier who said “What do M & S staff do?”.


“You really are ignorant to the amount of work involved in retail. My wife leaves the house every morning at 5-15 to work an 8 hour shift, 5 days a week and is exhausted by the weekend. She, like I, have to work these hours to make ends meet and I can assure you she puts in a full days work interrupted only by customers asking for advice. With the cloud of redundancies now hanging over all staff I would appreciate it if you kept your negative comments to yourself.

Complain about this comment

My reply is :

Subject:
M&S: no ordinary downturn

Posting:
irishbluebird post 62.

My, my, you poor things. Fancy having to work for eight hours a day five days a week. That’s, let me see, forty hours work a week, isn’t it ?

No wonder the poor dear is exhausted after five days work a week. I’m sure she hasn’t enough time over the two days of each weekend to recover from this remorselessly exhausting toil !

She ought to demand more time off. My, the sheer stress of it all. It’s scandalous ! Tell her to pull a ‘sickie’ on Monday to give her extra time to recover from the previous week’s work !

Out of the total 168 hours in the seven days of a week a notional eight hours of sleep per day adds up to 56 hours, which leaves 112 hours for everything else.

Working forty hours is only 35 per cent of 112 hours of free time, leaving a massive 72 hours out of the total of 168 – that’s more time than for work or sleep !

What more do you want you idle sods ? All the hours at 168 to sit on your fat backsides and be paid endless State benefits and subsidies so you don’t have to work at all ?

Get real. Go try and exist in rural India, China, Africa, South America or similar. You might find yourselves working more than 112 hours a week with barely enough time for any sleep and wages just enough for a starvation diet and absolutely nothing else.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/01/ms_no_ordinary_downturn.html

Banks, Robber Barons, Lawyers, Shylock – Bastards ?

Well known lawyer Anthony Julius, famous for being Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer, was rabbiting on about one of history’s oldest and most well known miscarriages of justice on the Radio Four ‘Today’ programme this morning.

It was all about that poor misunderstood creature Shylock in William Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’.

Anthony Julius was explaining how seven lawyers had just re-examined Shylock’s case and five had decided by a clear majority that Shylock was absolutely right in the first place to have his pound of flesh and the fact it would have killed Antonio, from whom it would be taken, irrelevant.

Shakespeare writes about how the poor fellow had signed a binding contract to lend three thousand readies to Antonio so he could blow it on showing off to his girlfriend so she would agree to marry him.

Nothing new there, as the present disastrous World wide credit crunch seems to have been caused exclusively by irresponsible banks lending lots of money to irresponsible people by actively encouraging them to spend on showing off to their own girlfriends and generally living the high life quite beyond their means with an utter disregard of reality.

When scatterbrained Antonio found he had been so busy wooing his girlfriend he had neglected his business and run out of money to pay Shylock’s loan back, Antonio discovered he had neglected the fact he had signed a contract with Shylock providing Shylock with security for the loan. This security was to be forfeit if Antonio was unable to pay the loan back at the agreed time.

A terrible miscarriage of justice then happened. Poor Shylock took his case to court asking for the security which was now rightfully his to be paid. But, instead, the court decided to fine Shylock half his fortune and punish him with what community service used to be by forcing him to convert to being a Christian.

The court had been forced to agree the security was rightfully and legally due to be paid to Shylock according to the terms of that binding contract with Antonio. But the court, being biased towards the rich and powerful in the establishment, as courts often are, imposed arbitrary and unreasonable conditions on Shylock taking his security from Antonio.

The court told Shylock he could have his security, but only on condition no harm came to Antonio by virtue of any of Antonio’s blood being shed. Reasonable enough, you might say. But then the court added that as Shylock was so insistent on having his security from Antonio, according to the strict terms of the signed contract, then it seemed only fair Shylock be punished if he failed to honour his side of the contract by actually taking the said security.

Unfortunately, as the security in question was a pound of Antonio’s own flesh, closest to his heart, there was no way Shylock could remove it without shedding some of Antonio’s blood and probably killing him stone dead at the same time.

So, Shylock was punished by losing his own money and being made an outcast of society as he was forced to convert from one religion to another, so being condemned and shunned by both.

A fitting end to a vicious and rapacious lender, most people down the centuries have agreed. An early example of a financial regulation authority cracking down on gross mis-selling of financial products others mightthink.

But not today’s lawyers ! They are still indignant Shylock’s contract providing him with the security of a pound of flesh was thwarted by the court and Antonio completely let off. That contracts are not completely binding and must at all cost be honoured, regardless what terrible consequences might ensue, is truly offensive to the sensibilities of lawyers.

So a bunch of today’s lawyers decided to organise an appeal for Shylock to see if they could put right what many lawyers have always thought a flagrant breach of contract unjustly dealt with by the court. They felt Shylock ought to have his named cleared and a miscarriage of justice put right.

After all, a contract had been signed. Antonio was fully aware of the consequences of failing to pay back the loan on time. Shylock had been treated unfairly. He didn’t get his security or his loan back.

Ah, so now Shylock has his good name back as modern lawyers have reversed the original court ruling against Shylock and put right a wrong that has offended all good lawyers down the ages since ‘The Merchant of Venice’ first appeared in print all that time ago.

So, let that be a warning to all you poor sods who have been encouraged, even, positively brainwashed by the banks some might say, into borrowing money you are now having increasing difficulty paying back as the Global Financial Crisis completely destroys the World economy and makes tens of millions of people jobless.

You may be sure the banks will all have their pound of flesh. They will be unconcerned how much more damage they wreak on your personal life as they take every last possession away from you, including your house.

After all, the banks have already destroyed the World’s entire economy and put tens of millions of people out of work. Why should they care a hoot about ruining your life completely.

Who cares if you are made homeless and suicidal -by the bank. Why should the bank give a damn about your wife and kids leaving you after your family is turfed out onto the streets.

Your life may be utterly hopeless as you wander the streets homeless, unable to function, entirely without your precious possessions collected over a lifetime. You signed the contract; you borrowed the money; the banks say. We want everything we can get back from you. It is our ‘right’. It is our security. You signed the contract with us and we want our contract upheld by the courts.

No matter the contract was unfair, or even frequently a complete rip-off. The banks don’t care. You signed the contract. We want our pound of flesh and by God we will have it at all costs even if we destroy everything else in the process, they say. The fact you have no choice but to sign the contract because the banks have a stranglehold over absolutely everything to do with money is quietly ignored by the banks themselves.

Of course the banks have wheedled a comprehensive control over almost every financial transaction, making sure they take a cut each time any money changes hands. They even charge you to take your own money out of the bank to spend. It was even suggested in a weekend newspaper this last weekend that banks might soon be charging people to put money in the bank in the first place !

So the banks have been used to forcing increasingly unfair, and quite unreasonable contracts down everyone’s throats. They have got away with it for so long they have become breathtakingly arrogant about always being in the right no matter what they do or how much they corrupt our financial system.

Banks being always in the right has brought the World economy to it’s knees and ruined millions of people and even made a whole country bankrupt already with more to follow.

Isn’t it about time something was done about their unbridled evil?

It would be a really good start if people started by not using banks at all for any purpose if it could possibly be avoided. Inconvenient, maybe; possible, yes. And maybe not so inconvenient after all when you discover how much better life is without destructive grasping, incompetent banking.

Banks are the modern robber barons. Many robber barons were bastards of legitimate landowning aristocrats, themselves granted their lands by Monarchs to repress the peasant working classes.

Bastards every one. Banks; Robber Barons; Bastards; they all seem the same to me. Bastards.

Destroyed by Blind Faith in Banking System – and Corrupt Government !

The ‘Blue Collar Manifesto’ blog written by American Jim Lunsford had this to say today. It is abridged and slightly edited, but I found it too irresistible not to repeat some of it at least.

It neatly encapsulates one of the most gigantic problems of Modern Times. It perhaps describes the fundamental cause of the collapse of the Global financial system.

Read it. Think very, very carefully and ask yourself what you can do now to prevent the World from becoming increasingly unstable and ever more violent and dangerous for your children and children’s children. Remember, human civilisation and even very survival is at stake.

This is what Jim Lunsford had to say.

“We have allowed our blind faith in the very instruments of our destruction to lead us to this crucial point in our history. A time in which our very lives are at stake.

“Economically, we have been destroyed by this blind faith in the Federal Reserve banking system; a system designed to create inflation and market crashes to further the political agendas of shadow governments.

“A system we allow to exist today, despite the fact so many of us have knowledge of it’s goals. Yet, we do nothing but insist the government police itself. And we wonder why they don’t.

“It is the nature of government to grow it’s own powers, and the result of this power is always corruption. It is a story as old as government itself, yet one we seem destined to constantly re-learn.

“But that does not mean we have to remain slaves of a system we have helped create through our own fears. First though, we must understand that we have the power to affect change. This power is inherent in all of us.

“Police states don’t just happen. They must be carefully cultivated. They need enemies to rally their citizens around their cause. External enemies. Police states, which includes our own government, constantly create threats which strengthen their regimes. But we must be willing pawns of our own destruction, or these schemes will never work.

“We look to the institutions that oppress us for solutions, when liberty is only found within ourselves. Tyranny can only exist when fear rules over a majority. This is the problem which we must face, and only by facing this problem, will we find the solution.

“In my travels around the world, I have always found the peoples of every country to be mostly good in nature. It is always their governments that are corrupt; for governments are the havens of the corrupt in all societies.

“It is in government that we find oppression, not in the people we war against. The same is true in this country as well, if we but have the courage to admit it.”

Jim Lunsford – American author of the ‘Blue Collar Manifesto’ blog.

GOVERNMENT SQUANDERS OUR MONEY

But help bankers and industrialists become very rich.

It appalls me how government resources are utterly squandered while disease, poverty, general misery etc increases almost everywhere – including the most privileged nations.

What about organising some kind of meaningful focus for this revolution to make it happen ? Because it may be that things are becoming a bit dangerously critical as third World Governments become more demanding, more able to meet others on more equal terms and so on.

The possibility of another bloody World war with exceptionally destructive weapons is increasing with exponential speed.

Even without that awful eventuality (which is a near certainty if you consider psychology very, very carefully) we have what seems to be the possibility of fast and destructive climate change due to our complete inability to manage human civilisation in a reasonable, intelligent way.

This is why we need this revolution as soon as possible before anything really nasty happens !

Fast internet communication connecting all individuals on the Globe is the key to much more sensible decision making and intelligent, more stable government, leading inevitably to one cooperative World Government.

This is the alternative to endless international squabbling about almost everything, and inevitably, wars, both small (as at present) and larger in the form of deadly World wide war.

I suppose I would have been a stand in for Trotsky or Lenin back in the days of the Worker’s Revolution. But it is unfortunate they didn’t understand how to re-organise government properly in those times and just replaced a repressive government by landed aristocrats with an even more repressive style of government by a bunch of amateurs with no idea of how to govern at all.

Maybe leaving all the aristos in charge might really have been better if you think about it. But right now it is essential to get away from government by vested interests, disguised but even more selfish modern style aristos in the form of wealth, and corrupt self seekers on the make who don’t care how many lives they destroy in the process !

Just look what the bankers have done recently to Word wide trade and tens of millions of lives !

They are indisputably, single handedly, responsible for destroying the World wide economy, putting millions into poverty.

It was they and they alone who managed the supply of money and it was they alone who were responsible for the integrity of that money.

This integrity of the money supply can only have been destroyed by the greed obsessed banking community, because no other group of people had the ability to manipulate the money supply in any way, other than the banks.

It is an inescapable fact that if the banks had chosen to behave differently to the way they did behave, the money supply could have remained stable and there would have been no World wide financial crisis.

Ergo, the banks control the entire money supply; but are an ignorant bunch of corrupt, self seeking, greedy bastards pulling the strings of every government everywhere entirely for their own ends , with a callous disregard of the consequences.

See the Blue Collar Worker Manifesto

THE INTERNET REVOLUTION

I just had to publish this article by Jim Lumsford I found on the BLUE COLLAR MANIFESTO BLOG today. It is well worth a read – it needs the widest possible audience, so send it to everyone you know !

THE INTERNET REVOLUTION

by Jim Lumsford

The internet has really grown since I first had access to it in 1992. It’s a completely different medium from that point in time. I believe I had a 1400 baud modem, and no picture capability. Just the old green screen.

Now, my wireless has the typical 5-54 Mega Baud rate, and so many features that weren’t even thought of a mere 17 years ago. Or even the 10 years (approx) since photography and video were available to the general public.

It has grown from a medium in which it was ridiculed by college professors, to one in which they now embrace as a tool to reach more students. More minds. One in which the traditional media’s stranglehold on information is being loosened at an incredibly high and exponential rate. It is driven by a youth more learned in it’s use and application than those individuals who are the foundations of our modern society. And it frightens the prevailing power structures in all aspects of our global society. It challenges the status quo, and dismembers it at every opportunity.

It is a viral growth, no center, no edge, just an endless out-growth of seemingly patternless avenues of information. And mis-information. Yet, the abundance of information accessible through powerful search engines helps to ensure some accuracy, by self-check through other sources on the internet and traditional primary resources, and encourages far greater changes in how we view events. This is part of why the dominant sources of information remain afraid of the internet. An internet dominated by traditionally rebellious youth.

Yet, these new pioneers are not as prone to violence as the traditional sources of communication’s owners have demonstrated themselves in their government models they’ve (and I mean we in the sense that all of us have encouraged their stranglehold on information by using them and validating them) lorded over the population. Just look at the condemnation of policies which kill or otherwise destroy hundreds of millions of lives. It is a peaceful revolution. Perhaps the first in history. A revolution with teenagers at it’s helm; if it were to actually have any one person guiding it. It is a marvelous revolution.

It is a revolution which has brought the dark world of corruption and greed to the fore-front of the news. Not the traditional media, though they are slowly catching on, but the news that an ever-increasing segment of the population is accessing. It is toppling regimes as we speak; regimes built upon censorship and tyranny. Regimes which control virtually every nation on earth.

When one looks at the amount of input on the Obama administration’s website, one might be inclined to think the internet population, comprised mostly of the youth of today, as being apathetic to politics. This is clearly not the case, and takes little effort to prove by the abundance of web-sites devoted to politics of all sorts. It is instead, a measure of how irrelevant this government model has become to the majority of the population.

We are entering a depression, one in which our currency is collapsing. One in which government is attempting to extend it’s tentacles into every aspect of our lives. One in which the traditional methods of government are viewed as irrelevant, at best. At worst, it is viewed as tyrannical. Most appear to believe the worst. And for good reason. It is.

Soon, the internet should develop an awareness of it’s own power. A power that can end tyranny of the majority by a minority. A minority motivated by an unquenchable thirst for money and power. A minority which is finally being uncovered by the seemingly infinite peeks into the hows and whys of government and it’s effects upon our individual quests for knowledge, self-rule, and peace.

The introduction of the Gutenberg printing press in Europe, in 1450, took 300 years to produce the Age of Revolutions. It appears that we are going to have the same effect in under twenty years with the internet. As long as we can keep the lines of communication open, it should be a peaceful revolution. However, government has consistently attacked keeping these lines of communication open. Government has consistently acted in a self-destructive manner in it’s approach to this medium. It is afraid, and rightly so.

Our government has consistently abused each and every power it has granted itself. That is the nature of all governments. It is no less true now, than when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution. However, it is far more difficult for the people to remain unaware of the abuses of government. At least when it comes to the youth of America. My generation, I am 48, and those before me, are much easier to fool. But we are passing on. The youth are just coming onto their own. I have great hope they will create a far more liberating government model than we have.

This form of government we presently subscribe to is falling. It’s indifference to the needs of the common person is being met with indifference by the common person. It has become irrelevent to the youth of today. It’s laws despised and ignored. Totaltarianism is being rejected and fought on countless web-sites. And it’s fast becoming aware of it’s own power.

Once this power reaches conscious awareness among a certain percentage of it’s users, we will witness, and become part of, multiple paradigm shifts in our approach to government. Models unknown or unworkable in the past, will rise and fall with speeds resembling the chaos feared by the previous generations of governments and it’s victims. The victims being a government’s citizens.

These should be interesting times indeed.

Rev. Jim Lunsford

Ultimately, it is up to each person to save themselves. And the world as well. We are all responsible and accountable.

How will your actions be judged?

The BBC Think I Nicked My Own Article !!! Ha, Ha, Ha

Dear Robert Peston &; Co,

‘Scuse me,

But I own the copyright to this article because I wrote it specifically to post on Peston’s blog and on my own blogs. It is copied from nowhere other than my own brain. There is not one word of re-write or reference from anywhere else or even the slightest connection or reference in my brain to anything else. I have yet to come across any other copy, in fact, which has is quite so scathing of the financial industry. This article is completely original and there wasn’t even a single page of reference anywhere near me when I wrote it.

The tone of the article entirely reflects my feelings about my personal experiences over thirty five years with various segments of the financial industry. Some of my experiences have been ghastly and give rise to a feeling in me which is somewhat venomous towards an industry which I have found to rapidly move away from any concept of honest decency and probity towards inbred deceit in the forty years of my adult life.

I am sorry it is so long. Although I intend to try and make things shorter, I find it difficult to cover the subject in fewer words when I actually write it. As an ex-sub-editor, I could sub it right down afterwards, but that is just extra work to no purpose as I am not trying to make it ‘fit’ into a publication with limited space. If you want to run the item in public open media I would happily sub it to any length, but in Peston’s blog, or mine it seems just silly and detracts from what the article is trying to say.

Perhaps I should feel flattered you think I nicked this article from somewhere else. When I wrote my first item for publication at the very beginning of my writing career it was a poem for the school magazine when I fifteen. I was accused of nicking it from Rupert Brooke as it was in that style. It has been since published in a newspaper and it gives me a warm glow still to think some one ranked my poetry at the age of fifteen along with such a great poet as Rupert Brooke. Although I have always been puzzled as to why someone didn’t just read Brooke’s poems to see if mine was one of them ! The magazine committee who hauled me up before them must have been a bit thick. They did publish it though !

Perhaps you might like to confirm this article is my original work by now checking my blogs where I think I will post this correspondence as a post !

Yours

Modern Times in Mudshires

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Subject:
Deflation or inflation?

Posting:
Poisonous Banks Destroying World Economy

December 17, 2008 by rocketone at Modern Times in Mudshires

The article in question is the one posted in full below as my previous post.

Poisonous Banks Destroying World Economy

Banks immoral behaviour shrinks World supply of money and destroys economy

Poisonous Banks Destroying World Economy

Banks immoral behaviour shrinks World supply of money and destroys economy

For our Global system of money to work we have depended entirely on all our banks to act responsibly, with honesty, morality and probity.

Because the banking system realised it could get away with being increasingly dishonest, immoral, completely irresponsible and absolutely without the slightest hint of probity or decency, the currency system of the World has been destroyed by their fraud and breathtaking greed.

We have a system whereby nearly all the money is manufactured by the banks issuing loans to their customers. These loans amount to about ninety five percent of all the money in circulation. Nearly all the money we therefore use is created by a bank making a loan to someone else.

A culture of rapacious, greedy dishonesty was created throughout every aspect of the banking system as the banks tried to lend ever increasing amounts of money with a complete disregard of their poisonous behaviour towards borrowers. They wanted to lend as much money as possible because the more they lent the richer the banks themselves could become at the expense of those borrowers.

So, all this had the effect of putting absolutely every business and individual person into more and more unsustainable debt. The currency system is actually called money as debt and a fractional reserve banking system whereby the banks can create unlimited amounts of money out of nothing. If there were no bank loans at all, there would less than ninety percent of money in circulation and no-one would be paying interest to the banks.

This system allows banks to exercise increasing amounts of control over every aspect of business and personal life. Everyone was at their mercy. All of us were really working for the banks – working hard at earning enough to pay the increasingly absurd levels of interest and penalties on all the banks loans.

Businesses were constantly persuaded to borrow more money to expand, individuals were persuaded to borrow impracticably large mortgages to buy homes and consumer goods they really didn’t need. We were all told how silly we were if we didn’t use credit cards to spend money we didn’t actually have.

The banks were in complete control of almost the entire supply of money everyone depended on to enable all trade and personal commerce to exist. All the money in use could be traced backed through debt after debt issued through the dishonest banking system.

The financial well being of every business and individual now depended completely on the banks and how they behaved, and how honest and moral they were.

When the levels of dishonesty exhibited by the banks became so blatant and unsustainable, it became so extreme it had the effect of making the banks themselves too frightened to lend to each other.

They knew better than anyone else how dishonest and fraudulent their system of loans and debt had become and how each bank would try and outsmart other banks by being even more devious with loans to each other.

So the banks stopped lending to each other because they knew they were ripping each other off with dodgy loans which were less and less likely to be paid back.

If the banks weren’t going to lend to each other it interrupted the circular movement of money from bank to borrower and from that borrower’s loan ending up in another bank which, in turn enabled the next bank to issue more loans of many, many times the amounts actually being deposited in the bank. And so on it went around in endless circles.

But once the banks interrupted the entire money supply by being too frightened to lend to each other, it also had the effect of rapidly shrinking the money supply. The behaviour of the banks is making money literally disappear from existence at exponential speed.

This is the reason people have less and less money to pay their debts or to actually buy anything they need. The World economy is being destroyed by all the banks because of their greed and fraud and their fear of lending to each other. They know how dishonest and unreliable other banks can be with lending money and fear their loans to each other may not be paid back because the system they created is so dishonestly fraudulent and unreliable.

Governments around the World thought by lending gigantic amounts of money to all the banks this problem of confidence in the money supply would go away. All the money Governments loaned to banks would enable them to commence lending to each other again and get the circulation of the whole supply of money moving again.

Government were wrong. They were wrong because lending to the banks didn’t make the banks any more honest or improve their morality or common sense in any way at all. So the banks just pocketed any money they could get hold of, held on to it like grim death, carried on paying themselves ridiculous ‘bonuses’ and still refused to lend to each other.

The fact this also meant they had less and less money to lend to anyone else too, didn’t seem to bother them. They didn’t seem to be able to work out their collective behaviour was rapidly destroying the whole World economy and even themselves as they started to go bust one by one.

If something doesn’t change pretty damn quick they will probably all go bust in the end. But they are too pathetic to see that, as they whimper on about how it isn’t their fault at all. It must be someone else’s fault, they say. Meanwhile things will continue to get much, much worse.

They are liars !

Every single single business, and individual wishes to continue to work hard to earn themselves money. Businesses do not wish to sack employees and cease to exist, employees don’t want to sit around jobless and having their lives being destroyed by unemployment. It is being forced upon them by the banks.

We all depend on being in possession of money to trade and prosper as a business, and in turn pay employees’ wages so they can buy things they need from the businesses that are prospering.

Money is simply a token of trust we can use to give to some one else in exchange for goods or services of actual real value we need from them. They can then use that token of money we give them to buy what they need from others.

The banks have manipulated the money system with sheer greed until it has been taken to the brink of complete destruction by their deviousness.

The banks are the only custodians of the money system. No one else at all has control of it. No Government, business or individual has control of the system of money. It is entirely in the hands of the banks. They have abused it, misused it for their own profit and have shown a callous disregard of the damage they do to everybody they deal with. Their behaviour has been, and still is quite simply disgusting.

The banks cannot be trusted. They created the Worldwide financial recession single handedly with no assistance from any one else. They are currently destroying the money supply everywhere with lightning speed. Their self seeking manipulation of the World’s money supply is destroying everyone’s ability to trade, or have a job, or pay back their debts. The entire money system is collapsing exclusively because of the irresponsible, fraudulent behaviour of the banks.

They are utterly callous in turning tens of thousands of people out of their homes, leaving houses empty, vandalised and pointlessly useless. They are equally callous as they take away the jobs of millions of people by destroying businesses with toxic loans and making it impossible for trade and commerce anywhere to function normally any more .

With this vicious control of money the banks have, allowing them to say who has a business and trades or who has a job and who doesn’t, who starves or who has a home or who is thrown out of their home onto the street by bank bailiffs, to have their entire lives destroyed by being made homeless, is a grotesque condemnation of modern times.

WHO OR WHAT REALLY CAUSED THE WORLD WIDE CREDIT CRUNCH ?

You do not need to know much about economics to discover what caused the mass destruction of the supplies of the World’s money. In fact, it’s best not to understand economics because, if you are an economist, it means you probably won’t be able to understand how this awful catastrophe has happened at all !

All the banks tried to put the blame on all those feckless people who borrowed money to buy houses to live in. The banks called it the ’sub-prime’ crisis and said these naughty home owners were failing to pay their mortgages back to the kind banks that had lent them the money to buy their houses in the first place.

It seemed everyone believed the banks when they said this was the reason for Word wide financial turmoil, mass unemployment, mass home evictions and almost instant poverty for tens of millions of people. It was all the fault of those wicked individuals who borrowed more money on their mortgaged home they could really afford to pay back , the banks told us.

We were conned by these homeowners; they took advantage of us; they lied to us so they could borrow money they couldn’t pay back, the banks said. We believed the banks when they told us this. But we were wrong to believe them.

The banks were lying ! It was a craftily contrived excuse by the banks to find someone else to blame.

It was not the fault of the struggling home owners failing to pay back all that borrowed money, although the banks came up with convincing stories about how they were owed gigantic sums running into billions of pounds and they were all going bust because home owners were not paying their home loans back.

How could it be the home owners falling into difficulties with repaying their loans ? Why, the banks would evict them all from their houses in a trice and sell their houses to get their money back within just a few months from the first month’s missed mortgage payment.

No. In most cases the banks would get the full amount of the loan back as well as extra juicy penalty fees and imaginary ‘expenses’ they dreamed up out of thin air to squeeze as much money out of the poor home owner as they possibly could.

More on this subject later when I have the time – then I will explain exactly what happened.

PEOPLE NOW EAT RUBBISH FOOD INSTEAD OF COOKING

Leaving a comment on another blog about home cooking and yummy recipes by someone who really enjoys cooking this morning, got me raving on about how hardly anyone bothers to cook proper food for their families anymore. I thought I would turn it into a post for my blog as it is something that makes me very cross. So here it is.

Hi – again. I’ve just woken up – late, overslept, my boy is LATE for school.

The vast majority of people (particularly here in the UK) are such nerds about food and most are quite incapable of cooking anything. This is why we substitute this almost total lack of cooking with looking at other people like Jamie Oliver cooking for us on television as a substitute for actually doing it ourselves.

How pathetic is that !

We all have to eat. That means someone has to cook it. Here in the UK we are collectively all so lazy and very, very stupid, that most of us seem to buy ready made meals in supermarkets for instant microwave re-heating and trudge off to greasy take-away food places that produce the most filthy, overpriced rubbish you could imagine.

It is common to find the poorest of families describing how they NEVER cook and eat nothing but takeaways and supermarket microwave ready garbage.

So a family of four might typically spend £6 each or £24 in total for each evening meal on this sort of nasty rubbish. This adds up to £168 a week. It costs just a third of this to eat the best of home cooked food if you bother to do it yourself.

The myth of not having enough time to cook is completely exploded if you calculate the amount of time spent queuing for takeaways etc.

As the enjoyment of eating good food takes precedence over every other aspect of life ( I mean without food every animal, including us, gets hungry and loses complete interest in everything else – sex, sleep, making money, working, rocketscience and philosophy even), this widespread disinterest and contempt of cooking is a ridiculous, bizarre nonsense.

I cook proper food for me and my boy too – every day. It has never occurred to me to do otherwise. And every time I have standard takeaway rubbish (like on motorway journeys) I generally feel yucky and bilious afterwards ! Sometimes, just to emphasise the point, I throw up because what I ate was contaminated with vomit inducing bacteria from the poor hygiene; you can just imagine what goes on, can’t you ! .

In fact this reminds me of the very first time I had a McDonalds hamburger. It was twenty five years ago in London. My wife had just given birth to my second daughter in the Whittington Hospital in Highgate. I was left in sole charge of our other daughter who was just two and a half years old.

As my wife and newborn had to stay in hospital for a few days life at home was a bit chaotic. It always is when you are suddenly left alone for the first time to look after a toddler of two and a half. You can have absolutely no idea of what they can get up to and how much time they consume if it has never happened to you.

So cooking became somewhat disorganised and in our rush to get back to the hospital one day I thought, ‘sod it’ we will get a hamburger on the way. I mean, it’s a treat for a kid, right ?

That’s what I said to my little daughter, just like I had been brainwashed to do by the whole fast food industry relentlessly brainwashing the entire population from the moment we are all born and right through to the bitter end of our lives.

You probably find people on their death beds being brought takeaway meals from the likes of McDonalds as special treats by the visiting family members who can’t think of anything better !

So, we both had our first ever McDonalds hamburger on our way to visit Mum and the brand new sister in hospital !

Guess what ?

Just as we arrived and said hello to a rather exhausted looking Mum and rather yellow coloured, cross looking newborn baby, both my two and a half year old daughter and I threw up all over the place. It caused a bit of consternation, as you might imagine.

But, boy oh boy, did we both feel better afterwards- having disposed of the disgusting, poisonous and very contaminated food we had just eaten. It was a positive relief just to be hungry again instead of feeling really, really ill.

Oddly, hamburgers have not featured greatly in our lives in the twenty five years since. In fact, I don’t even have to eat a McDonalds hamburger to feel ill. Every time I see that awful McDonalds logo I feel instantly bilious as it comprehensively completely puts me off the idea of eating any food at all !

‘Nuff said. I could ramble on and on for hours about food. I used to own a restaurant once too. That was an interesting story,

Anyway, I got so carried away rambling on I thought I would turn this into a blog post for my blog.

Cooks are a dying breed and we need people like you to stop home cooking becoming completely extinct. It already nearly is in the UK, I think.

What’s Behind the Financial Market Crisis ?

by Antony Mueller

founder of the Continental Economics Institute

The financial crisis is not over. Neither tax rebates nor low interest rates nor higher or lower exchange rates can do the job of reviving an economy that is burdened by debt loads that are too high. On the contrary: the policy measures that the US authorities have been applying will prolong the agony. Be prepared for the challenges of extended financial turmoil and economic stagnation.

Early this year, the US central bank decided to manage the debt crisis in the light-hearted belief that a few aggressive rate cuts would “unfreeze” the banking system. Yet as of the end of the third quarter of 2008, the arteries of the financial system are still cluttered, and the financial system has moved even closer to total collapse.

Those banks and brokerages that haven’t yet failed have been kept alive by emergency monetary transfusions from the US central bank. The Fed has cast away all restraints of economic rationality and is acting in a purely political way. The Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System is pursuing the goal of getting the financial system through the mess — at least until the end of the year, no matter how high the costs will be thereafter.

The American central bank has adopted the financial equivalent of the military strategy of scorched earth. The economic philosophy of the current chairman of the US Federal Reserve System can be summarized in the slogan, “No depression under my rule!” He resembles a military leader who stubbornly declares, “No defeat under my rule!” the more the chance of victory is slipping away, and defeat can be denied no longer.

The current economic disaster is the result of the combination of negligence, hubris, and wrong economic theory. For decades, an economic and monetary policy has been practiced based on the illusion of, “It doesn’t matter.” At first it was, “Deficits don’t matter.” From that, the policy of “it doesn’t matter” got extended to money creation, the credit expansion, the stock-market bubble, and the housing boom. Now, we’re being told that buying financial junk by the central bank to beef up banks and brokerages also doesn’t matter.

As a byproduct of this mindless economic and monetary policy, financial market operators, too, have lost their heads. Trusting the official cheerleaders, investors hold on in the trenches until they will have lost their last shirt. Economic weakness is spreading around the globe. There is no new spurt of economic growth in sight. Yet many investors stay put because they have been conditioned to believe that government will bail them out.

The current financial crisis is not of a cyclical nature. The financial turmoil is the symptom of the structural imbalances in the real economy. Over decades, expansive monetary policy has gone hand in hand with implicit and explicit bailout guarantees, and this has distorted the process of capital allocation. Under such perverted conditions, those investors will win most who cast away the restraints of prudence. It is a game that can go on for a long time — up to the point when the irrationality has become systemic.

The behavior of the investment community reflects the incentive structure that has been put in place by the authorities. Investors have learnt to dance to the tunes of the pied pipers at high places. After all, the individual market player could see from those who were ahead of him in the abandonment of prudence how money is being made. In the wake of this, financial companies have become overextended and are now in need of deleveraging. Yet the core problem lies in the imbalances of the real economy.
In the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the distinction is made between the “primary” and “secondary” depression. The secondary depression is what catches the eye: the turmoil in the financial markets. Yet the underlying cause is the distortion of the economy’s capital structure: the primary depression.

The simple fact is that the US economy is burdened with a highly lopsided capital structure as the consequence of a wide discrepancy between consumption and production, which, in turn, is the result of monetary policy. Persistent trade imbalances are the symptoms of this discrepancy. This means for the US economy that lower interest rates and government incentives aimed at boosting consumption work as pure poison. Instead of more consumption, more savings, less consumption and fewer imports are needed.

The current financial crisis reflects that many debtors have reached their debt limit and that creditors are lowering that limit. From now on, business and consumers, governments and investors must work under the restraints of lowered debt ceilings.
Economic policy as it is currently practiced is in a fix: lower interest rates may temporarily help to alleviate the financial crisis, but they exacerbate the fundamentals that are the cause of the financial crisis. Equally, a lower dollar would make imports costlier for the United States, while a strong dollar comes with lower import prices. But while a low dollar would help to expand exports, a strong dollar impedes export growth. Therefore, the United States will have high trade deficits as long as the economy does not fall deeper into recession.

Without an adaptation that would increase savings, decrease consumption, and reduce imports, the US economy can only go on in the old fashion with ever more debt accumulation. But the limit of debt expansion has been reached. The financial crisis has reduced the willingness of domestic and foreign creditors to extend loans.

Foreign creditors are getting ready to reduce their holding of US debt in a more drastic way. The governmental takeover of the mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailed out the monetary authorities of China, Japan, Russia, and other foreign countries that hold agency debt. As a result of the socialization of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises, the Treasury opened a window of opportunity for these countries to unload their US assets at subsidized prices, all at the cost of the US taxpayer.

A profound restructuring of global capital has become unavoidable. Such a process is quite different from a recession in the traditional sense. In contrast to a sharp and typically short-lived recession, when, after the rupture, business as usual can go on, the restructuring of a distorted capital structure will require time to play out. Rebalancing the distorted capital structure of an economy requires enduring nitty-gritty entrepreneurial piecemeal work. This can only be done under the guidance of the discovery process of competition, as it is inherent in the workings of the price system of the unhampered market.

Anticyclical fiscal and monetary policies are of no help when it comes to the daily toil in business to work towards reestablishing a balanced capital structure. The so-called income multiplier won’t work, and lower interest rates won’t stimulate spending. On the contrary: these policy measures only make the task of the entrepreneur harder.
“Ignorant of the lessons of the Austrian School, the authorities will most likely continue with their disastrous policies.”

The difficulties ahead arise from the problem that business as usual cannot go on under conditions of a credit crunch, which has its roots in the distortions of the economy’s capital structure. Thus, even if the financial market turmoil were to settle, there won’t be the simple resumption of the old ways of doing business. The belief that, after the financial crisis is over, the real economy can reemerge unscathed, is probably the greatest error that many investors share with the policymakers.

As a result of the bailouts and the socialization of the mortgage agencies, the financial system is now fully infected with moral hazard. The disastrous effects of these government interventions will show up soon. The major task of bringing the capital structure in order is still ahead and more pain is in the waiting.

As long as governments and central banks continue to focus on the monetary symptoms of the “secondary depression” and continue to ignore the structural aspects of the “primary depression,” they act like quacks. Ignorant of the lessons of the Austrian School, the authorities will most likely continue with their disastrous policies.

Antony Mueller is the founder of the Continental Economics Institute . He is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and academic director of the Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil. He maintains the blog Money, Markets, and the Business Cycle.

YET ANOTHER DESCRIPTION OF CROOKED BANKING

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

ludwig Von Mises Institute

Do you know where the bank gets the $160,000 for your mortgage? It’s very simple. Someone walks over to a computer and types 160,000 beside your name.

With only $27.93 of cash reserves for every $10,000 of assets (as of June 1999) the bank has just created the remaining $159,553 of that interest-earning money out of thin air.

When, after 25 years of hard work, you pay off your mortgage, the $159,553 vanishes back into thin air. Not so the interest however. It vanishes into the banker’s pocket.

Chartered (i.e. privately owned) banks, such as The Bank of Montreal, The Royal Bank, The CIBC, etc. have created about 95 percent of our total money supply ($589.1 billion as of Sept 1999) in exactly this way.

But the cash reserves in their vaults amount to only a paltry $3.893 billion. (About $32 billion of cash circulates in public hands.) This is called fractional reserve banking, and it’s the greatest scam of all time because it creates debt for no reason other than to enrich the banking class.

Its long term effect – as becomes clearer every day – is to steadily suck wealth out of the community and into the hands of a few people, a fact that bankers and most politicians stubbornly refuse to admit.

Charging interest on money created out of nothing is, in the main, unjust and immoral, and Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible (Deuteronomy 23:19), the Koran (2:275-278), the Catholic Church, many codes of law and most writers on morals have condemned it for more than two thousand years.

The historical name for this evil is usury. Nevertheless bankers enjoy peace of mind because they know that the public thinks they merely lend out the savings of their depositors.

In fact, banks create more than 95 percent of all deposits, for when a bank creates a loan it simultaneously creates a deposit. What banks do to justify the accusation of being economic parasites is to lend out interest-bearing money of their own creation using a very thin sliver of legal tender (cash) to back it up.

How did the banks gain this oppressive power of charging interest on mere computer entries? Very simply they lobbied and hoodwinked our politicians into giving it to them.

Before World War II cash reserves of 1:10 had been the norm in practice. This meant that if you deposited $100 of cash in a bank, the banking system (though not that one bank) would eventually use that $100 to create up to $900 of credit.

That credit shows up in their books as $900 of interest-bearing loans (assets), and $900 of deposits (liabilities). Note that credit is not cash – only the Bank of Canada (BoC) can print and coin money – but it’s money nonetheless because you can buy things with it as long as the bank honours your cheques.

In 1991 legislation was quietly passed that eliminated required cash reserves by mid 1994. The result? Figures from the Bank of Canada Review show that by September 1998 the ratio of the banks’ cash reserves ($3.893 billion) to their total assets ($1393 billion) had soared to 1:358, a ratio that was never more than 1:15 in the first half of this century.

That means for every dollar of cash in their vaults or deposited with the central bank (i.e. the BoC) the banks have conjured up $357 from the void which they’ve invested or lent out with interest. Hence the record profits.

Meanwhile not one person in a hundred grasps the fact that our government permits private banks to create about 95 percent of our money supply bringing huge profits to them and endless debt to us.

Nowadays the big profits lie in government bonds, currency speculation, the stock market, and derivatives; and banks, with their power of money creation, are up to their eyeballs in all four.

But there’s always a day of reckoning. History teaches us that banks are forever finding new ways to commit financial suicide, and when they do they bring the public down with them. (With the collapse of their debt-pyramids the once mighty Japanese banks have been living off the public purse for years.) But what we witnessed in 1998 was unprecedented in human history. In South East Asia, Russia and Latin America, national economies were plundered and millions impoverished, almost overnight, through the deliberate manipulation of “free” market forces.

Now that our money supply has been essentially privatized, how can we free ourselves from this sly form of economic tyranny? In the three quotes below a famous American president, a famous Canadian prime minister, and a governor of the Bank of England in the 1920s tell us exactly what needs to be done.

Unfortunately, there’s never been a reform of the banking system while the banks were in the driver’s seat. They must first be rendered helpless by an economic collapse. When that blow comes two facts should be etched in our minds: 1) a government can lend interest-free money into existence by borrowing from its own bank, The BoC, — unfortunately The BoC has become a puppet of the financial elite, despite its mandate to serve the interests of all Canadians — or, it can borrow interest-bearing money into existence by borrowing from privately owned banks; 2) a government that borrows with interest from private banks, when it can create its own interest-free money, is a government of idiots or thieves.

Unfortunately, the human mind finds it easier to believe a lie it’s heard a hundred times before than to believe a truth it’s hearing for the first time. We hope that the words of Jefferson, MacKenzie King and Stamp will help break down any natural scepticism you may feel when we claim that the chartered banks, in collusion with The Bank of Canada and with the complicity of our government, are riding on the backs of the citizens of this country. The right to create money belongs to the people (see notes on “It’s Your Money” by William Hixson), and it is the sacred duty of the state to exercise this right for their benefit.

Instead, the bonanza of money creation has been handed over to private bankers by ignorant, irresponsible politicians.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs”. Thomas Jefferson.

“Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile… Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws… Usury once in control will wreck any nation”. William Lyon Mackenzie King.

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of the pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again… Take this great power away from them and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in… But, if you want to be the slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit”.
Sir Josiah Stamp
(Governor of the Bank of England in the 1920s)

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

ludwig Von Mises Institute

GOVERNMENT BY CONTROL FREAKS

The Government sanctimoniously announces today plans to force people in receipt of welfare benefits back to work, even if they are looking after young children or incapacitated with chronic illness. It’s time the ’something for nothing’ welfare culture ended, the Government smugly announces.

I couldn’t agree more. The four million odd people living on ‘welfare’ in the UK – about a fifth of the working population – is a ridiculous indictment of how completely incompetent the Government has been.

Perhaps if the greedy, grasping hand of Gordon Brown’s rapacious taxman stopped stealing such vast sums of money from people when they did want to work hard to better themselves, several million people ground down by government bureaucracy which makes it pretty much impossible for many people to escape being trapped on welfare benefits would actually be able to work. Nearly all of them are desperate to work in fact.

It is the choking death grip of Government interference in every conceivable part of daily life that prevents people from working and distorts the economy into creating artificially low wages for the more ordinary, basic jobs . This low wage economy deliberately created by the Labour Government forces nearly the entire population into relying on handouts of one sort or another from the Government.

This suits Gordon and cronies, though, because it means even more minute control over everyone and creates a vast army of brainless bureaucrats pointlessly employed on very low wages by the Government to dictate and control every detail of our lives. These ever increasing millions of people employed by the Government to do it’s bidding and destroy our lives are more easily brainwashed into supporting the dreadful system that pays their wages by voting for their corrupt masters. It is the story of socialism throughout history.

We now have things like the ridiculous concept of the Government doling out extra little handouts to pay winter fuel bills for pensioners to stop hordes of them dying from cold because they no longer have enough money to pay for the ordinary basic things in life like their own fuel bills. Meanwhile more taxes are piled onto everyone to pay for rubbish bin police and local Council spying departments peering at the population through millions of CCTV cameras watching every move in a nightmarish parody of George Orwell’s Big Brother thought police.

This is no longer a ‘free’ country. It is now very definitely a police state where the majority of everyone’s time is spent being forced to deal with endless pettiness, incomprehensible record keeping and form filling, and a slavish devotion to channelling the sum total of human existence through meaninglessly confusing and pointless computer systems with the delusion all this somehow improves modern life. It doesn’t. It’s time wasting garbage really.

Daily life has become infinitely more tedious and time wasting as the Government has forced everything to be minutely and laboriously documented and recorded through computer keyboards. This now allows Big Brother Government to inspect and control everything we do.

This Government, collectively, is a bunch of dangerous, delusional, corrupt idiots. They are completely destroying the daily lives of everyone in this country.

A PRIVATISED MONEY SUPPLY

Modern Banking and the Fractional Reserve System

by Murray N. Rothbard
  
We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal cartelization of the nation’s banks through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.



Banking is a particularly arcane part of the economic system; one of the problems is that the word “bank” covers many different activities, with very different implications. During the Renaissance era, the Medicis in Italy and the Fuggers in Germany, were “bankers”; their banking, however, was not only private but also began at least as a legitimate, non-inflationary, and highly productive activity.

Essentially, these were “merchant-bankers,” who started as prominent merchants. In the course of their trade, the merchants began to extend credit to their customers, and in the case of these great banking families, the credit or “banking” part of their operations eventually overshadowed their mercantile activities.

These firms lent money out of their own profits and savings, and earned interest from the loans. Hence, they were channels for the productive investment of their own savings. 

To the extent that banks lend their own savings, or mobilize the savings of others, their activities are productive and unexceptionable. Even in our current commercial banking system, if I buy a $10,000 CD (“certificate of deposit”) redeemable in six months, earning a certain fixed interest return, I am taking my savings and lending it to a bank, which in turn lends it out at a higher interest rate, the differential being the bank’s earnings for the function of channeling savings into the hands of credit-worthy or productive borrowers.

There is no problem with this process. 

The same is even true of the great “investment banking” houses, which developed as industrial capitalism flowered in the nineteenth century. Investment bankers would take their own capital, or capital invested or loaned by others, to underwrite corporations gathering capital by selling securities to stockholders and creditors.

The problem with the investment bankers is that one of their major fields of investment was the underwriting of government bonds, which plunged them hip-deep into politics, giving them a powerful incentive for pressuring and manipulating governments, so that taxes would be levied to pay off their and their clients’ government bonds.

Hence, the powerful and baleful political influence of investment bankers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in particular, the Rothschilds in Western Europe, and Jay Cooke and the House of Morgan in the United States. 

By the late nineteenth century, the Morgans took the lead in trying to pressure the U.S. government to cartelize industries they were interested in – first railroads and then manufacturing: to protect these industries from the winds of free competition, and to use the power of government to enable these industries to restrict production and raise prices. 

In particular, the investment bankers acted as a ginger group to work for the cartelization of commercial banks.

To some extent, commercial bankers lend out their own capital and money acquired by CDs. But most commercial banking is “deposit banking” based on a gigantic scam: the idea, which most depositors believe, that their money is down at the bank, ready to be redeemed in cash at any time. If Jim has a checking account of $1,000 at a local bank, Jim knows that this is a “demand deposit,” that is, that the bank pledges to pay him $1,000 in cash, on demand, anytime he wishes to “get his money out.” Naturally, the Jims of this world are convinced that their money is safely there, in the bank, for them to take out at any time.

Hence, they think of their checking account as equivalent to a warehouse receipt. If they put a chair in a warehouse before going on a trip, they expect to get the chair back whenever they present the receipt. Unfortunately, while banks depend on the warehouse analogy, the depositors are systematically deluded. Their money ain’t there. 

An honest warehouse makes sure that the goods entrusted to its care are there, in its storeroom or vault.

But banks operate very differently, at least since the days of such deposit banks as the Banks of Amsterdam and Hamburg in the seventeenth century, which indeed acted as warehouses and backed all of their receipts fully by the assets deposited, e.g., gold and silver. This honest deposit or “giro” banking is called “100 percent reserve” banking. Ever since, banks have habitually created warehouse receipts (originally bank notes and now deposits) out of thin air.

Essentially, they are counterfeiters of fake warehouse-receipts to cash or standard money, which circulate as if they were genuine, fullybacked notes or checking accounts. Banks make money by literally creating money out of thin air, nowadays exclusively deposits rather than bank notes.

This sort of swindling or counterfeiting is dignified by the term “fractional-reserve banking,” which means that bank deposits are backed by only a small fraction of the cash they promise to have at hand and redeem. (Right now, in the United States, this minimum fraction is fixed by the Federal Reserve System at 10 percent.)



Fractional Reserve Banking



Let’s see how the fractional reserve process works, in the absence of a central bank. I set up a Rothbard Bank, and invest $1,000 of cash (whether gold or government paper does not matter here). Then I “lend out” $10,000 to someone, either for consumer spending or to invest in his business.

How can I “lend out” far more than I have? Ahh, that’s the magic of the “fraction” in the fractional reserve. I simply open up a checking account of $10,000 which I am happy to lend to Mr. Jones. Why does Jones borrow from me? Well, for one thing, I can charge a lower rate of interest than savers would. I don’t have to save up the money myself, but simply can counterfeit it out of thin air. (In the nineteenth century, I would have been able to issue bank notes, but the Federal Reserve now monopolizes note issues.)

Since demand deposits at the Rothbard Bank function as equivalent to cash, the nation’s money supply has just, by magic, increased by $10,000. The inflationary, counterfeiting process is under way. 

The nineteenth-century English economist Thomas Tooke correctly stated that “free trade in banking is tantamount to free trade in swindling.”

But under freedom, and without government support, there are some severe hitches in this counterfeiting process, or in what has been termed “free banking.” First: why should anyone trust me? Why should anyone accept the checking deposits of the Rothbard Bank? But second, even if I were trusted, and I were able to con my way into the trust of the gullible, there is another severe problem, caused by the fact that the banking system is competitive, with free entry into the field. After all, the Rothbard Bank is limited in its clientele.

After Jones borrows checking deposits from me, he is going to spend it. Why else pay money for a loan? Sooner or later, the money he spends, whether for a vacation, or for expanding his business, will be spent on the goods or services of clients of some other bank, say the Rockwell Bank. The Rockwell Bank is not particularly interested in holding checking accounts on my bank; it wants reserves so that it can pyramid its own counterfeiting on top of cash reserves.

And so if, to make the case simple, the Rockwell Bank gets a $10,000 check on the Rothbard Bank, it is going to demand cash so that it can do some inflationary counterfeit-pyramiding of its own. But, I, of course, can’t pay the $10,000, so I’m finished. Bankrupt. Found out. By rights, I should be in jail as an embezzler, but at least my phoney checking deposits and I are out of the game, and out of the money supply.



Hence, under free competition, and without government support and enforcement, there will only be limited scope for fractional-reserve counterfeiting. Banks could form cartels to prop each other up, but generally cartels on the market don’t work well without government enforcement, without the government cracking down on competitors who insist on busting the cartel, in this case, forcing competing banks to pay up.



Central Banking



Hence the drive by the bankers themselves to get the government to cartelize their industry by means of a central bank. Central Banking began with the Bank of England in the 1690s, spread to the rest of the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and finally was imposed upon the United States by banking cartelists via the Federal Reserve System of 1913. Particularly enthusiastic about the Central Bank were the investment bankers, such as the Morgans, who pioneered the cartel idea, and who by this time had expanded into commercial banking. 

In modern central banking, the Central Bank is granted the monopoly of the issue of bank notes (originally written or printed warehouse receipts as opposed to the intangible receipts of bank deposits), which are now identical to the government’s paper money and therefore the monetary “standard” in the country.

People want to use physical cash as well as bank deposits. If, therefore, I wish to redeem $1,000 in cash from my checking bank, the bank has to go to the Federal Reserve, and draw down its own checking account with the Fed, “buying” $1,000 of Federal Reserve Notes (the cash in the United States today) from the Fed. The Fed, in other words, acts as a bankers’ bank. Banks keep checking deposits at the Fed and these deposits constitute their reserves, on which they can and do pyramid ten times the amount in checkbook money. 



Here’s how the counterfeiting process works in today’s world. Let’s say that the Federal Reserve, as usual, decides that it wants to expand (i.e., inflate) the money supply. The Federal Reserve decides to go into the market (called the “open market”) and purchase an asset. It doesn’t really matter what asset it buys; the important point is that it writes out a check. The Fed could, if it wanted to, buy any asset it wished, including corporate stocks, buildings, or foreign currency. In practice, it almost always buys U.S. government securities.



Let’s assume that the Fed buys $10,000,000 of U.S. Treasury bills from some “approved” government bond dealer (a small group), say Shearson, Lehman on Wall Street. The Fed writes out a check for $10,000,000, which it gives to Shearson, Lehman in exchange for $10,000,000 in U.S. securities. Where does the Fed get the $10,000,000 to pay Shearson, Lehman? It creates the money out of thin air. Shearson, Lehman can do only one thing with the check: deposit it in its checking account at a commercial bank, say Chase Manhattan.

The “money supply” of the country has already increased by $10,000,000; no one else’s checking account has decreased at all. There has been a net increase of $10,000,000. 

But this is only the beginning of the inflationary, counterfeiting process. For Chase Manhattan is delighted to get a check on the Fed, and rushes down to deposit it in its own checking account at the Fed, which now increases by $10,000,000.

But this checking account constitutes the “reserves” of the banks, which have now increased across the nation by $10,000,000. But this means that Chase Manhattan can create deposits based on these reserves, and that, as checks and reserves seep out to other banks (much as the Rothbard Bank deposits did), each one can add its inflationary mite, until the banking system as a whole has increased its demand deposits by $100,000,000, ten times the original purchase of assets by the Fed.

The banking system is allowed to keep reserves amounting to 10 percent of its deposits, which means that the “money multiplier” – the amount of deposits the banks can expand on top of reserves – is 10. A purchase of assets of $10 million by the Fed has generated very quickly a tenfold, $100,000,000 increase in the money supply of the banking system as a whole. 

Interestingly, all economists agree on the mechanics of this process even though they of course disagree sharply on the moral or economic evaluation of that process.

But unfortunately, the general public, not inducted into the mysteries of banking, still persists in thinking that their money remains “in the bank.” 

Thus, the Federal Reserve and other central banking systems act as giant government creators and enforcers of a banking cartel; the Fed bails out banks in trouble, and it centralizes and coordinates the banking system so that all the banks, whether the Chase Manhattan, or the Rothbard or Rockwell banks, can inflate together.

Under free banking, one bank expanding beyond its fellows was in danger of imminent bankruptcy. Now, under the Fed, all banks can expand together and proportionately. 

”Deposit Insurance”

But even with the backing of the Fed, fractional reserve banking proved shaky, and so the New Deal, in 1933, added the lie of “bank deposit insurance,” using the benign word “insurance” to mask an arrant hoax.

When the savings and loan system went down the tubes in the late 1980s, the “deposit insurance” of the federal FSLIC [Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation] was unmasked as sheer fraud. The “insurance” was simply the smoke-and-mirrors term for the unbacked name of the federal government. The poor taxpayers finally bailed out the S&Ls, but now we are left with the formerly sainted FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation], for commercial banks, which is now increasingly seen to be shaky, since the FDIC itself has less than one percent of the huge number of deposits it “insures.” 



The very idea of “deposit insurance” is a swindle; how does one insure an institution (fractional reserve banking) that is inherently insolvent, and which will fall apart whenever the public finally understands the swindle? Suppose that, tomorrow, the American public suddenly became aware of the banking swindle, and went to the banks tomorrow morning, and, in unison, demanded cash. What would happen? The banks would be instantly insolvent, since they could only muster 10 percent of the cash they owe their befuddled customers. Neither would the enormous tax increase needed to bail everyone out be at all palatable. No: the only thing the Fed could do, and this would be in their power, would be to print enough money to pay off all the bank depositors.

Unfortunately, in the present state of the banking system, the result would be an immediate plunge into the horrors of hyperinflation. 

Let us suppose that total insured bank deposits are $1,600 billion. Technically, in the case of a run on the banks, the Fed could exercise emergency powers and print $1,600 billion in cash to give to the FDIC to pay off the bank depositors. The problem is that, emboldened at this massive bailout, the depositors would promptly redeposit the new $1,600 billion into the banks, increasing the total bank reserves by $1,600 billion, thus permitting an immediate expansion of the money supply by the banks by tenfold, increasing the total stock of bank money by $16 trillion. Runaway inflation and total destruction of the currency would quickly follow.

This article originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of The Freeman and is reprinted with permission.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty and many other books and articles. He was also academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Murray Rothbard Archives
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MORE LIES FROM MORTGAGE LENDERS

Housing Minister Margaret Becket said on the BBC Radio Four programme this morning (December 4th) that it cost mortgage lenders £35 000 every time they were ‘forced’ to repossess a house when homeowners fell into arrears with their mortgage.

Now I’m sure Margaret Becket hasn’t intentionally constructed a lie or simply invented this figure herself. But it is most definitely a lie and it is a completely fictitious figure too. So where did this piece of fiction come from ?

Could it be from the Council of Mortgage Lenders ?

The truth is most repossessions cost the lenders absolutely nothing. But they cost the persecuted homeowner plenty because it is the homeowner that is made to pay any extra costs incurred by the lender.

Not only does the repossessed homeowner have to pay all the real costs, but lenders invent utterly fictitious ‘costs’ which they add to the final bill to the homeowner. This is all extra profit opportunity for the lender.

This is why the banks were so keen to develop their laughingly labeled ‘subprime’ mortgages. They allow the banks to contrive to make more and more borrowers desperate for a mortgage as the banks falsely label them ‘too risky’ for ordinary, standard mortgages.

This contortion of thinking then allows the banks an excuse to tie these borrowers up by forcing them to accept weasel mortgage contracts worthy only of Shylock the evil money lender. The contracts are specifically designed to fleece the borrower at every turn and push him further into debt as his home is stolen bit by bit by the system the banks have deliberately designed to do exactly that.

You see, the banks have all got together to form a sort of cartel or effectively a monopoly where they all follow the same procedures to milk as much money as possible from their customers and in particular to catastrophically penalise the most disadvantaged and poorer people.

I personally know of a case where a homeowner has been systematically milked of about half a million pounds of the value of his house as he was repossessed four times in rapid succession. Mortgage lenders literally forced him to remortgage again and again by using their artfully constructed lending system to get their hands on nearly all the equity by means of falsely claimed ‘expenses’ and ludicrously named ‘early redemption penalties’ Oh, and rapaciously higher interest charges on the completely false premise of ‘higher risk’.

So where, precisely, does this claim of each repossession costing the mortgage lender £35 000 come from ?

I suspect it is a figure mostly comprising the imaginary losses dreamed up by lenders of the loss of profit they would have obtained if the mortgage had continued.

In other words they have lost absolutely nothing at all except their greedy little dream on some further profit in the future which their twisted minds makes them think they can describe as a real loss now.

It is a lie. It is the same as you or I saying we have ‘lost’ a million pounds because we failed to earn more money than we have. It is a fiction. Just like a lot of what the banks get up to. They are so used to habitual lying they no longer have any understanding of the truth – just like most other career criminals.

DIMWIT GORDON BROWN COLLUDES WITH BANKER’S FRAUD

Gordon Brown and his Government of utter dimwits are undoubtedly very, very stupid for being completely incapable of handling the nation’s finances sensibly since 1997. But how did the recession really come about ?

It was the banks of course !

They have a collective, unconscious collusion – the banking system. With all it’s rules and collectively agreed systems and methodology it spiralled out of the realms of honest morality into pure fraud. Banks abused their position of privilege which allows them to ‘manufacture’ new money without limit.

They competed savagely with each other to magick out of thin air ever increasing amounts of cash because the more money they conjured into existence, the more they could lend and the more money they could make for their greedy, selfish selves.

All this money had to be lent out. It cannot be ‘manufactured’ unless it is loaned. So ever increasingly dodgy wheezes were invented by banks to make the money go round faster and faster because every time the pile of dosh passed through their hands, they could take a hefty cut and put in their own pockets. Good wheeze hey ?

Once they set this merry go round in motion it had to go round faster and faster to stop the whole fraudulent lie falling apart – precisely the same as all the other similar criminal frauds of the past. The criminal fraternity coined the word ‘churning’ to describe it.

The banks dreamt up a myriad different ways they could trap even the most prudent members of the public into using larger and larger amounts of borrowed money. The banks also ratcheted up all their charges as they realised the public were just a herd of sheep that would soon get used to the outrageous charges that would have been inconceivable at any other time in recorded history.

I mean just look at the complete joke that is the credit card system. The banks have somehow succeeded in persuading most of the population into thinking there is some mysteriously good reason for routinely using credit cards for some or all of all money transactions. The banks know this will result in many credit card users being trapped into what can only be described as vicious, extortionate charges.

That is the only purpose the banks had in mind when they created the credit card system. It was designed purely so they could build up a mountain of debt that people could not afford to pay off immediately. That would result in all those ‘penalty’ clauses in the small print that would allow the banks to sanctimoniously declare the credit card user had ‘broken’ the ‘rules’ and ‘terms and conditions’ ‘agreed’ with the user now ‘allowed’ the banks to make charges that really only amount to carefully crafted theft.

It is called ‘conversion’ by lawyers and it is a criminal offence to acquire other people’s property by means of this kind of deliberate deception.

This latest wheeze of paying cash savers considerably less interest than the rate of inflation is just another variety of the fraudulent crime of deliberate ‘conversion’. Specifically designed to take your money and pay you, say, two percent for saving it with a bank; then lending your money (along with ten times that amount of magically manufactured ‘new’ money) to your neighbour who pays the bank, say, eight per cent (if he’s lucky) on a loan.

So, let’s just work this out shall we ? The bank pays you two percent, lends about ten times the amount you have saved at eight per cent – that’s a total of eighty per cent for all of you dullards at maths – the bank makes eighty percent from your savings but pays the saver just two per cent – well below the rate of inflation !

So the actual real value of the savers’ money steadily shrinks, while the banks just get fatter and fatter. Oh to be a banker, you just can’t help getting richer and richer; both in recessions and boom times. You have the population by the jugular in both cases.

How stupid can we savers get ? Obviously, the banks could pay the saver well over the rate of inflation and still be left with a hugely profitable chunk of the eighty per cent they make quoted in this example.

Of course it is only by contriving to keep ordinary, financially unsavvy people, ignorant of how finance really works that has enabled these nasty fraudsters to get away with the breathtakingly criminal behaviour they have.

Think about it ! They have actually destroyed the entire Global economy in a matter of weeks. Millions of people losing jobs and having their lives ruined.
Many even being hurled out of their homes onto the streets and into extreme poverty and deprivation. All because banks are greedy, self seeking and just plain immoral and nasty.

Even the most highly educated people like news readers and Government Ministers routinely say they don’t understand the weird financial ‘derivatives’ and even bankers themselves fail to understand it all. Most people seem to cheerfully admit to simply not being able to understand how economics work

They don’t. That is why we are in such a mess – by allowing the banks to be the sole means of controlling the economy; incompetently !

Isn’t it about time we did something about controlling the excesses of this evil banking system ?

Obviously they lack the simple morality to control their greed themselves !

IS THE NHS A JOKE ?

AN EVERY DAY TRUE STORY OF GIVING BIRTH WITH THE NHS

‘On the Thursday I was seven days overdue with her. So, seven days late.

I was having really bad back pain, it was really uncomfortable. So I rang up the hospital and they said ‘Oh well come up and we will have a look at you.

This was on Thursday night. When I got there I was two centimetres. I was having contractions every three or four minutes.

Being two centimetres dilated is a clear indication of the start of labour. And ten centimetres is when it’s the start of when you’re about to have your baby.

I stayed in Redhill overnight on the Thursday because I was still having contractions and they gave me some painkillers – some codemol and it sent her to sleep. because they are quite strong painkillers she went off to sleep so it stopped my contractions.

So I Came home – this was on the Friday morning at eight O’clock . I was discharged from Redhill. They just said, well it’s going to happen you’ll just kind of have to go home until ….and see what happens. So I came home.

I went off to Harry’s school play and was wandering around in quite a lot of pain. About two o’clock I rang my friend who was taking me to hospital. It was all arranged that when I had to go to hospital I said I think I really need to back now. So okay we’ll go up there.

I got to Redhill about three o’clock Friday afternoon. They said oh right you’re four centimetres it’s definitely going to happen now. Stand up, get moving walk around because that will bring it on The more you do that the quicker it will be basically. So I’m there wandering all around the hospital i8n and out of the room Im in trying to get it all moving .

I was examined again at five o’clock and I was still four centimetres but I was having contractions every three minutes then and they could see on the trace that they were getting stronger So then I was like this is my third baby so it should be quite quick.

Then about seven o’clock the midwife said we are going to break your waters at seven thirty. Because when she did the internal examination of the baby she could feel the waters of the baby bulging out. They were ready to break anyway. Any moment they could have done it themselves. She said but at seven thirty we’ll come and do it for you then it will happen really quickly because I was in quite a lot of pain.

I said okay then. At then at quarter to eight – when they were supposed to come at half seven to break my waters – at quarter to eight another midwife came in and same I’m really sorry we can’t do that we’re too busy and you’re going to have to go home.

I was, like, you are joking. My friend was like what. By then I was quite emotional and just started crying I didn’t know what to do with myself I was having like full blown contractions every three minutes They were just like we’re too busy you’ll just have to go home.

And I said that I live in Horsham it will take me at least forty five minutes to get here in a rush kind of thing.

Oh no you’ll be fine like you’ll have loads of time when it happens even though the midwife who came in before had said once your waters break you’ll have your baby quickly because it’s your third baby it’ll be quicker. And because my labours with the other two have only been like a maximum of two hours from when my waters are breaking.

And I was like, really, I didn’t know what to do with myself I was crying I rang my Mum up was like I don’t know what to do my Mum was, just got a little bit angry not of me that was the hospital on their heads be it kind of thing if you come home and it happens they will be responsible for that. So I came home from Redhill my friend driving. Got all the way back to the Faygate roundabout at the end of the road and my waters broke and I was like oh no and my friend was like shall we just turn round and go back Thank goodness we didn’t because this was like probably at nine o’clock by then we were at Faygate roundabout when my waters broke, so I thought hang on, that’s about five or ten minutes from home.

We came back here and I rang up Redhill. As soon as my waters broke my contractions were like one after the other I wasn’t even getting a rest between them. They were like straight away. And I got out of the car and I had to crawl up the front path because I couln’t even walk it was so painful.

So I came in and rang up the delivery suite which I’d just left at Redhill and said look you’ve just discharged me and she went yea I know you’ve just left I was like well I’ve just got home my waters broke she could hear me on the phone like (moaning and crying) having like she was like.

She said don’t worry, don’t rush just get back up here in the next hour or so. I said to her I haven’t got an hour.

If it was your first baby maybe you might not know but it was my third and I knew I was never going to make it back to Redhill. So I said I was not going to make it. She was like you will don’t worry no need to panic you’ll be fine .

So I got off the phone and my Mum’s friend was here looking after the boys they were asleep in bed. She said you’re not going to make it are you I was like no asnd I don’t know what by something was just like ring an ambulance I’m not going to make it I think it was twenty to ten on Friday night when we rang the paramedic. We had arrived back at about quarter past nine.

About twenty to ten when we rang the paramedics. My friend rang them for me and she was like she’s in labour she having contractions literally a minute apart there was hardly any rest in between them. Obviously while they were on the phone they send the ambulance don’t they.

The lady on the phone was talking to her… saying take her trousers off sit her on the floor get her comfortable and everything The paramedics took eleven minutes from the time when they got the call to when they got here I think they were from Crawley They said they had sent a midwife at the same time.

They came in and said how is it and I said it’s really painful and they said it’s okay we’re going to take you back to Redhill. He sat down on the floor in front of me and I literally just pushed once and she was there and he was like well okay then we won’t be going back to Redhill. And the midwife was then another hour and forty minutes after they arrived for her to get here. It was all over and done by the time she got here.

She just checked the baby and weighed and stuff. It was all over and done with.

It was the fourteenth of November.

Common sense says a woman beginning dilations stays in hospital. I should never have been sent home.

Obviously when I ,was there in hospital and it was four centimetres and I had been for three or four hours . In those three or four hours I was having contractions every three minutes it wasn’t as if nothing was happening. The whole time I was there I was having contractions every three minutes. And they could see by the monitor ,they put on you and trace the baby’s heart beat and the contractions and they could see by the trace that everey time I was having contractions they were getting stronger and more intense.

So basically I was sent home in the middle of childbirth.

The staff were just really rude like I know that I’m only young I’m twenty two, nearly twenty three but it was my third baby I knew what I was doing it wasn’t like it was my first baby. I know some people are a bit dramatic and over the top with their first one but with my third baby I knew what my body was doing and I knew that I was in labour. They knew that I was in labour
and they had already said I was four centimetres dilated.

They were really rude and offhand you’ll be fine just go for a walk it’ll happen when it happens. Well obviously I know that but … When she came in and said I think you’ve got to go home we’ve got no space for you we need the room and you’re just going to have to go home I was really upset then I was in a lot of pain and I was really crying.

I said I’m really worried that I’m not going to make it back I’m really scared that when I have my baby not in hospital that’s the scariest thing in the World. Oh you’ll be fine she said. She really brushed it off. And I was like that’s not really what I wanted to hear.

I never had a doctor the whole time was there it was all midwives. They just leave you alone with a buzzer and come in and check you every hour.

All my friends and people I have spoken to that have babies and that all don’t go to Redhill they go to Haywards Heath They think it is a much nicer hospital and they are much better there.

And I’ve had this like obviously my third baby I’ve never had any problems at Redhill. I’ve always said , you know what, they were amazing. You know what Harry was six weeks premature and they were absolutely amazing with him. they were like took him into special care they were absolutely brilliant I stayed in for five days after I had Harry and I would never have had a bad word to say about them.

With George I was induced which means you’re there for the whole day and a whole night kind of thing until you have your baby.

They were amazing then. This time they were just awful. I don’t know if it’s just because … Oh and when the paramedics came the day they sent me home The paramedic said that was the day they had closed emergency services at Haywards Heath so everyone was going to Redhill.
So they obviously sent me home because they were so busy because Haywards Heath were accepting no more patients.

So I had to go home because they didn’t have space for me.

If I had turned the car around to go back to the hospital when my waters broke at the Faygate roundabout like my friend had wanted to I would have had my baby at the side of the road That night it was minus four. When the paramedics came out they said it was minus four.

And I would have had my baby on the side of the road just me and my friend . It was lucky I decided to go home rather than back to the hospital. Because I never would made it back there. I would have had her on the side of the road in the freezing cold on my own.

I don’t know if we would have been able to cope. We had no blankets or anything in the car. It was like minus four. It wasn’t like you were at home and could get towels and blankets and obviously if you’re in hospital they take the baby and put it straight under a heater.

If there had been any kind of complication it could have been seriously dangerous.

After I had George, my second child, the baby before her I had a haemorage and I had to have a blood transfusion so I’ve already had that complication with him and it could have happened again. And I would have been in my front room with the paramedics hoping they had some blood in their ambulance otherwise God knows what would have happened.

I can’t imagine how I would have coped if there had been injury to my baby; I’d be going mental. I would be doing everything I could not to let this happen to anyone else.

It’s bad enough that I had to have my baby on my own at home. Luckily I had people with me. What if I had just been at home completely on my own.

Luckily my two older children were asleep in bed. They slept through all of it. But they were here the whole time. How traumatised would they have been if they had walked in and watched me give birth on the floor.

My local midwife who goes through your pregnancy the whole way through wrote a letter of complaint to Redhill and so did my doctor.

Are Banks Thieves ?

The outrageousness behaviour of banks has been dramatically illustrated with the case of Cheltenham student Laura Gibson, whose 8 pence overdraft with Lloyds TSB has turned into a bank charge of more than £800.

Lloyds TSB has threatened Laura, 20, of Cheltenham, with legal action to recover the debt, which began when she made a £60 purchase in September last year. The purchase put Ms Gibson 8p in the red which immediately triggered a fee of £65.

As Ms Gibson did not clear the overdraft she was charged a further £30 in October, £60 in December and £78 in January. Then in May, Lloyds TSB increased its unauthorised overdraft charges to a flat rate of up to £20 a day.

She said: “This whole episode has been an absolute nightmare. I’ve now paid more than £300 in charges but still they want more. I’ve stopped using the account and the way I’ve been treated is disgraceful.”

Ms Gibson, who is enrolled to start A-Levels in September, says the stress of the charges contributed to a nervous breakdown. “Lloyds TSB have been harassing me by telephone and by mail, putting pressure on me to pay this money back. I feel that it is morally irresponsible that the bank can charge people such ridiculous amounts of money especially when some of the charges amount to more than my income each week.”

Last week, research conducted by Moneynet.co.uk, the price comparison website, found that Lloyds TSB had the most expensive overdraft charges of all the high street banks. Moneynet compared the charges incurred on an unauthorised overdraft of £50 over two weeks. HSBC had the lowest fee of £25.10 but Lloyds TSB charged £165.36, almost double the rate of the next most expensive bank.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has extended a waiver that allows the banks to put on hold customers’ complaints about overdraft charges. The decision means that tens of thousands of customers hoping for refunds of charges will have to wait for at least another six months to learn if they will receive any compensation.

The FSA said the waiver extension should give sufficient time for the Court of Appeal to decide whether the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has the right to determine a fair level for overdraft fees. In April, the OFT won a test case in the High Court confirming its jurisdiction over bank charges but the banks appealed the decision.

Martin Lewis, of Moneysavingexpert.com, a consumer website, criticised the FSA for siding with the banks. He said: “It’s nearly a year since the FSA first kiboshed reclaiming, and people are still sitting on their hands, unable to try to reclaim money which was taken from their accounts without their permission, while the banks continue to make hundreds of millions in charges. How long are people expected to wait?”

An OFT report claimed the high street banks make about £2.6 billion a year from unauthorised overdraft charges. The report also criticised the banks for the complexity of their charges as well as their lack of transparency, making it difficult for customers to compare current accounts.

(I found this little gem of a story about how the dishonest banks prey on ordinary people somewhere else on the internet and thought it deserved repeating to the widest possible audience. I have no doubt it is completely accurate as I have had similar experiences and certainly heard of many others.)

WHAT CAUSED THE CREDIT CRUNCH ?

The Smoking Gun of Predatory Lending

What really amazes me about this Worldwide Financial Catastrophe is how no one seems to really know exactly what caused it and what the solution actually is.

The cause seems blindingly obvious to me, as does the solution. But then I do have the huge advantage of not having studied economics or ever being employed in any capacity within any part of the dubious financial industry.

The cause of the Global Financial Crash is simply this.

Because banks create most of the money in existence by means of the ‘Fractional Reserve Banking’ system, it is completely essential banks act honestly, with probity and faultless morality as well as very great care about how they lend.

This would mean borrowers were treated honestly, fairly and with great consideration as they are the sole means of the banks being able to increase real economic prosperity by creating almost unlimited new money using Fractional Reserve Banking. Confidence is absolutely everything with money, so being very careful about how you treat borrowers is completely essential to safe, reliable and stable banking and prosperous economies.

But the banks didn’t act morally at all. They seemed to have no comprehension of morality, honesty, probity and certainly not fairness or care. Why ? Simply because they became increasingly greedy – and they got away with it for years as banking disintegrated into a farcical comedy of ostentatious wide boys and spivs who elbowed their way into the banking world to displace genuinely decent bankers.

Confidence eroded as morality, honesty, probity and fairness utterly disappeared – along with any concept of treating borrowers fairly. Deviousness in banking became so widespread banks even became frightened to lend to each other for fear of being fleeced by rival banks with unreliable, dodgy bits of paper pretending to be valuable financial instruments.

Lending became increasingly predatory and unfair in all sorts of ways – perhaps the most despicable being subprime mortgages, whereby banks realised they could get away with fleecing homeowners in a manner which is profoundly dishonest. To my mind it is clear the subprime lenders have a case to answer for the illegal ‘Conversion’ of homeowners equity.

For the uninitiated ‘Conversion’ is a legal term describing a “tort” or civil wrong whereby property is ‘converted’ away from the rightful owner to another person by means of undue influence, trickery and misrepresentation . It describes a kind of theft really, which is not quite criminal theft, but is just, only just, on the other side of the dividing line between criminality and non-criminal activity. It is illegal however – just not imprisonable – at least not until the culprit refuses to give back the property in question.

If the banks had remained doing business with the levels of morality that existed a few decades ago and taken the same care in recent times as they did then, we would not be in the middle of Global Financial Meltdown and a Depression screaming into being with astonishing speed.

So, the solution is to exert very tight control on the banks and all their activities to force them to abide by the obvious rules of morality. It is really that simple.

The banks have caused Worldwide financial disaster by very suddenly reducing lending to borrowers of any kind to a mere fraction of what it should be. This is the direct and the only cause of the Global financial meltdown and gathering recession.

The banks are simply destroying virtually the entire supply of money instead of doing their usual job of creating it. This prevents trading, which then causes job losses, which in turn causes even less money to exist, which in the downward spiral the banks have irresponsibly and wantonly manufactured utterly wrecks prosperity for us all across the Globe.

In a moral banking environment things like subprime mortgages wouldn’t exist. I mean, what on earth can be the justification for taking monstrous advantage of the of the poorer and least able members of society struggling at the bottom of the heap. Why should they be conned out of what little money they have and effectively have their very homes stolen from them by rapacious, dishonest banks; deliberately milking them with quite extortionate mortgage terms which are unreasonable, unfair and known by the bankers to be almost impossible to comply with without borrowers losing vast sums of money and even becoming homeless as they are evicted from their homes at the drop of a hat by ruthless, merciless mortgage lenders.

How could this possibly have been allowed to happen. Can anyone tell me ?

The whole of the really interesting research paper by authors Harold L. Bunce, Debbie Gruenstein, Christopher E. Herbert, and Randall M. Scheessele can be seen on the USA Policy Development and Research Information Service website here:

Subprime Foreclosures: The Smoking Gun of Predatory Lending

LEGALISED THEFT ON EPIC SCALE BY BANKS

Manufacturing money and forcing people to borrow

Just a little thought I have to get off my chest. It keeps nagging away at me.

You’ll be noticing how house prices have been sinking like a stone recently as the banks hold onto all the money and refuse to lend it out to anyone – particularly for mortgages as well as businesses and even each other ?

Well then, you might also remember how everyone used to complain how house prices were becoming ever more ridiculously expensive as they climbed up from two or three times an annual salary to many, many times an annual salary.

The ordinary little flat I bought in Bristol in 1971 for three times my annual salary as a junior newspaper reporter was selling for fifteen times the current annual salary of exactly the same kind of job just over a year ago. The same thing happened all over the property market.

Why do you suppose there was this vast change in value ? Think about it carefully for a moment. In 1971 I had to work for just three years for my entire annual earnings to buy a home. A year ago, doing the same job, I would have to work for fifteen years for my complete annual earnings to buy the same home. As we all know, this grotesque distortion in house values caused lots and lots of problems as it progressively destabilised the whole housing market for all of us.

Now, within just a few weeks of the banks creating this Worldwide financial crisis, property prices in the UK and other parts of the World are plummeting as the supply of money everywhere withers and shrinks to almost nothing as the banks simply stop lending to anyone.

This is an extreme state of affairs. It is caused only by banks very suddenly refusing to lend any money because they are fearful the unstable economic circumstances they actually created will mean they won’t get their loans paid back because all the borrowers are busy going bust as a recession roars in from just over the visible horizon. This is the opposite of the banks previously conjuring up too much new money into existence and ramming it down people’s unwilling throats.

Thank you very much all you ‘Masters of the Universe’. Obviously you lot weren’t really as clever as you liked everyone else to think. Perhaps after all, you were just really greedy, rapacious conmen, disguising your dishonesty in a complete fiction of incomprehensible jargon and meaningless garbage which even most of you lot couldn’t understand – never mind the ordinary members of the public.

Now we are paying the price as people lose their jobs and their homes as thousands and thousands of people are catapulted by the banks into extreme poverty.

So what then, was the reason for all this distortion as house prices rose remorselessly to unrealistic, dizzying heights ?

Everyone complained about it but no one seemed to know why it was happening. People tried to think of why it might be happening. They blamed it on a ‘housing shortage’, on ‘too many immigrants coming into the country’, on ‘families disintegrating and more people living on their own as society broke apart at the seams in an orgy of self destruction’, and so on.

But the real reason was quite simply that banks were creating too much money and they had to lend it somewhere. They discovered one of the best and most profitable places to force loans down nearly everybody’s throat was by means of increasingly large mortgages as people were forced to compete with each to offer higher and higher prices for houses just because banks wanted to lend larger and larger sums of money – so they could make more money for themselves ! They quite simply ran out of places to lend money and dreamed up a whole new bottomless pit of possibility for more lending.

This meant that when anyone bought a house, they could only do it by making sure they offered more money than anyone else. The banks were always happy to keep on increasing the size of mortgages because they knew they had a complete stranglehold on each borrower.

The word ‘mortgage’ comes from a medieval phrase meaning ‘death hold’. That pretty much sums up the banks iron grip over the entire population really, doesn’t it !

It was one of the safest and most profitable ways of lending huge amounts of money over a long period of time. Much better, the banks thought, than all this tedious hard work of lending money to businesses over short periods of time. Businesses were much more risky and often went bust; then there was no one to pay loans back to the bank.

Individual householders were easier to pursue and were permanently chained to the banks until they either paid off their loans or died. A much better wheeze, thought the banks.

So, there we have it. Banks can create unlimited amounts of money if they can find somewhere to lend it. This is fine if the lending is sensibly organised and not rapacious and dishonest, or dangerously stupid because it wrecks economies and destroys people’s lives.

But the banks didn’t think of that. They were too immersed in their own greed to care less about what they were doing. As long as they could get away with it anything goes; that was fine by them.

Never mind the damage done to so many other people – or even whole nations. The whole country of Iceland has been made bankrupt and flung into instant poverty and even starvation by the nasty behaviour of the banks ! But the banks are OK, so that’s alright then ?

The ‘Masters of the Universe’ will just keep their heads down low for a bit until the recession blows over, then they will start again; effectively engaging once more in a form of legalised theft on an absolutely epic scale.

If bankers have the legal means of simply conjuring new money into existence, which they do, then there ought to be sensible law to control them and stop the gargantuan amounts of grasping dishonesty we have seen displayed by these dishonest little worms in Modern Times.

Now over to you Prime Minister !

BANKS BECOMING INCREASINGLY INSANE

I overheard this conversation in one of those ‘chatrooms’ on the internet today and I found it priceless. A little cameo of just how mad the banks are becoming now. It’s no wonder they are busy destroying the Worldwide economy – they have completely taken leave of their senses !

0845/0870 calls from banks

Has anyone else received any? I started getting calls from 0845 3312320 on Tuesday purporting to be from LloydsTSB – an automated message that asks you to ring the number and leave your personal details before you can speak to anyone, which of course I didn’t, thinking it was a scam.

After much hassle and about 20 more of these bloody calls I find out they are indeed from Lloyds and am pretty pissed off. In these days of mass fraud how irresponsible is it for banks to be cold calling and asking for your personal details? Am also doubly annoyed because I’ve had endless problems with fraud in the past five years or so, including my ID and cards being stolen, cloned etc, all of which the bank knows about.

Anyone seen any articles about this kind of thing as I’ll be pitching to the money pages if it’s not been done to death.

……..Yep I regularly get them from HSBC too, even though I switched banks a year ago
 

……..Natwest is doing something similar. My bank and other companies have rung me before now and been astonished when I insist on ringing them back before giving any personal info.

……..I did an article about this for the Telegraph – my husband received an automated call from Lloyds when they stopped his card when we were in Morocco. Actually the article was more about cards being stopped when you are on holiday, but that was in there.

……….Lloyds stopped my card after my tenants paid money INTO my account. Their excuse was that it was an unknown transaction – all £750 of it.

…………Lloyds are quite heavy handed about stopping cards. They stopped Alex’s because of “suspicious payments” – it was £30 for our regular Friday night take aways.

……………Whaat?!

…….I know, I thought I’d heard everything. It was a Saturday too, so I couldnt’ even go into a branch. Luckily I was with a friend and she lent me some money so I didn’t have to pay for my bus fare, bagel and coffee with my credit card. I then spent a frustrating hour trying to explain to Lloyds that freezing someone’s account because a couple of hundred quid had been paid into it was not in any way, shape or form helping to safeguard against fraud. And then they ring you up and ask you tell all to machine. Ha!

Aren’t the banks simply a delight to do business with these days !

Or perhaps they are just run by half wits who are so obsessed with their own culture of rapacious greed and vicious treatment of customers, they don’t understand how destructive and immoral they really are.

They seem to be so arrogant they actually think they can do absolutely anything they please with a total disregard of honesty and law.

THE GREAT BANKING SCAM

Makes us all impoverished and enslaved to the banks

How’s this for a little gem of information then ?

“I’m afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”

Reginald Mckenna, past chairman of the Board of the Midlands Bank of England came up with this nasty little truth some long time before today’s credit crunch; and boy oh boy. Just how right he was.

Because the banks can destroy money even faster than they create it in the first place – and that is exactly what they have just done over the entire World economy in just a few weeks recently.

That is why people are being made homeless and losing their jobs all over the World; why the whole fabric of society in Iceland is disintegrating and it’s citizens queuing in doleful lines for food handouts to stop previously middle class professional families starving; people everywhere losing their savings and why we’re all going to have a lousy Christmas this year even if we don’t lose our job; because the entire World economy is going bust. This is because the sheer incompetence and greed of banks has paralysed the supply of money and is rapidly shrinking the total amount available for all of us to spend.

Without the ability of all us to spend, businesses go bust on an epic scale, putting more and more people out of work. This further reduces the amount of money which people would normally be spending at an ever faster and faster rate. A spiral of wanton destruction destroying millions of lives just because the banks are both incompetent and breathtakingly greedy.

They are so dishonest they cannot even trust each other. That is why they don’t want to lend to each other and why they now cannot find enough money to lend to businesses or anyone else.

The financial system relies entirely on banks lending to each other and if they don’t, there is no financial system and there is no money at all. With no money business and trade simply cannot function, so ultimately no one will have a job if the process is taken to its logical conclusion.

So, at a stroke, they are completely destroying the World economy as they close down ever increasing numbers of businesses and turn out hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people, out of their homes and onto the streets.

Quite simply, the banks have destroyed everyone’s trust in money and set about the process of destroying money itself and the only means of World trade.

Decades of building up wealth have vanished in an instant because greasy, immoral, devious thugs have somehow wormed their way into the banking system to wreak havoc with it as they made continuous increments towards ever increasing risks and constantly pushing at the boundaries of honesty and probity.

That famous phrase ‘The Big Bang’ seems to spring effortlessly to mind. This was the phrase used to describe the ’deregulation’ of banks. For ‘deregulation’ read ‘ be as dishonest as you can get away with’. It certainly turned out to be quite a bang, didn’t it ? The whole World economy is now going up in smoke.

There is no honesty or probity in banking anymore; just raw, savage, heartless greed. Banks are liars and thieves. There is no honour amongst liars and thieves. That is why the banks know they cannot trust each other and so it is why they are now so reluctant to lend to each other.

As about 95% of all the money in circulation is apparently created by banks during their process of taking deposits and then making loans, this means they are just as capable of destroying 95% of all the money in circulation if they continue to be as greedy and stupid as they have been in the recent past.

This is how the great banking scam works.

There is something called a fractional reserve ratio. It is a neat little conjuring trick, conjured out of thin air by the bankers getting together in a huddle with the government in the past to persuade it to pass a law saying banks could lend many times the amount of money actually deposited as savings.

A fractional reserve ratio of 9:1 allows banks to create and lend £100 000 from a deposit of only £1 111.12p – an actual multiple of nearly one hundred times the original sum as the money is lent and re-lent at a diminishing amount of nine times the deposit sum each time; gradually diminishing to ever smaller sums before aggregating at about one hundred times the original sum. At 6% interest this provides the bank with £6 000 annual interest income which is roughly six times the original deposit of £1 111.12.

At 18:1 it would be twice the amount or £12 000 income for the bank from just £1 111.12p deposited.

The need for deposits from savers is entirely dispensed with when the bank or mortgage company charges a loan ‘arrangement’ fee. This fee simply allows the bank to conjure up the complete amount of your loan or mortgage from thin air without the tedious business of the bank having to be in possession of a single penny in the form of a deposit in the first place. Effectively, by paying your ‘arrangement fee’ up front, you are simply creating your own loan or mortgage out of absolutely nothing !

It seems rather a pity we have to bother with doing it via the bank instead of just creating how ever much money we want to spend ourselves. It really wouldn’t be any different – except there wouldn’t be a nasty, grasping bank to repossess your property if you failed to make the repayments on time !

How’s that for a financial conjuring trick then ?

Some banks and mortgage companies have recently been rumoured to use fractional reserve ratios of up to 40:1. This would mean that for every £1 111.12p in cash they get their hands on, they can lend £400 000 , earning £24 000 a year in interest at 6%.

But of course the interest rate is often a great deal more. In the case of credit cards it might be 30%, for instance. Hmm. That would make an annual income of £120 000 for the bank from just one single deposit of £1111.12p then. Nice little earner, isn’t it ?

You could say it is just a teeny, weeny bit excessive.

Just for the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, that translates into immoral and dishonest, which in turn really translates into a form of theft. You might call it conversion really; whereby the bank dishonestly converts honest savings from customers into entirely dishonest and misrepresented and risky loans which have now put the entire World economy at risk and threaten all with imminent recession and poverty.

So, when you pay your mortgage company £1 111.12 as a mortgage ‘arrangement’ fee, they might lend you just £200 000 and then have another £200 000 left over to lend someone else – or possibly pay themselves a large bonus instead, what ho ! Good little wheeze, don’t you think ?

How else do you think all those meaninglessly huge sums of money sprung into existence from nothing – along with all those gigantically huge banker’s bonuses running into billions of pounds ?.

Why, the bankers simply realised they could conjure up as much money as they liked and spend it how they liked because they had complete control over it and virtually no one else understood how the whole thing worked.

Now we are all paying for their dishonesty and misrepresentation as our lives disintegrate around us. It’s about time our Government rounded all the bankers up and shot the lot of them. They are worthless fraudsters.

I came across this interesting observation by the Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Robert H. Hemphill in a film called ‘Money as debt’.

“Individual debts paid off leave individuals with more money. All debts paid off leaves society with no money at all. So there it is, we’re totally dependent on continually renewed bank credit for there to be any money in existence. No loans, no money.

“This is what happened in the great depression as the money supply shrank drastically as the supply of loans dried up.

“This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every pound we have in circulation, cash or credit.

“If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not we starve.

“We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible. But there it is”.

THIS IS A SERIOUSLY NASTY LABOUR GOVERNMENT

Leftie Mafia close ranks over Baby P

“WHY did Gordon Brown react so violently when asked in the Commons about Baby P’s shocking death?

Was it a guilty conscience?

The unforgivable death of Baby P has revealed Labour’s dirty little secret — the arrogance verging on corruption of entrenched Socialism”.

Not such a secret now, after the hideous catalogue of incompetence leading to what anyone but our modern justice system would regard as murder.

This avoidable tragedy tells us about the way the Left works when, as in Haringey, it has unbridled power.

Baby P’s fate was the culmination of a blinkered authoritarianism in which rigid political correctness supersedes human decency.

Haringey is a bastion of the loony Left.

Its website boasts: “We are committed to eliminating discrimination on the grounds of age, colour, disability, ethnic origin, gender, HIV status, marital status, nationality, national origin, race, religious belief, responsibility for dependants, sexuality, or unrelated criminal conviction.”

Great. But they can’t tell when a baby has a broken back and hours to live.

It swallows £100million a year for a child “protection” programme, and allows TWO of them to die in unimaginable agony.

Hard-faced “welfare” chief Sharon Shoesmith won’t apologise and it takes two days before anyone in Haringey says sorry.

Yet when Shoesmith IS finally kicked out, she could win £200,000 in compensation. That’s blood money. It’s disgusting.

Nobody in today’s blame-free public services walks away without a bung.

We hire armies of new nursing assistants, classroom assistants and police support officers. to help the professionals.

Yet we won’t sack any of the 20,000 rubbish teachers identified by Whitehall – or the hundreds of thousands of other idiot State employees doing nothing useful except causing lots of harm.

Superbugs kill thousands and strike terror into us all, yet no nurse or orderly has been fired for shoddy hygiene. Just fill in the forms and tick the boxes and it’s a job for life.

Look at Dr Sabah Al Zayyat, still practising after failing to spot Baby P’s ripped fingernails, let alone his bust ribs and broken spine.

The herd of State employees closes ranks, bound by a Mafia-style code of Omerta.

Speak out, like Haringey whistleblower Nevres Kemal, and you are sacked and legally gagged.

Why is such primitive tyranny tolerated?

Public service unions are Labour’s paymasters. That’s why Gordon Brown has put 800,000 more of their members on the state payroll.

It’s why they can retire at 60 on inflation-proof pensions, paid for by millions who can’t afford to retire at all.

It’s why we have hundreds of pointless quangos, costing £70billion a year and run by unaccountable stooges on £200,000 salaries.

Welcome to Labour’s client state, a multi- billion—pound gravy train driven by buck-passing bureaucrats who aren’t fit to look after a baby”.

That’s where all our taxpayer money goes !

This is an edited version of an article by TREVOR KAVANAGH Published on 17th Nov 2008 in the Sun newspaper.

DISHONEST, IMMORAL MORTGAGE LENDERS

HOME OWNERS FLEECED BY DEVIOUS BANKS

“An important factor behind the increase in mortgage foreclosures is the rise of so-called subprime loans. Subprime loans are made to borrowers with credit deemed insufficient to qualify for a standard home mortgage. They sometimes entail predatory practices including exorbitant interest rates, additional fees and prepayment penalties that make it virtually impossible for the borrower to escape from debt. Subprime lending is targeted disproportionately at the poor, minorities and the elderly.

The increase in home foreclosures is linked to the rise in subprime lending. Studies in Boston and Atlanta conducted during the 1990s showed foreclosures by subprime lenders tripling, while foreclosures by other lenders remained steady or declined. A similar study in Chicago, which began at an earlier date, showed an even more dramatic increase. [ See Subprime Foreclosures: the Smoking Gun of Predatory Lending? Policy Development and Research Information Service http://www.huduser.org/index.html]

During the 1990s the practice of “risk based’ pricing increased. Banks began charging higher than normal interest rates to certain borrowers deemed to have lower than average credit worthiness. This practice was justified on the grounds that it opened home ownership to those who would not otherwise qualify for mortgages. However, by their nature, subprime loans carry a higher risk of default because they impose an additional financial burden on those who are in many cases least able to afford it. Further, subprime loans have become an arena for outright fraud and abuse. Cases of “redlining” have been documented where whole neighborhoods, usually poor or minority, are deemed to be substandard credit risks, forcing residents with otherwise excellent credit to pay subprime interest rates.

One of the most flagrant offenders is CitiGroup, headed by Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary Robert Rubin. In March the Federal Trade Commission charged CitiGroup with deliberately “steering” and “misleading” borrowers into accepting predatory loans.

It is alleged that CitiGroup, its affiliate Associates First Capital and sister company CitiFinancial engaged in predatory lending practices such as inducing borrowers to take out high-interest loans even though they qualified for prime-rate loans. It is also charged that CitiGroup engaged in another predatory tactic known as “flipping,” where borrowers are pushed into progressively higher-interest loans by repeatedly refinancing their mortgages. The bank is also alleged to charge “excessive and unjustified” fees and impose impossible loan terms that lead to foreclosure.

Despite these serious allegations of a criminal character, CitiGroup and its executives were able to escape any major consequences by paying a mere $215 million in restitution to defrauded home buyers.

Such practices are by no means the exception. Subprime lenders often impose interest rates far higher than anything that could conceivably be justified by factoring in costs associated with added risk. Borrowers are often unaware of provisions hidden in fine print that require additional fees, balloon payments or the payment of compulsory life insurance premiums. In some cases lenders simply lie to borrowers, stating installment amounts that are far lower than what the mortgage holder is actually required to pay.

There are indications that the speed of home foreclosures is increasing. This is also tied to the rise of subprime lenders. For example, the above mentioned study in Washington state noted that of all foreclosures reported in 2000, subprime lenders were responsible for 58 percent of fast foreclosures, defined as foreclosures within the first two years.

Powerful financial interests have intervened to block even token reform. For example, the Ohio legislature enacted a bill in February 2002 prohibiting local communities from passing laws against predatory lending”.

MONSTROUS SOCIAL INEQUALITY

“Our site provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world’s people.

As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the site will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle.

We anticipate enormous battles in every country against unemployment, low wages, austerity policies and violations of democratic rights.

The financial crisis enveloping the entire world economy sharply poses the need for the international unification of working people. Transnational production and global financial markets have changed the face of capitalism forever.”

( This is from an interesting political website and I just couldn’t resist quoting the article as I couldn’t have put it better myself)

THE SILLY SAINSBURY’S SUPERMARKET – AGAIN !

Treating it’s Customers With Complete Contempt – As Usual !

Today I bought a couple of pairs of pyjamas from Sainsbury’s for my ten year old boy. That was a bit of a mistake. I never seem to learn my lesson. Sainsbury’s ownbrand TU clothes for kids is a just a byword for tat. It’s just not worth bothering to buy at all as every time I do, things just have to be returned because they’re so useless.

They should alter the brand name to TAT instead of TU. That would be a more honest description of the utter rubbish they sell, and at least we customers would know exactly where we stand and be properly warned of the withering contempt with which Sainsbury’s obviously views it’s customers.

Just about every time I buy a Sainsbury’s TU brand of kids clothes I just have to take them straight back again because they are so incredibly badly made they are completely unwearable.

The pyjamas were Sainsbury’s TU ownbrand BBC Dr. Who pyjamas that come with a ‘sound chip ‘ which gurgles ‘exterminate, exterminate’ in a monotonous electronic voice when you touch it. It is a fairly large thing – about two square inches of soft rubber – sewn into a sort of pocket dangling at the bottom of the top part of the pyjamas just where the top ends at the wearer’s waist.

It is quite bulky and would be really uncomfortable for the child wearing the pyjamas in bed as they would be sleeping on a huge great lumpy thing digging into their waist. It would also come to grief in the wash as hot water, detergent and a washing machine continuously bashing clothes around to clean them is not exactly the best environment to expect electrical or electronic things to survive. Water and electricity are not friends at the best of times.

To be fair to Sainsbury’, there is a label somewhere which says you should remove the sound chip before washing and sleeping. But the problem is, there is no way of removing the sound chip which looks as though it might be intended to be in some sort of open pocket which would actually allow it to be removed.

In actual fact, the pocket has been completely sewn up in a permanently closed position, probably by simple carelessness in the manufacture. So, the only way of removing the chip – which has to be done if anyone expects to be able to sleep in the pyjamas or to wash them – is to hack open the pocket with a pair of scissors.

However carefully this might be done, it is unlikely to be possible to put the flaming sound chip back without it falling out immediately, and the likelihood is that the pocket will be so damaged, it will simply rip apart in the wash and have to be completely hacked off the garment anyway.

Well done Sainsbury’s ! Another victory in the great battle to force us consumers into buying complete rubbish of the lowest possible quality ( and the highest possible profit to the supermarket).

Guess where the garment was made ? Why, China, of course !

WHY DON’T THE MEDIA EXPOSE SOCIAL WORKER’S WICKEDNESS

What I utterly fail to understand about the media being unwilling to take on these stories is that, as far as I understand it,  they can be reported in quite a detailed manner, providing they are anonymised.

I listened very carefully to the judge expounding details of the injunctions relating to a case and it was all about simply not identifying the protagonists. There is no actual ban on telling the story as long as different names are used and there is nothing to directly identify various people.

Now, I know the media are obsessed with producing people’s names. I was taught as a local newspaper reporter the idea was to encourage people to read the paper to look for their names in it. That is what local papers do. While it is also generally important to identify people in any story, when it is impossible to identify them, it doesn’t mean the story is automatically worthless and should be killed.

It is just because of the draconian totalitarian secrecy of the family courts that many of those stories should and could be told in quite significant detail because many are so incredibly shocking.

Until I had my own little brush with the evils of Social Workers and their abuse in the family courts I wouldn’t have been able to believe there was such a widescale abuse of justice going on in this country, the like of which we all normally associate with the worst of totalitarian regimes, like Hitler’s mass extermination programme or Stalin’s Russia, or Romania’s recent dictatorshiop which seemed to particularly specialise in abusing children.

What I learnt from my own experiences of social workers and their representations to the family court is that the half baked opinion of some incredibly ignorant, often inadequate person, most often than not with a psychological problem making them  want to  be a ‘control freak’ and sanctimoniously tell others what to do to the nth degree, is all that removes children from their parents – not the inadequacy of parents.

I experienced exactly that from just about every social worker I dealt with. Take the time to read this thumbnail of my case.

THE EVIL INCOMPETENCE OF SOCIAL WORKERS

My partner is a faultless Mother (apart from the consequences of her mental illness)  and I am a pretty competent type of Father. When my partner started falling ill with schizophrenia and became consequentially wildly erratic, I called social services asking them to fulfill their statutory duty to provide the medical help my partner is legally entitled to and the assistance three very small children were entitled to by virtue of being in danger etc because of psychosis and my partner abducting the children from the family home and living in damaging, very overcrowded circumstances.

Social Services first flatly refuse to do anything at all, then paid a visit with a psychiatrist to where my partner and the children were and tell me they agreed my partner is thoroughly insane but as the children ’seem to be OK at the moment, there is nothing they can do until things get worse and something really bad happens’.

When I take private law action seeking custody my partner immediately tells the court she wishes me to have custody because she recognises the dangers of her illness. This results in an interim order that my baby son resides with me. Bizarrely, the judge makes the first big mistake in the very first hearing by arbitrarily ordering my two step children to reside with their Father, who had expressly said he wanted me to have custody ( and I had agreed) as he would be unable to look after them. This order eventually leads to the breakup of that Father’s family and severe damage to the two step kids of mine over the long period of time the saga goes on for. The Judge was a moron.

So, my baby son was resident with me, and his Mum came too because she always had a good relationship with me and being with me invariably encouraged her to become better from her attacks of psychosis. Social workers now come to my house to make out their report to the court relating to my custody action. They lied in their report, saying ‘I hadn’t bonded with my son and ignored him on their first visit’. My son was asleep during that entire visit so not much bonding was likely to go on. I certainly didn’t ignore him, as I checked him every ten minutes to make sure he hadn’t rolled off the sofa. They also lied in their report saying my house was ‘unsuitable’  and my bedroom, where my son slept with me, was ‘dangerous’. That was incredible nonsense as it was a normal,  recently brand new room in every way.

Their apotheosis of incompetent nastiness came when they told my partner, in front of me, that she should employ a lawyer ‘to fight me for custody of her child, otherwise she may never see him again’. She had only just come out of a period of being sectioned in a secure mental ward. She was better, pretty normal. She instantly had a breakdown as a result of what that idiot social worker said and abducted my son, fleeing to her aged Mother’s one bedroom council pensioner accommodation 200 miles away in North Wales.

The police, sent by me to retrieve my son under the terms of the interim court order he reside with me, were told to get lost by social services and instructed to inform me I would have to go back to court if I wanted to retrieve my son. Their contradiction of the existing court order was an illegal contempt of court as they did not have or even bother to state any reason for this.

When I got to court a few weeks later, social services were in court and had brought my partner with them and produced a legal team. Social services had now taken it upon themselves to manipulate my highly suggestible partner, taking over her until now passive by our mutual agreement, case and persuade her to fight me for custody and somehow made my partner believe we were a couple splitting up and living apart. This was not the case and had never been the case. My partner and I had always ‘got on well’, excepting the difficulties psychosis sometimes produced.

Social services then proceeded to advise the court my son would be better off staying with his mum 200 miles from me on the grounds ‘it would be disruptive’ for him to return to his London home with me as he had now been away for about four weeks.

The judge said plainly that it was clearly quite unsafe for mum to look after the two year old child as she had a recent history of severe mental illness and dangerous behaviour and an obvious inability to look after a child or even herself. Social services insisted that was their advice. My lawyers hadn’t thought of the need for me to have an opposing witness. In fairness, were were completely ambushed by social services, but with hindsight I now realise my lawyers should have seen it coming and employed my own social worker witness.

The judge made a huge song and dance about it, and said she was being forced by social services to do something that was not appropriate. The judge then said she would only agree to placing the child with mum if social services visited mum every day and made sure mum attended her doctor on a weekly basis etc, etc. The judge made a point of saying that I was a good father and that I should be able to have completely unrestricted access to my son for two days a week and that social services should pay my expenses travelling 200 miles to see my son two days a week.

Social services did not pay my expenses and restricted my access to my son for two hours on each of the two days I visited him. They insisted I was supervised and I was not allowed to be alone with my son or take him with me overnight as explicitly ordered by the judge. This was on the entirely imaginary grounds that I was somehow ‘violent’ towards social services staff. There had been absolutely no incident of me being anything other than well mannered and polite at all times to social services and there had been no incident of anything remotely resembling violence. Being brought up in an exceptionally well mannered family and attending a private school which was positively obsessed with good manners and politeness, random violence is just not on my agenda.

Predictably, even social services had to eventually agree mum was far too dangerous to look after a two year old and my son was removed from mum after a few months. Instead of returning him to me, they put him in foster care where he was viciously abused, being constantly poked by the foster parents with a walking stick. This produced numerous identical round bruises all over my son’s torso and he still remembers it all now at the age of ten – over seven years later. 

Social services then told me, in front of my solicitor, that they were considering putting my son up for adoption and they explicitly threatened me that ‘if I didn’t co-operative with them my son would be adopted’.

At this point I would remind you that at no time had anyone suggested I was an inadequate parent in any way whatever. Social services had not made any suggestion like this themselves. But you will notice a continuum of spiteful, arrogant disregard of law, any shred of competence, human rights or any sense of human decency whatever from social services so far.

I took social services to court and won custody of my son, but still had to suffer their menacing presence for another year of weekly visits as though I had been accused of inadequate parenting of some kind, which I never had been. They even forced me to go to parenting classes !

Their last effort at spiteful destructiveness was to announce  (at one of their care plan meetings) to my partner in front of me that I had had an affair, a relationship, with another woman while my partner had been living away from me. This resided entirely in their imaginations and was completely untrue and they had no meaningful reason to say something like that at all. They’re just plain weird, nasty people.

Unfortunately, the whole debacle had only made my son’s mother even more mentally ill through the stress of social services completely wrecking her family and being the agent for her losing her two older children to a their father who she knew neither wanted them or was capable of looking after them properly. And so it turned out to be the case.

Our previously close knit family had been completely blown apart by the activities of social services and the two elder children lost, becoming severely emotionally damaged by virtue of living with their father. 

Although my partner continued to live with me for quite a long time after our son was returned to me,  she descended into alchoholism and eventually abandoned her son and me as a product of her illness. Despite this we have always maintained a good and very friendly relationship and still do to this day.

Meanwhile all our lives have been comprehensively wrecked in a manner which has been entirely orchestrated by the activities of Social Services.

This sort of behaviour by social services seems to happen time and time again in virtually all cases they deal with. I have heard endless stories of social services being worse than useless, spiteful,  destructive and nasty. The damage they cause children and the  parents of those children is breathtaking.

ROGUE ECONOMICS – ARE BANKS LIARS AND THIEVES ?

ARE THE BANKS DECEIVING EVERYONE – INCLUDING POLITICIANS ?

Probably. But how are they getting away with it ?

We are told that bank or mortgage lenders a or b have posted huge losses of billions here and billions there because of ‘bad’ mortgages that borrowers cannot repay.

As a result World banking has seized up and the World economy is grinding to a halt everywhere with huge inflation and increasing poverty.

The gigantic figures for losses that the mortgage lenders talk about do not seem to make the slightest sense because they appear to be much larger that could ever be conceivably possible.

Mortgage lenders talk of huge losses, particularly on the sub-prime market as people cannot repay housing loans and houses are re-possessed.

But as most houses repossessed are sold and mostly repay the mortgage loans in full, there are absolutely no losses for the mortgage lenders with those housing loans that were completely recovered without loss to the banks.

While there are some repossessed properties that do produce varying degrees of loss for the lender, they are a relatively small number of repossessions and cannot possibly add up to the silly figures of billions that the banks claim.

For example, if an average mortgage loan is £200 000 and there is a total loss of that loan to the bank because the property is repossessed, then the approximate total annual repossessions here in the UK of about 40 0000 properties, assuming that each repossession represented a total loss of the entire value of the average loan, would be 40k x £200 000 = £8 000 million or £8 billion in total ONLY !!!

This figure can be approximately multiplied up for the USA’s bigger population by a factor of, say six, to produce a maximum loss figure of £48 billion which is so much smaller than the losses being claimed by the banks it is laughable.

Combine these two total loss figures of both the UK and the USA and it adds up to a total of £56 billion, not the many, many hundreds of millions all the banks are claiming.

It also must be pointed out that the above calculation assumes that every repossession represents a complete and total loss of the entire loan for the lender. Obviously this cannot be the case because most repossessed properties are sold and repay the lender in full. Very few repossessions end up in any loss and even fewer end up with total loss. That figure must be a microscopic one.

This would make the real, actual loss figures for the banks infinitely less than this maximum possible figure of about £56 billion. This makes their claims for hundreds of million in losses incomprehensible.

So, can someone tell me what on earth the banks are talking about when they say they are losing billions ? Can it be they are making up fairy tale figures based perhaps on what incomes and profits they imagined they might earn at some vague point in the future.

In other words the whole thing seems to have been hyped up as a figment of the fevered imagination of bankers utterly obsessed with their own greed.

How are the huge figures for losses posted by banks calculated ? And why would any particular lender suddenly and dramatically ‘go bust’ overnight owing hundreds of millions.

I just don’t get it. The figures don’t add up. They seem to be living in some fantasy land.

Can some kind economist explain this to me – and all the other millions of very puzzled members of the population who really do not understand all this gibberish talked by the banks and politicians ?

THIS EVIL COUNTRY – STATE DEPRIVES CANCER BOY OF MOTHER

Yes, It’s Britain I’m talking about as
Moronic Social Services Tear Cancer boy away from Distraught Mother

I have just heard of a story from a very reliable source. I know this story is completely true; but if I say too much about, if I give any details which can identify anyone involved, I will be sent to jail for exposing the criminal secrecy of the Family Courts.

But if ever a case needs to be exposed (and it can’t be because the State says anyone exposing it will be imprisoned) this is one terrible injustice, artificially constructed by ignorant, nasty, people.

In a nutshell, a small boy of about seven years old is taken to hospital with vaguely flue like symptoms by his Mother. He is diagnosed with Leukeamia – a form of deadly cancer.

Of course any Mother in this situation is likely to become fairly agitated. In this hospital, staff, notably one Doctor B…., reported the mother to social services simply because they found the mother difficult to deal with and took against her ‘attitude’ to their sloppiness.

Astoundingly dimwitted, ill educated and incompetent social services staff then constructed a completely imaginary case the mother was not able to properly look after her son.

The basis of this seems to be this mother’s ‘attitude’ to hospital staff and social services. So social services forced the woman to undergo a psychiatric report which said that as the mother was contemptuous of people in authority, she must have a personality disorder and this would make her unfit to look after her own child.

Now, co-incidentally, I once had a similar experience of social services threatening to take my child away from me and have it adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operate’ with them. This was said to me by the Director of Children’s Services in front of my solicitor. This is no figment of my imagination, therefore.

I too was forced to undergo a psychiatric examination where the report announced that as I was such an individualistic person with a disregard of those in authority ( presumably social services) I too had a ‘borderline personality disorder’ which might make me unreliable in looking after my own child.

I was sufficiently articulate to fight these nasty minded people at their own game in court. I won, but it was always touch and go as to whether the bastards were going to rip my child from both his parents and condemn him to a life in abusive foster homes.

He had already been placed in foster care illegally by social services – without any justification at all, and against the order of a court that the child be looked after by me – and had been thoroughly physically abused. He was beaten black and blue by the foster parents poking him with a stick. Although this happened just before his third birthday, my child still remembers it years later.

So social services recommend to the (secret) family court that this Cancer boy be looked after by his criminally inclined Father with a history of violence and abuse and with the Mother only being allowed to see her son infrequently for just over an hour under the ever watchful and controlling eye of social services in one of their bleak ‘contact centres’.

Meanwhile, the boy angrily tells social services he doesn’t want to live with his father and sadly says “where’s my Mummy …. I want to go home to my Mummy” to hospital staff who refuse to allow his Mother to see him while he is still in hospital.

We know for certain the whole case was based on fantasy, as a psychiatrist examining the mother as part of the social services fabricated case reported to the family court that, if the mother had not taken her boy to hospital to be diagnosed and treated for his deadly disease in the first place, no accusations of possible future bad parenting would ever have been brought against her as it was clear she had always previously looked after her son very well before he came to the hospital.

It was only social services fantasizing about the mother possiibly not being able to properly look after her child at some vaguely undefined point in the future that mysteriously gave rise to the evil minded family court, knowing they were completely unaccountablt to anyone owing to complete secrecy, forcing the boy to live with a father he feared and disliked.

Meanwhile, the boy pines for his Mother, and his Mother has been driven to distraction by having her son torn from the family home by small minded, ignorant State employees without the slightest justification.

LETTER TO SAINSBURY’S SUPERMARKET

Last night (24th June) at about 9 p.m. I visited the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s to try and speak with Chris LaForte who had telephoned me to deal with my previous complaint concerning an incident on Sunday May 11th 2008.

All my previous efforts to telephone the store had failed because the telephone was never answered – day after day. Yesterday I spoke to Mat Rownsly at your Head Office on extension 54356 about this. He had told me the store would telephone me yesterday, which it didn’t. Hence my personal visit in order to progress this complaint issue.

Imagine my astonishment when the Horsham store exhibited yet another example of how to alienate customers and behave seriously badly. This is what happened.

I went to the customer service desk, where I politely enquired if Chris LaForte was in. When I was informed he was on annual leave, I commenced explaining why it was I needed to speak to him in the hope someone else could address this matter.

In the course of that explanation I mentioned it referred to my complaint about a previous incident at the store where had been erroneously ‘ banned’. I said to the member of staff I was speaking to, that as I thought she had been present at that previous incident, she would probably remember it. For some curious reason I do not understand she denied being there and said she had no knowledge of me being ‘banned’.

Informing her that I would then wait until Chris LaForte was back at work, I went off to buy just one item, some cream.

As I was peering at the cream shelf, a man dressed in a Sainsburys uniform sidled up to me and said “I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store immediately’.

When I attempted to talk to him in a perfectly normal manner he behaved in a similar manner to the previous Store manager – Matt Engell.

He refused to talk to me, he was aggressive and confrontational and behaved in a manner which would wind any person up and instantly make them feel completely abused and very, very angry.

Every time I opened my mouth to say anything at all, the Store manager behaved as though I was assaulting him or otherwise being violent or abusive. He was incredibly confrontational, in other words, and quite determined not to engage in conversation of any kind. This kind of behaviour can only be considered thoroughly abusive and an intentional effort to generate conflict. It was stunningly ignorant behaviour.

I imagined Sainsbury’s would be training staff on how to avoid and defuse conflict rather than gratuitously generating it out of thin air.

Actually, I was being exceptionally civilised, calm and polite in every sense – and not yet angry, but trying very hard not to become so. And as I saw how he was behaving in a ludicrous manner which would guarantee to be extremely offensive towards anyone, I stopped myself being wound up and sucked into his ridiculous mindset of violent anger and confrontation towards me. It took a great effort on my part to avoid this store manager achieving his obvious intention of being offensive, winding a perfectly civilised person up without good reason, and generally attempting to cause a major confrontation.

In his defence, I have to say it subsequently became obvious that his behaviour is entirely a product of both his training and the apparently aggressive ethos among staff at that particular Sainsbury’s store.

Remaining very calm and speaking quietly, I had to repeat myself many times to ask him if I could speak to him, as he was deliberately preventing any conversation taking place by simply continuing endlessly to angrily tell me to leave the store, and continually talking over me and telling me he would not speak to me and asking me to be quiet and not to speak to him.

Eventually, when he saw I was going to continue to be calm and polite, he deigned to reluctantly allow a conversation to take place. I asked him what on earth he was on about asking me to leave the store without any explanation and without allowing any normal conversation to take place.

He then told me the customer service woman had spoken to him over the internal communications system. He informed me I had just told her about my spurious banning and the complaint I had made to Head Office etc which is why I had come to the store to speak with Chris LaForte.

That is why he had come over to me to tell me to leave – on the instructions of this service counter woman who had told me she knew nothing about me being banned when I had asked her, and had only been told about the matter by myself a few moments earlier.

This duty store manager then told me he had been present at the previous event concerning Mr Engell, and because he had been told by the unbelievable security woman who caused the problem in the first place that I was ‘violent’, he had assumed I was going to be violent when he spoke to me and asked me to leave the store.

As the situation at that moment began to calm down as, with great difficulty, I persuaded him to allow me to speak to him as you might normally expect, he then sheepishly apologized to me for being so confrontational and clearly indicated he was acting on the basis of instructions relating entirely to the previous incident and the erroneous idea that I was somehow a ‘troublemaker’ of some kind.

He then explained that now, as we were having a polite and civil conversation ( which he said he ‘had not expected’) he no longer felt it necessary to be confrontational in the manner I have previously described.

It then became utterly clear to me that I might equally be speaking to Mr Engell who had behaved in an identical manner the previous occasion. Then, on the instructions of the slightly lunatic security woman who had shrieked at me that I was (previously) banned and had pressed a panic button.

The point here is that both Mr Engell and this second store manger (a Mr Serotas, I think) both behaved towards me as though they automatically assumed and expected me to be violent and abusive when in fact I had never been so on either of the two occasions.

In fact, both these store managers were effectively acting on the instructions of the security woman who had accused me of being banned and pressed a panic button.

At the time of the first incident, when I was trying, but failing, to speak to Mr Engell ( he was refusing to allow me to say anything at all to him and was just repeating his instruction to me to ’get out of the store because I was banned’). The lunatic security woman had shouted at me and Mr Engells she had banned me ‘for being rude to her’.

I distinctly recall the security woman aggressively shouting at me the precise words – the very first words she uttered – “you’ve been banned from the store, I think, haven’t you ?”

Bearing in mind that some huge percentage, 60%, I think, of communication is non verbal, I can tell you this woman’s non verbal communication to me with this hesitant question was exhibiting her extreme uncertainty as to who I was, or whether she recognised me or, indeed, whether I was actually banned.

She was clearly asking me for corroboration of the information that I had been banned, because she was not at that time in possession of it. She actually clearly indicated she had absolutely no idea of whether I had been banned and was expressing obvious doubt in her mind as to whether it was merely a figment of her imagination or not.

It is not entirely clear to me what she is talking about and it seems monstrous to me that your customers can be treated in this disgraceful manner by some demented security woman with a personal grudge of some kind.

That all the Sainsbury’s staff fall into line behind one demented woman with some personal grudge about ‘me being rude to her’, and fantasizing that I had been banned from the store, is quite beyond my comprehension.

That the Customer Service woman sees fit to inform the store manager of her conversation with me in order for him to throw me out on the second occasion, essentially on my own say so, because I had mentioned the banned word to her, is utterly unbelievable.

I had, in fact, been shopping in the store after the first incident several times, as the Sainsbury’s head office Mr Rownsley had told me quite clearly there was no record of me being banned anyway. It was clearly confirmed by Mr Rownsley that it was a complete fairy-tale, as I already knew.

The fact is, I am a normal civilised , sixty year old, well educated ‘middle class type’ person who frequently goes to your store with his nine year old son to shop for domestic items – not to engage in abusive incidents. And I certainly do not go there to be abused by manic security shrews obsessed with their inflated egos and Television Cop and car chase films.

In the course of my conversation with Mr Serotas on that second occasion, he also told me he thought I had pushed my shopping trolley at Mr Engell on the occasion of the first incident, leaving my shopping in the trolley, and that ‘I had stormed out of the supermarket’.

I was completely astonished when I heard this because I have never done anything of the kind or engaged in any form of physical aggression at Sainsburys – ever.

What precisely happened is that while I was being thoroughly abused by Mr Engells, and reduced to a state of extreme shock and sheer humiliation by all this extraordinary behaviour, I picked up my one carrier bag containing just £5 worth of purchases, and walked to my car with it, rather than take an entire trolley with just one small bag in it.

I did, indeed, leave the trolley where it was as I was in no state to be concerned about finding a home for it as Mr Engells and the security guard were shoving me around and ‘elbowing’ me out of the store. It was quite clear I had no option to park this trolley anywhere under such circumstances.

It is quite ludicrous of the second store manager, Mr Serotas, to describe this as me ‘abandoning my shopping and pushing the trolley at Mr Engells, which is precisely what Mr Serotas did say to me. This is pure fiction.

All this seems to indicate quite unequivocally that your staff at the Horsham store are unpleasant and aggressive and contrive to conjure up incidents of confrontation where none exist in the first place. I am really shocked at this experience.

As I have seen other members of the public being treated with unmitigated aggression by security and car park staff in particular, I know my experience is not an isolated event, but just one of many others concerning other people.

On one famous occasion I was in my car in a long queue of cars unable to get out of the car park because the car parking staff refused to raise the barrier to a woman who was refusing to pay £10 as she had bought less than £10 worth of goods.

So while the parking staff were obtuse and bullying, deliberately humiliating this woman, every other customer trying to get home was kept prisoner for a long time.

This is disgusting.

SAINSBURY’S AND OTHER BIG BUSINESS CONNIVE IN DESTROYING SLEEPY MARKET TOWN

When, many years ago, my Father was a Councillor in this town and as Chairman of the Council was intimately involved in trying to prevent Sainsburys’ and other megalomaniac big businesses from wrecking the then pretty country market town with massively destructive ‘redevelopment’, he would have had absolutely no idea how nasty these big businesses like Sainsbury’s would become.

Since I knew the town as a boy, the Sun Life Insurance company and Sainsbury’s have together been instrumental in conniving to persuade the Town Council to raze down vast amounts of the then attractive centre of the town and browbeat the Local Council into agreeing to close off most roads into the centre of town and build an ugly motorway-like ‘inner ring road ‘bypass’ around the centre of sleepy little town, preventing any normal access to it.

Both these business organisations built monumental and modernistic ugly buildings over the centuries old town centre roads, killing of the historic town at a stroke. No doubt Sainsbury’ and Sun Life persuaded the Council it would be a good thing as they would be bringing lots of local jobs into the town.

But it has had the effect of preventing any of the local residents from getting at the town centre to do any shopping and empty shops now lie abandoned and boarded up forlornly as a result.

Shops and other traders still struggling to make ends meet as the Council extorts gigantic parking charges, hugely exceeding the costs of paying an average monthly mortgage for a house, never mind a bloody car parking space, can only watch grimly as turnover falls and they go out of business one by one.

Fewer and fewer residents bother to overcome the sheer trauma and hassle of being milked by unreasonable parking charges and endless threats of £90 parking tickets followed by bailiffs at the door adding hundred and hundreds of pounds to just one parking ticket, then threatening householders with the legalised theft of their house contents if they don’t pay up immediately.

Pedestrians are artfully provided with their own obstacle course to get into the town centre too. Nearly the entire local population has to brave an artificially contrived and utterly inappropriate and unnecessary urban motorway, carefully conceived by dimwitted ‘planners’ to make getting into the town centre on foot as unpleasant as possible for virtually everyone.

Hence, the town is dying on its feet; a slow strangulation that has already turned a really busy, attractive mediaeval market town into a nasty little empty urban desert in the middle of of what used to be some of the most stunningly beautiful landscape in the World.

It is now a noisy sprawl of ring roads and Orwellian building development designed to look as revolting as possible.

But Sun Life has fallen on hard times as more and more people realised the life insurer plundered their pockets and business has slumped. So the predatory business has now gone, having done its job of sucking the life out of the two like the parasite it is.

Sainsbury’s too is no longer in the centre of town, bringing the extra shoppers and vibrancy it had solemnly promised all those years ago.

It’s old low rise utilitarian shed like architecture is now a shoddy enclosed shopping centre, identical to any down at heel shopping mall anywhere. Completely without character and wildy unpleasant to visit, most shops offering standardised high street cloned tat.

Sainsbury’s supermarket itself, even more sophisticated in manipulating and dictating to local town councils all over the country, has purloined most of the one time garden of a fantastically elegant classic manor house in the one small remaining bit of the original town by the ancient Church that still remains.

The Manor House is no longer fantastically elegant as it was bought by the RSPCA for it’s headquarters, and then sold at a massive profit to developers who built bits on everywhere and turned it into a warren of poky little ‘town houses’ and awkward apartments in the once elegant original building.

The town is is now ugly and bereft of the soul it had. The centuries of hustle and bustle of a busy English country market town have gone. The old coaching inn, once the focal point, is boarded up and decaying listlessly. In the evenings and on the weekends, the town is dead and empty, except for a few loitering youths, often mindlessly drunk.

It is not the pleasant, friendly place it once was. Instead it is a place to hurry away from before a black cloud of depression descends about what modern life is like .

THE WEASILY TWINS

Or how Blair and Brown destroy Britain

A tetchy day today. The nine year old Ninja Wrecker decided to get up early. He told me later in the day it was because the motorbike the next door neighbour mistakes for his own masculinity was standing around idling with it’s throaty roar at the crack of dawn.

A common occurrence as the inadequate idiot with the bike likes the whole neighbourhood to notice how masculine he must be making such a pathetically irritating noise. Sometimes the bike is grumbling on and off at intervals all day. What a moron !

The nine year old Ninja turned the central heating on (it’s mid-summer) and the ancient piping is so noisy it hisses and grumbles loudly until you wake up in exasperation. So I did. It was really annoying as I had only gone to bed at 2.30 a.m. owing to my desperate need to blot my brain out by watching mindless television.

It’s virtually the only escape I ever get from the Ninja, watching TV in the middle of the night while the little blighter is in bed and isn’t constantly wittering at me. More effective than Prozac, my mind gradually sinks into a semi-conscious state where I am entirely unsure of what I am actually watching. It could be anything really.

Then the Postwoman knocks on the door with a recorded delivery letter. It’s always irritating to be summoned to open the front door in your dressing gown, announcing to all the neighbours how decadent you are being in your dressing gown so late in the morning with the boy lurking behind you in his pyjamas. “what an idle pair of slobs’, they will be thinking self righteously.

Then, to really irritate me, the Postwoman spent ages and ages fumbling with letters while I just stood there like an embarrassed lemon. Eventually she plucked one from a bundle and thrust it angrily into my face, holding it strangely between her thumb and forefinger at the very edge of one corner, saying sharply ‘Is this you ?’, as she wobbled it backwards and forwards, making it impossible to read.

Without my glasses I couldn’t see anything except a blur. So I reached out to take the envelope from her so I could hold it still enough to read. Then I would be able to see the address.

That’s when this politically correct twit really wound me up by snatching the envelope back from me as I tried to take it and a brief tussle ensued. Fortunately, I won the tussle and was able to read my name on the envelope. Slightly embarrassed at the fight over the envelope I muttered weakly that I was as blind as a bat and couldn’t see a thing without my glasses. – a statement of the obvious.

After I had signed for it, and she had gone, it dawned on me the reason for her possessiveness over the envelope was the indoctrination every government employee gets about dealing with any member of the public.

All public employees these days seem to be brainwashed by their masters – the Government – to become naturally aggressive and inhuman. It never used to be like that.

They are all trained to believe everyone they deal with is completely dishonest, almost certainly inclined towards criminality at every opportunity, and with latent violence lurking it must always be potentially dangerous dealing with anyone. Just like all Government emplyees are really !

I suppose that is the natural result when you have an evil, self serving, corrupt Government that sets about systematically taking away everyone’s freedom and milks them dry right left and centre with fraudulent scams to steal as much money as possible.

After all, as the Government knows it is grasping, dictatorial, controlling, and just plain dishonest in every way as it goes about blatantly stealing our freedom and our money, I suppose it must assume the rest of us are as criminally dishonest and nasty as they are.

Therefore the Postwoman is trained to assume that householders might snatch letters not belonging to them, presumably so they can disappear inside their houses to frantically rip them open in search of valuables.

A fairly crackpot assumption on the part of the Postwoman and the people who no doubt specially train Postmen and women to hang on the letters like grim death as a cunning population of householders take every opportunity of snatching them from all the Postmen.

But that’s how they behave, so they assume everyone else behaves as badly as they do. After all they are all agents of the Government, and that’s how the whole Government behaves; totally dishonestly !

This atmosphere of paranoid distrust you now find absolutely everywhere is spread throughout every part of our society as a result of the poisonous Government we have had for the last decade.

It has employed a huge army of civil service bureaucrats to carry out a manifestly crazy and dishonest campaign of systematic persecution on the entire population of the country.

It is positively Orwellian. What this Government has done to this Country is breathtakingly nasty.

Why have we allowed it to happen ? We used to pride ourselves in our civilised way of life. We were the envy of the World for our integrity and gentle ways.

Now we have seen that we too can be prey to the evils of dictatorship and corruption along the lines of Hitler, Mussolini, Mugabe etc. Blair and Brown and their cronies have just been less extreme and a little more weasily.

But in the end they are all exactly the same.

Who was now who once said something along the lines of “For Evil to prevail, good men just have to do nothing to prevent it”.

Could that be why Britain is sinking into a cess pit of anarchy, chaos and Government led corruption and oppression ?

We done Mr Blair for leaving us your legacy.

And shame on all of us who don’t stand up to what we know is evil and corrupt.

Start off by refusing to pay a single parking ticket or speed camera fine. That will show you how powerful you can be if you actually bother to do something.

BLOGGING MADE DIFFICULT

Why is the Internet so unbelievably and unnecessarily aggravating – not to mention monumentally time wasting ?

I find using computers and the internet extraordinary; everything seems to be made deliberately difficult.

It seems finding out how to blog is rather like trying to unlock a combination lock with guesswork. Everything is guesswork to a greater or lesser degree. So, although it is intrinsically simple, it is made immensely complicated – and therefore horribly time consuming.

The reality is an experienced person could stand over the shoulder of a new beginner and say “do this, this and this because……”

It would take a very short time – an hour or two at most – to learn how to do all the relevant things, instead of spending half a lifetime trying to guess.

This tutorial could be converted into a written form which could be quite brief. It would be a godsend to people ! I have yet to see anything remotely like it.

That is why I have only the foggiest idea of how to get the readers in to my blog.

I have absorbed (over a vast period of time on the internet) the fact that:

a)  You have to post frequently
b)  link to other sites/blogs

Posting frequently I can understand. Linking, no. First of all what exactly is linking ? Is it the contents of your blogroll – the thing of adding other blogs to your sidebar ? If so there is a bit of a limit to how many you can add. Also it is rather random – just hoping that particular blog will be interested in you. It may or may not be.

Or does linking really mean picking on every available word in your blog text and turning it into a highlighted hyperlink to some random site ? If so, I cannot understand the validity of that.

When I first came across this as a reader, I thought the fact a word in the text you were reading was highlighted as a hyperlink meant it had some particular relevance to what I was reading.

I became increasingly irritated as these links led me randomly around the internet to read things that simply held no interest and unfocussed my mind until it became a bit like fermenting porridge and about as useful. The time wasting has been of epic proportions. I have had enough of it. life’s too short to waste on computer nerdiness.

The other thing I fail to understand is how blogs which are unremarkable have attracted large numbers of readers and in some cases have over-excited book publishers into wanting to publish books ?

I still remain mystified ?

Single Parent’s Treadmill

Persecuted by Bureaucrats

At present, I am not making ends meet at all. I am completely tied up in knots which prevent me from finding enough time to work. Obviously, I hope to change that. But so far I have been fighting a losing battle.

So much so that I have just received notice from the mortgage lender’s solicitor telling me they are starting repossession proceedings.

For example; today is a typical example of not being able to find time to work.

It is 1400 (2pm.) , office workers have just returned from lunch to do slightly more than 50% of their normal daily work load before going home for the weekend. I have already been busy since 8.a.m, by the way.

I, on the other hand, cannot do one solitary item of income generating work right now. The ordinary workers mentioned above will do 50% of their days work, I will do zero percent. Why ?

Because I have just one and a half hours before my nine year old son returns from School. After which time he will require feeding and watering, and when feeding and watering is dealt with he will be wittering non-stop at me about something or other.

I cannot stop him – ever. All attempts have proved fruitless. Only by being seriously unpleasant with him can I shut him up and that means ruining what is a reasonably good relationship. It would be pointless to do that. It would mean becoming one of those disinterested and distant parents who couldn’t really give a hoot about the existence of their children, viewing them as nothing more than a severe inconvenience to get rid of at every opportunity. Anyway, previous experience tells me even being unpleasant only shuts him up for a few moments.

Meanwhile, the immediate priorities for me are to attend a brief hospital appointment at 3.30, and deal with a monstrous mountain of garbage paperwork all generated by insane bureaucrats. I would barely make a dent in it if I spent a full forty hour working week at it, so fitting it all into the hour and a half before 3.30 is slightly difficult.

We have lunatic claims for ten years of council tax (over ten thousand pounds worth – a joke, isn’t it ?) for the house I moved out of seven years ago, combined with bailiffs threats to seize everything I possess to pay for it, we have the mysteries of tax credits to occupy a few hours with, we have the State milking me for speed camera fines, where I have to fight the case in court, taking many hours, and many, many other things, all with screaming deadlines and all wanting to take priority and all to be done right now, before the end of today. It is impossible. And there is no possibility of doing what I really want to do which is proper income generating work.

Instead I have to devote all my time to fending off the persecution by bureaucrats. If I don’t, they will take their revenge and impose nastinesses on me. The speeding fine will cost money and I will be arrested for not paying as well as having my license taken away. All because drove at 38 miles per hour on a completely empty main road in the middle of the night, actually obeying all speed limits. Like about three million other people, I have been well and truly conned by a thieving Government which is milking thousands of motorists every day.

And, although I will persevere at my desk after dealing with the nine year old and persuading him to go out and play cricket with the local cricket club, past experience tells me I will get very little done at all. Even when I put off preparing the evening meal for him and me until the last minute, its still doesn’t buy much time. It also means we usually eat at 11 pm which is far too late for both of us and drives me completely bonkers.

This is just a little cameo of everyday life as a single parent. Variations of the same theme occur every single day. Each day I think tomorrow will be different. But it never is. All my time is taken up by the combination of mad bureaucrats poisoning my life and looking after the nine year old Ninja Destroyer.

BUREAUCRACY OF OPPRESSION

Social Services Abuse Children – frequently ! No, Perhaps most of the time !

A local family I have known for some time told told me an amazing story recently. It’s about the sheer nastiness of Social Services and the bureaucracy of oppression this Labour Government inflicts on us all.

The story is one of those awful tales of Social Services tearing children away from their families without the slightest moral justification whatsoever.

This family are at the bottom of the social heap. The fifty year old husband used to be in the army. Now he is a full time carer to his wife who suddenly descended without warning into mental illness – schizophrenia – a few years ago.

It could have been because of the awful traumas the family experienced. With a son and daughter with learning disability under the age of ten, the family discovered their third child, a son without any medical problems until then, acquired bone cancer and ended up having one leg amputated at the very top of the thigh.

The family remained close and supportive of each other with the husband loyally caring for a wife constantly causing problems making life really difficult for everyone with her muddled and mentally ill mind.

I have heard a mental health nurse working in the NHS say to another husband looking after a schizophrenic partner “Why bother staying with her. It’s a waste of time looking after them. It doesn’t do any good in the end and it just destroys your own life eventually, so why bother ?”

It made me really angry to hear that. It seemed typical of so many of the lazy, self centred bureaucratic employees in the NHS, only concerned with getting paid and with no intention of ever bothering to do their jobs properly. Instead, hiding their incompetent lazyness behind a blizzard of rules and bureaucratic justifications.

The daughter went to a special school for people with learning disabilities and emerged a reasonably competent young woman, perfectly able to look after herself in her small single person flat supplied to her by the local council. The learning disabilities had been quite minor really.

Then she became pregnant. So far, unremarkable. Everyone is getting on with their lives normally and nothing particularly unusual is happening .

Then, let’s call the young girl Julie, instead of her real name, in case some bureaucratic moron working for the government tries to imprison someone for talking about this matter; because it is, apparently, against the law to openly talk about these things and people are often sent to prison for doing so.

Most people won’t know about that and you don’t really hear about the people imprisoned for protesting against the appalling and vicious incompetence of Social Services and the Family Courts.

The reason being, the Government gags everyone with oppressive laws forbidding any exposure of the dreadful activities Social Services and the Family Courts get up to.

Of course these laws completely protect Social Services from being exposed for the destructive, useless, idle and incompetent idiots they often are. The law also conveniently protects the complacent and pompous little Judges sitting in the family courts, happily collecting their large pay packets, secure in the knowledge they are answerable to no one.

I once heard of a family court Judge who billowed in thoroughly late for the Friday afternoon hearing that was supposed to have started at 2 p.m. It was nearly three O’clock when she finally arrived in the court. She must have had a really good lunch.

Apologising brusquely for being late, she announced she hoped everyone in the court would get a move on and conclude the case before four p.m. as she really had to get off on the dot of four O’clock to do her weekend shopping. She couldn’t possibly stay a minute longer that four p.m., she said.

As a direct result of what she had menacing told the roomful of subservient and groveling lawyers, ritually awed by the sheer majesty of the almost unlimited power the Judge held over everyone in the court, a two year old child was deliberately and intentionally placed in great danger by Social Services.

The poor father who had brought the case to ask the court to uphold the law and return his two year old son the court had previously ordered be looked after by him because the Mother was dangerously mad with schizophrenia, was forced to agree to Social Services being given an instant care order so the case could be finished quickly. Then the fat little Judge could cheerfully go off and do her weekend shopping without a care in the World.

Never mind the child had been illegally abducted by the insane and dangerously psychotic Mother and the Judge herself had told the Social Services she was unhappy with the obvious dangers of expecting this Mother to look after the child when clearly she was seriously mentally ill.

But, no, Social Services insisted they thought it would be too ‘disruptive’ to return the child to his Father, even though everyone in the court agreed the Father was an excellent and competent parent, always having been the principal carer anyway. The Judge specifically told Social Services she was unhappy with the idea of the Mother looking after the child as she was clearly a danger and the Father wasn’t. But, no, Social Services must have their way.

So, the Judge said she would reluctantly agree to the Social Services recommendation that the child stay with the dangerous Mother on condition Social Services visited the Mother every day to make sure she was actually looking after the child and not neglecting it. The very real risk of the child’s death at the hands of a psychotic mentally ill schizophrenic was ignored.

Eventually, as it turned out, Social Services were forced to admit the Mother was dangerously psychotic and completely incapable of looking after the child, so they put the child into a foster home rather than return him to his Father.

In the foster home the child was thoroughly abused by the foster parents. When the child left the foster home he had twenty eight identical little round bruises all over his ribcage where he had been poked hard with the end of a walking stick wielded by the foster parents.

This was to keep the two year old child from coming too close to them.

They didn’t like the idea of the child approaching them to seek the affection it craved, having been arbitrarily ripped from both his Father and Mother by the wickedness of utterly incompetent Social Services people so obsessed with political correctness that they would do everything in their power to prevent a Father looking after his own child.

Social Services even went so far as to threaten the Father in that case with taking his son away and forcibly adopting him if the Father ‘didn’t cooperate’ with them, whatever that meant.


So, back to ‘Julie’s ‘ story. Twenty year old heavily pregnant ‘Julie’ sensibly applies to the Council for slightly larger accommodation – a two bedroomed flat instead of the laughingly described ‘studio flat’ she currently occupies. Actually it is just a glorified bedsitter really, but that’s the property market for you. All exaggeration and hype.

Immediately, the bureaucrats of the ever watchful Big Brother State Surveillance, Interference and Oppression Machine swing into action.

Because Julie has had to fill out endless forms describing her entire life history just to get her Council Accommodation in the first place, the nosy officials noted she once had ‘learning disabilities’.

Straightaway the busybody and prurient Council Housing Official handling an application for larger accommodation notified Social Services that a young girl in Council accommodation was about to give birth and as she was recorded as once having ‘learning disabilities’, perhaps Social Services might want to use this as an excuse to interfere in her life, possibly even destroy it.

You bet they do.

Social Services set about causing the maximum amount of destruction and heartache they can contrive. Standard procedure really. All in a day’s work. They are used to doing this sort of thing all the time.

Within a short time after the child is born, Social Services have grasped control of it through the complacent family courts, and they can now do what they want with the child.

That often means ripping the child away from the Mother and family and putting the baby up for adoption to meet the insane ‘adoption targets’ set by an Orwellian government obsessed with controlling every aspect of everybody’s life with ‘targets’.

‘Targets’ for everything. ‘Targeted Services’, meaning things like non-existent health treatment for vast swathes of the population because services are not ‘targeted’ in their direction. Rather all the money seems more ‘targeted’ in the directions of the government bureaucrat’s pockets and fat index linked pensions.

So, particularly bad luck on all of you lot who want dental treatment. Unfortunately all the NHS dental treatment seems to have been ‘targeted’ somewhere else, because you are certainly unlikely to get any of it. You will be forced to pay for your own dental treatment yourself. Just one example of the clever dexterity of our Government’s ‘targeting’ culture.

Soon the baby is placed in a foster home by Social Services, but the young Mother is still ‘allowed’ to look after her own baby as she too, is forced into the same foster home at the age of twenty years old.

Social Services are not satisfied with torturing the Mother by telling her they have decided to bring a case before the Family Court for the forcible adoption of the child.

So, for no other reason that some knowing official employed by Social Services has decided they know best and can decide on who can have the privilege of keeping the child they have given birth to and who can be arbitrarily deprived of keeping their own child, Social Services also use the Family Court to forbid the Mother and child to visit the Grandparents, or for the Grandparents to offer their daughter any help in looking after their own Grand-daughter.

Apparently all this is based on the grounds Grandmother has been mentally ill, although she is doing absolutely fine now as her husband and children are helping her so much and looking after her.

Social Services also hint darkly to the Family Court that as the Grandparents have an untidily gaudy front garden with lots of flower pots full of flowers, this somehow constitutes a serious hazard to the well being of the baby should she visit the house.

This is the sort of thing Social Services think they ought to protect the child from and even make sure it is adopted to take it away from such a dangerous environment where it might be over-exposed to the dangers of too many plant pots in the front garden. Tsk Tsk.

So the Court bans the child from visiting the Grandparents house, having given weighty consideration to the question of too many flower pots in the garden and other things of such similar great importance.

So there we have it. Another good day’s work done by Social Services. I expect they managed to keep their expenditure of public money to a modest hundred thousand pounds or so to interfere in private family life and tear a child away from it’s parents entirely unnecessarily

Never mind the hordes of dismally deprived children who really need the intervention of Social Services to prevent things like their parents starving or beating them to death. Cases like that are much too much of a bother for Social Services to deal with. There is always an excuse for not dealing with them.

Rather just let those children get on with it and suffer the most awful privations, because the laws of obsessive State secrecy will protect Social Services and the Family courts from the public ever finding out about the true extent their breathtakingly corrupt incompetences.

It’s all just a gravy train really, a nice secure position being paid for by the taxpayer, and there is no real accountability at all. ‘Who Cares. We don’t. We’re just Social Services. We couldn’t care less about anyone except ourselves thank you very much.’

To hell with the children.

Repossessed, Repossessed, Repossessed !

Instead of Location, Location, Location !

The mortgage lending industry are mostly liars and thieves. I can speak from personal experience. Read on and you will see what I mean.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders are certainly liars. I have lost count of the times I have seen spokespeople from the Council of Mortgage Lenders telling all us mortgage holders that our lenders will bend over backwards to help us if we fall into arrears with our mortgages when we experience financial hardship.

It is, quite simply, a lie.

Another falsehood being peddled is that courts are sympathetic towards householders being repossessed.

The truth is, once you have become three months or more in arrears, you are likely to be repossessed in the most astonishingly nasty, brutish manner – and very quickly too.

The whole industry is rotten to the core. It is intrinsically fraudulent.

For example; I had a mortgage with Birmingham Midshires. They actually told me I didn’t have to pay the mortgage for a while as I was in severe financial difficulties.

They immediately ignored what they had told me and sent me repetitive penalty charge notices. Eventually they built up thousands of pounds of mythical expenses they added on to my mortgage. They were all artful works of fiction – a complete fairy tale.

But the small print of their mortgage contract said this is what they could do. Of course it did !

They proceeded to repossess my house and throw me out with an eviction notice that just gave me about three weeks notice to quit.

Is that civilised behaviour or what ?

To be continued.

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NATIONWIDE PROTECTION RACKET TO FLEECE US ALL

Organised crime used to be the occupation of highly unattractive individuals from deprived neighbourhoods full of dysfunctional poverty ridden families.

One of the most lucrative schemes these criminals dreamed up was the ‘protection racket’. This entailed a bunch of thugs wandering into other people’s premises – a pub, or restaurant for example – and simply demanding money in return for not smashing the place up or beating the owner up and putting him in hospital.

Most people soon learnt it was better just to pay the regular demands for cash because it was the only way they could stay in business.

Persistent resistance to the menacing extortion often led to murder as the thugs sought to terrorise everyone else into compliance with their demands.

Modern times have opened up exciting new possibilities for slightly more sophisticated methods, rather than just brute violence.

Big business has learnt a few lessons from the old fashioned protection racket scam and crafted a more modern version which has the huge advantage of carrying absolutely no risk whatever of going to prison for being a criminal.

There are many examples of this form of legalised theft, but consider this particular one. It is very common.

My Potterton gas boiler was ill. It had been ill ever since I bought this house five years ago – despite the fact it was virtually new. Apparently, Potterton were knowingly supplying brand new gas boilers to people all over the country which were faulty from the very moment they were installed.

The problem was the circuit board. That little bundle of inscrutable electronics that controlled the turning on and off of the boiler when the water was at the right temperature. It would either fail to turn the boiler on at all, or, once on, be unable to turn it off.

This meant the hot water tank rapidly overheated, reached boiling point and boiling water and red hot steam would zoom into the roof, overflow out of the header tank and down through all the ceilings in the house one after another, wrecking plasterwork, decor and carpets and any other valuable possessions that might be inconsiderately lying around in your house at the time.

When the damned thing gave up the ghost completely and refused to fire up at all, just as winter became a fair simulation of the frozen arctic, leaving us with freezing cold water and a house like a hovel in Siberia, I finally tried to get the thing repaired.

That was when I learned about the new, modernised form of protection racket gleefully seized upon by the likes of Potterton and British Gas.

Big organisations like British Gas and Potterton have a virtual stranglehold over the entire market, just like all the other large companies that either take over every local enterprise or simply drive them out of business. They are basically the only people you can turn to for repairs.

So when I failed to find a local heating engineer who wasn’t a complete cowboy, I was reluctantly forced to turn to Potterton, being the makers of the boiler, as a hopeful source of reasonably reliable repair.

Bingo ! “No problem sir. Our first available appointment for an engineer is for tomorrow. Would that be suitable ?”

Would it be suitable ? I was in a state of pathetic gratefulness for the amazing speed with which my inanimate boiler could be repaired and warmth restored to the household once more. My nine year old son would no longer be in danger of dying from hypothermia or pneumonia as he dragged his grey, pinched and frozen body wearily through the cold and wintry house , clutching a duvet around him wherever he went.

But, there was a catch. There would be a fixed price of £349. There would be no other options. So, even if the repair took five minutes and a part costing only a few pence it would still cost £349. As the entire boiler cost only about £1000 brand new, it would be quite impossible to imagine any ordinary repair that was likely to cost as much £349.

So, being a single parent existing on a below the poverty threshold income, I thought this was ludicrous. This repair was going to cost me the equivalent of three weeks entire income !

I turned to British Gas. They couldn’t send an engineer tomorrow but they could manage the next day. That looked promising. I wouldn’t hold the extra day’s delay against them. It was still pretty prompt. Prompt enough, anyway.

Then came the crunch. The cost ? £444 fixed price only, the same as Potterton, but just another hundred pounds more, nearly.

Both of these extortion artistes wrapped these huge repair fees in gobbledygook language which seemed to use the word ‘protection’ quite a lot – just like the old fashioned criminals selling ‘protection’ from them smashing the place up as long as you coughed up the regular weekly payments they demanded with menaces.

Except the genius of British Gas and Potterton is that all they have to do if you don’t pay their extortionate demands is, well, err…. nothing. Yes, all they have to do is absolutely nothing. That means you and your family will simply freeze to death because it will be impossible to get anyone else to repair your boiler, because that is the way the manufacturers arrange it. They are the sole source of specialised parts, for instance.

So, I was forced to return to Potterton, being nearly a hundred pounds cheaper than British Gas at £349 instead of some £444.

When the repairman called he took just ten minutes and cheerfully described it as a complete rip off. The actual cost of the circuit board he simply replaced was just £100 before VAT. Charging the repairman out at £50 an hour would make the bill no more than £150 instead of £349 or British Gas’ incredible £444.

A forty hour working week charged at £50 per hour is two thousand pounds a week or £104000 per year. Enough to pay the repair man his salary of less than thirty thousand pounds a year and still leave the company with a whopping profit.

However. the repairman told me he did an average of five repairs like this a day. At £349 each that is a daily total of £1745 or a staggering total of £453 700 per year. Yes, that’s nearly half a million pounds !

Good money for those that get it ! Shame about the single parents on poverty levels of income shivering with cold as they no longer have any money left at all to pay for fuel to use in their now repaired and working central heating boilers.

Consumers need protection from this sort of extortion which is a creeping menace today as big business becomes increasingly bigger and bigger and more and more out of control as it rampages through our wallets with dishonest and evil impunity.

SAINSBURY’S THUG LIKE BEHAVIOUR

I recently visited Sainsbury’s in a Sussex market town on a Sunday to return some boys shorts bought the previous day which had been incorrectly labeled and were, therefore, the wrong size.

I had done a major shop the previous day and didn’t need to purchase anything else other than about £5 of milk etc.

When I paid the cashier I asked her to ‘swipe’ my car park entry card in order to allow me out of the car park because I had probably been in the store for very slightly more than the half hour allowed for ‘free’ parking.

Without swiping the card I would have incurred a parking fee of £10 for the privilege of being forced to return a faulty product and make a minor purchase of less than the minimum of £10, below which you have to pay extortionate parking charges if shopping has taken more than half an hour.

The cashier made the assumption that because I had bought such a small number of items I must have been in the store less than half an hour. When I told her I had also spend a considerable time dealing with my exchange of shorts she held on to her mindset of me being within the half hour.

She refused to swipe the card, saying she ‘couldn’t’ swipe it if I had been less than half an hour and ‘couldn’t’ swipe it if I had been more than half an hour because I had only spent about £5 and not the minimum of ten pounds.

Never the less, I asked her to swipe the card because should I have been in the store for just slightly more than half an hour I would be refused exit without paying a ten pound fee, and I would have blocked the exit to the car park for all the other exiting shoppers while I either paid the fee or had the unpleasant experience of arguing the matter with the intransigent Sainsbury’s staff.

Although this discussion was ludicrous, there was no personal difficulty or rancour in the discussion other than the cashier explaining to me her wish to obey her management instructions not to swipe cards in my sort of circumstances.

The cashier then hailed a passing ‘supervisor’ and asked her to take the card to the customer service point to have it swiped. An amicably reasonable solution to the utter lack of initiative the Sainsbury’s management deprive cashiers of using.

I would stress that despite my slightly acid description of events, there had been no unpleasant exchanges between the cashier and me. I recognised she was following the management instructions to her and our exchange was perfectly polite and civilised in every way.

I merely told her I insisted the card must be swiped as I did not want to block the car park exit. And It seemed complete lunacy to gamble on whether I had been in the store 29 minutes and would be freed, or 31 minutes and would be trapped causing every other exiting shopper to also be trapped behind my blocked car.

There had been no disruption or ‘argument’. It was a perfectly normal exchange, with a perfectly amicable solution as the cashier instructed the supervisor who gaily tripped off to swipe the card without further ado.

Unfortunately, just as the supervisor walked off with the card, a hatchet faced woman with a Sainsbury’s uniform and with a filthy expression of intense anger on her face shrieked at the top of her voice to me ‘You’ve been barred from the store.’

At the same time she slammed her hand on a ‘panic’ button to set off a loud alarm and shouted for security staff to forcibly remove me from the store.

Amazed and utterly nonplussed, I replied to her that I had not been banned. The supervisor taking my card to be swiped turned around and handed the card back to the cashier who then handed it to me, unswiped. I handed it back to the supervisor in a dazed state as the screaming harpy was continuing to shriek loudly at me that I was banned and shouldn’t be shopping at the store at all.

This was news to me as I have been shopping at the store every few days for five years uninterrupted by any ‘banning orders’ imposed by screaming harpies shouting abuse at me at the top of their voices.

The supervisor with my card walked with me to the customer service point where the card was swiped by her without comment.

Meanwhile, a burly security guard appeared who told me I couldn’t leave the store. He kept shuffling up to within a very few inches of my face every time I tried to keep a reasonably normal distance from him, breathing his foetid breath straight into my nostrils as he followed his training instructions to intimidate people by ‘invading their personal space’ in an overtly threatening manner by standing abnormally close to them.

I was a prisoner of Sainsbury’s, not allowed to leave the premises by this threatening security guard.

I was completely stunned at being screamed at for absolutely no reason at all by this maniac of a hatchet faced harpy woman employed by Sainsbury’s, and then kept prisoner and prevented from leaving by a threatening ’security guard’ who clearly implied he would use violence to prevent me going about my lawful business.

Meanwhile, my nine year old son appeared to be in a state of increasing terror at what was happening to his Father.

A duty manager, then appeared and asked the security guard what was going on. The guard replied he had no idea other than the shrieking Sainsbury employee has said I was banned from the store and had asked him to throw me out.

A slightly unnecessary procedure as, armed with my now swiped card, and having paid for my shopping, I was more than anxious to remove myself from this screaming madhouse where the Sainsbury employee’s continued shrieking had attracted a wide audience of at least a hundred people looking to see what the fracas was all about.

The manager did not speak to me, indeed refused to do so as he asked the security guard what the fuss was about. I was insolently and rudely told to be quiet by the manager when I greeted him as a possible saviour from this growing insanity and attempted to start explaining to him what had taken place. I imagined that, naturally, the manager would wish to speak to the polite and diffident customer being kept prisoner and prevented from leaving the store by a security guard.

Not so. When the security guard had finished telling the Duty Manager he had no idea what was going on, the manager simply refused to speak to me and told me brusquely to leave. I replied that was what I was being prevented from doing.

The manager’s response was to behave in an extremely confrontational and aggressive way, and also following his training on how to deal with violence, proceeded to do the same as the security guard and shoved his face within inches of mine. Together the manager and the security guard ‘herded‘ me out of the store in a brutally uncivilised and unnecessary manner, not allowing me to leave normally and willingly as I was entirely intent on doing.

It occurred to me the pair of them must have been watching too many American Los Angeles Cop and Car chase type TV films and were completely confused about what was American television fantasy and what was real life in a quiet Sussex market town as a sixty year old, inoffensive, middle class resident went about the daily business of domestic shopping with his nine year old son.

I was followed into the car park by the security guard at a distance who waited to see which car I approached. He then wrote my car number in biro on his hand in a thoroughly dramatic manner, no doubt still living the fantasy and taking his cue from all those America Cop movies he watched when not harassing innocent shoppers in the local supermarket for a living.

Child Abuse

As a single parent it has become abundantly clear to me the whole idea of both parents having full time jobs and still somehow managing to bring up their children is a complete joke.

I have brought up two children who are now adults. We were a two parent family and there was always one of us at home and not working. Now I have been bringing up my nine year old boy alone as a single parent since he was three.

What a different experience.

It is a full time job; and if I was to have a nine to five job, even locally, around the corner from my house, no matter how I arranged things, it is clear my boy would suffer immense emotional neglect as well as a considerably impoverished way of life.

I am finding it seriously difficult just trying to find enough time to work at home from my computer. There just never seems to be enough time to either get on with a decent amount of work, or to spend adequate time with my boy.

How on earth does this ignorant bunch of morons who comprise our government think any single parent is going to be able to bring up children and somehow magically fit in a full time job as well ?

Of course, it is possible to have that full time job and farm out the children to some dipsy child minder. But even if the child minding situation is as brilliant as it can ever get, it will still impose enormous problems on the child and parent.

It is hardly surprising the whole country is complaining about the dysfunctional youth of today; a vast and increasing proportion of who are becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol and crime.

It is the inevitable consequence of the Government structuring an economy which forces both parents out to work, effectively ensuring virtually the entire nation simply abandons all it’s children.

The culture of fecklessness and disinterest in getting a good job and getting on in life is encouraged and nurtured by children been left with childminders for most of their childhood while their exhausted parents go out to full time jobs, only to come home to a mountain of domestic chores for which there is not enough time to deal with.

The nation’s children are simply being abandoned – left to their own devices while their parents slog it out on the treadmill of Gordon Brown’s poisonous economy.

Taxed to the hilt, working for half the year for absolutely no pay whatever to feed the insatiable coffers of Gordon Brown’s greedily officious taxman.

And where does all this money go ? Why, to an army of nasty little bureaucrats employed in ever increasing numbers by the government to interfere in every part of our lives and spy on every citizen so they can be controlled in the minutest way.

You can’t even leave your dustbin lid slightly raised without the Government spies noting it down in minute detail and prosecuting you to brand you with a ‘criminal’ record. I mean, what a surreal joke to describe someone whose dustbin lid is slightly ajar as a ‘criminal‘ ! What kind of obscene Orwellian nightmare has this Government brought to this country?

MILKING THE MOTORIST SPEEDING CAMERA SCAMS

Like many others, I have a problem with speeding tickets , my first ever in forty years of driving !

Of course it was a camera – and a con trick to gather money.

The road was a minor A road completely empty except for me. It was 9.30 p.m. ish on a dark winter night and it was raining cats and dogs, relentlessly.

Because of atrocious weather conditions and a very bendy road it was impossible for me to drive particularly fast. Driving at all in those conditions took all my concentration. If I had driven fast, I would simply have skidded off the road. I also had my nine year old son in the car.

Suddenly, going around a sharp bend I saw a 30 mph sign. It was obscured from being seen at any maximum sort of distance by virtue of being partially around a bend.

The very second I saw the 30 mph sign I braked as hard as the wet, greasy skid encouraging road surface allowed.

While my foot was still firmly on the brake holding the car on the edge of a slight skid – around a corner – in a semi emergency stop sort of way, the camera flashed.

It was so close to the 30MPH sign it was impossible to slow any faster from what had been a reasonable speed prior to the sign.

The record showed me doing 38 mph.

The case has yet to go to court where I wish to fight it.

I am even considering refusing to pay any fine etc if found guilty and would be prepared to go to prison.

If everyone was prepared to do this, refuse to pay and willing go to prison, the law would change pretty damn quick, I should think.

I now always make a point of never paying for parking, and just throw all the tickets away, as I have had some breathtaking experiences of being robbed blind with parking tickets. I even lost a newish car illegally taken by bailiffs.

Two recent tickets have instantly expanded to over a thousand pounds each because I didn’t pay them. The utterly disproportionate way in which an already extortionate penalty charge of £40 instantly escalates to this sort of figure is a national scandal.

WHY do we all put up with it ?

This Totalitarian Government under Gordon Brown is simply a thief.

Motorists are being deliberately milked of gigantic amounts of money to prop up an incompetent, repressive and failing Government of inadequate control freaks.

How did they ever get into power ?

Any advice would be very welcome. And might I suggest giving consideration to organising a national campaign against extorting money through the excuse of ludicrously high parking fees.

If everyone just threw their parking tickets away and refused to pay for parking, the whole rotten system would grind to a full stop.

Just to point out a little truth that few people seem be aware of. Most council parking parking fees add up the cost of a parking space being more than enough each month to pay for a substantial mortgage.

Yes, that’s right. Each parking space milks the motorist of a monthly sum sufficient to pay a large mortgage. Some spaces wrack up to being worth thousands of pounds per month to the council in extortion money.

When criminals specialise in extortion it is a crime. How come it isn’t a crime when councils and the government do it ?

Can someone tell me ?

http://ticketappeal.co.uk/

Knife Crime – Knives Not Needed To Kill

That Twit Gordon Brown announced today that teenagers caught carrying knives will automatically be taken to court and prosecuted.

Somehow he is so thick he imagines this will stop teenagers harming each other and occasionally stabbing each other to death.

When I was growing up and was a boy scout, we all carried large sheath knives or Bowie knives as part and parcel of being a scout. When I was a sailor in the Royal Navy we Seamen were issued with official Royal Navy Seaman’s knives as part of the uniform. We wore them tied on a white lanyard around our waists.

Just about every schoolboy in those days carried some sort of penknife. It was what boys did. Everyone expected it. But we didn’t use these knives to stab other people with. It would never have occurred to us.

No one else worried these knives would ever be used as an offensive weapon because there wasn’t the culture of violence that we are surrounded with today. So we were a great deal less violent than today’s teenagers.

The big difference between then and now is we were not brought up being force fed a diet of extreme violence day in and day out. Violence and aggression were not rammed in our faces everywhere we looked. We did not spend all our spare time playing silly computer games revolving exclusively around the idea of destroying other people with the maximum amount of aggression and violence.

Society as a whole seems to be so dim as to be unable to realise that human brains are influenced only by what is put into them. Feed them a nihilistic diet of violent aggression all the time to the virtual exclusion of anything else, and that will determine their own behaviour.

Simple really.

As you don’t need knives to maim and kill other people, the teenage violence will simply continue without knives being needed at all.

What we need is to change our extremely unpleasant culture – completely !

COMPUTERS ARE A COMPLETE CURSE

When computers came into our lives we were told they would make things more convenient and faster. We were told how much more we would be able to achieve.

What a load of complete cobblers that was. Utter, utter, rubbish !

I have been writing about computers since before the PC or the Apple Mac were invented, and been using them on a daily basis for over twenty years. So you can’t say I am unfamiliar with how to use them. I am no technophobe.

But I am distraught beyond comprehension with the amount of time they waste. It isn’t really the fault of the actual computer though. It is the fault of the idiots who write the software programs we all use.

They are invariably obscure and extremely difficult to understand or find your way around. This is completely unnecessary. They could all be as easy as pie to understand and use.

Unfortunately, the computer industry has historically been staffed by nerdy little geeks, hardly out of nappies. You know the sort, the kind of creeps who think it is great to spend most of your life playing silly, meaningless computer games.

They seem to think it is really clever to use stupidly incomprehensible language for ordinary things and hide essential information with an overload of useless information in gobbledegook on every page.

So, have you noticed how everything in life now takes much longer than it ever used to before computers came along ? 

Even the simplest of things.

Take those queues at the bank cashier. Each customer now takes up vastly increased amounts of the cashiers time as they fumble with their silly computers.

And what about those ghastly automated computerised telephone switchboards that answer every call we make and seem to have the single objective of preventing us speaking to the people we need to.

They waste hours of our time keeping us on hold and passing us around in circles from place to place. Each one with it’s own manically insane automated and computerised voice talking utter rubbish.

Today, I have another kind of computer time wasting problem. I just have to write two blog posts of about 500 words each – an hour’s work, perhaps. But then I have to post them on the blog.

This is something I am very familiar with and it normally takes but a moment. Today though, the blog software I am using has decided to throw a tantrum. It logs me in OK, and it gives some tantalising hints that everything is tickety boo and my blog is there waiting for my attention.

But, lo and behold. When I go to my blog management page it tells me I have no blog and there is nothing to manage, so I cannot make a post. It is obviously mad because I can actually read my blog on the internet. It is there It just wont let me access it to make a post or do anything else with it – despite acknowledging that I am logged in correctly.

So it is definitely not me making a mistake. It is the software.

So, what with all the to-ing and fro-ing around the computer, that manages to waste my entire morning as I try and do what I have to do. Oh, there was also my email software throwing another tantrum in sympathy as well.

It was just refusing to send mail and generally muddling things up right left and centre without the slightest explanation.

I wont bore you with the details, but, clearly, it would have been easy to sort out if the progam writers had bothered to provide explanations of what is wrong and how to correct it.

They never seem to do this with any software. You just get things like – ‘Error, you can’t do this. Error message number 8756.

How stupid is that ? Really helpful, isn’t it.

Supermarkets Rip Us Off

Supermarkets Rip Us off
I noticed in the supermarket today that the only loose new potatoes were Jersey Royals at £1.99p a kilogram. There were no other loose new potatoes at all.

When I asked an employee at Sainsburys why they were not still selling the Cyprus new potatoes they had been selling for weeks at less than one pound per kilo – that’s half the price of the Jersey Royals – he said that Sainsburys always stop selling the cheaper Mediterranean new potatoes in order to force customers to pay twice the amount of money for the much more expensive Jersey Royals when they come onto the market.

Is that a rip off or what ?

If you want to buy loose new potatoes at the price of less than one pound a kilo that you have been already paying for weeks, Sainsburys deliberately make sure you have to pay twice as much for the Jersey Royals, which are exactly the same type of potato. It is just that one lot is grown in the Mediterranean and are cheaper, and the other lot are grown in Jersey and are more than twice the price.

Paying two pounds in money for one kilo of potatoes is ridiculous. Many types of meat can cost only about two pounds per kilo weight. Ordinary chicken, for one.

We must be really stupid to let supermarkets get away with this kind of rip off manipulation. They are just plain nasty.

That reminds me. I was in Waitrose supermarket the other day and I saw their ‘Select Farm’ chickens at £1.93 per kilo. The size was described as 4-5 servings and the weight was 1.792 kilos. Then I saw a row of identical chickens at £2.90 odd per kilo. Except they weren’t exactly the same size; they were all one serving size smaller and described as 3-4 servings each.

When I asked a member of Waitrose staff why identical chickens (excepting one type being one serving larger) were two entirely different prices, one type being more than fifty per cent more expensive, they said they larger size chickens were ‘on offer’ and the smaller and more expensive chickens were not.

What do you make of that, then ?

Could it be even more manipulation. It’s a really good way of completely confusing customers and detaching any concept of prices for anything from reality.

Do you think this is why supermarket do it ?

HELP ! MY ‘PHONE LINE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY LUNATICS

The lunatics in question are an evil team consisting of BT (otherwise known as British Telecome) and Talk the Talk ( an utterly insanely named bunch of twits that make its
shareholders very rich by providing a truly lousy telephone service.

Today I started my working day only to discover my BT broadband connection had entirely vanished.

I discovered Talk Talk had somehow hijacked my telephone service so I could make calls, but not receive any, and there was no broadband connection at all.

Talk Talk had stolen my phone.

It’s called ’slamming’ in the language of the mentally retarded wierdos of the electronic sub-culture. It is illegal and a crime.

I spent a solid five hours and came close to having a heart attack at the immense difficulty of getting anything done about it and recovering my line from the thieves.

It meant I got absolutely no work done at all. I also feel like checking in to the nearest secure psychiatric hospital after spending the entire day in the hands of ‘customer advisors’ and ‘call centres’ of various kinds with BT and Talk Talk, OfCOM and the frequent foray around the globe to Hindustani speakers in India, a continent or so distant from here.

If this sounds mad, that’s because it is. More later.

Gordon Brown Punishes People

“The whole economy has been powered by debt because Gordon Brown & now Mr Darling have at every turn rewarded greed, speculation and uncontrolled immigration while punishing hard working, honest small business people.

“It is not regulation we need it is integrity from our leaders. “

Jeremy Silverstone wrote this on BBC Journalist
Robert Peston’s Blog

Families in Meltdown

A senior family court judge has hit out at the government over what he says is an “epidemic” of family failure that will have “catastrophic” effects.

In a speech, Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge for England and Wales, warned the results could be as destructive as global warming.

He said ministers are not doing enough about a “meltdown” in family life.
The government defended its record on the family and said most children were “safe, healthy, and achieve well”.

In a speech in Brighton to lawyers from Resolution, formerly the Solicitors’ Family Law Association, the judge warned of a “cancerous” increase in broken families and said the government must take “comprehensive action”.

The judge said those who witnessed the goings-on inside family courts would be aware of it being a “never ending carnival of human misery – a ceaseless river of human distress”.

Almost all of society’s social ills can be traced directly to the collapse of the family life says Mr Justice Coleridge.

Using very strong language, Mr Justice Coleridge warned of a bleak future if the UK did not address the problems he described.

He said “the effects of family breakdown” would, within the next 20 years, be “as marked and as destructive as the effects of global warming”.

“We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps,” said the judge, who added that its effects pose “as big a threat to the future of our society as terrorism, street crime or drugs”.

Mr Justice Coleridge said the collapse of family life is at a scale and severity that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago.

‘Broken’ families

“What is certain is that almost all of society’s social ills can be traced directly to the collapse of the family life,” he said.

However, Mr Justice Coleridge, who heads family courts in the south west of England, did not criticise single parents directly.

“I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family.
“What is government doing to recognise and face up to the emerging situation? The answer is: very little and nothing like enough.

“It is fiddling whilst Rome burns.”

Mr Justice Coleridge outlined a number of recommendations to improve the societal ills he described.

The suggestions included placing family justice at the top of the political agenda; allocating more staffing and money to family issues; better funding for contact centres to aid family cohesion; and extensive reforms of the laws relating to divorce, cohabitation and financial relief.

On the issue of legal reforms, Mr Justice Coleridge said divorce law and those relating to financial orders were “last properly reformed two generations ago, in the mid-60s, when society was altogether different.

“The current laws are not suited to modern social mores of the way we live now.”

‘Challenging circumstances’

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Families and Schools said: “Most children and young people in England today are safe, healthy, and achieve well.”

She added: “We do not agree that there has been a breakdown in the family – 70% of families are headed by a married couple.

“And a recent BBC poll suggests that three-quarters of people in Britain are optimistic about the future of their families, 24% higher than when the same question was asked in 1964.”

The spokeswoman said the Children’s Plan put children and families at the centre of everything the government did.

Meanwhile, more than £250m was being spent developing local services for parents in England, focusing on those in “challenging circumstances”.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for children, schools and families, said the judge was highlighting trends dating back at least 20 years.

“This government is not the source of the family breakdown problem but policies such as the operation of tax credits have made it more difficult for some families to bring up children in stable, two-parent households,” he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/7331882.stm

Published: 2008/04/05 13:50:20 GMT

Britain is Now Totalitarian State

This is a quote I found on a website set up to help families being persecuted by Social Services.

“We live in a country where at present a minority of gutless, ignorant and cruel individuals stand more unaccountable than ministers in our own government. An unaccountable minority making lives hell for thousands of families and their precious children each year.

An unaccountable minority who escape prosecution for their perjurous crimes committed against innocent families in unaccountable family courts wrapped in secrecy. Unaccountable legal representatives who pretend to care right at the start only to deceive and ignore nearing the end.

These are draconian laws, but made worse when twisted by local authority officials using a safety net of unaccountability. Abolish all secrecy in the Family Courts and let the daylight of open inquiry illuminate their work.”

Have a look at the website Fassit

JUDGE VOICES HIS CONTEMPT FOR BAILIFFS

Bailiffadviceonline

MONDAY, 19 MAY 2008
DRAKES GROUP and a FORM 4 COMPLAINT.

This complaint was made to Middlesborough County Court in February 2008 by a disabled lady, who is confined to a wheelchair.

The bailiff’s certificate was revoked and compensation awarded to the lady.

A parking ticket had been incurred and a bailiff from Drakes Group ( now Marston Group) had visited her home early in the morning and clamped her car BEFORE knocking at the door. The car was clearly displaying a disabled blue badge and the warrant in the possession of the bailiff was in the name of Motability Finance. It was therefore clear to the bailiff that the vehicle in question was a disabled vehicle. The bailiff charged £553.36.

The bailiff also maintained that he had visited the house the previous afternoon which was denied by this lady as the family run a business from their premises with staff. Drakes Group, in attempting to prove that a previous visit had taken place provided satellite navigation print outs which the court dismissed as they only proved the bailiff had been in the vicinity….not at the house.
At the hearing, the Judge was critical of the bailiff, but in particular was most critical of the company; Drakes Group Ltd for the following:

RE: THE CAR BEING CLAMPED BEFORE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR.

“There appears to have been absolutely no reason to do that except to bump up Drakes’ fees…..which had already been bumped up, it seemed to me, by a heavily unjustified charge the day before”.

RE: THE ALLEGED VISIT THE PREVIOUS DAY.

“I regard it as significant that there is no copy of the letter left (the previous day). I am told that this is a system of Drakes, but Mr X is the only person who can carry the can for an unsatisfactory system.”

RE: THE CHARGES OF £553.36

“Looking at that document ( breakdown of fees) which contains five figures, there is a maximum of one which is accurate , all the others are excessive”. He also said that “it seems to me that Mr X is trained to seek excessive amounts by is employers”. The Judge confirmed that the “correct figure would probably have been something under £200 made up of the original £95 (PCN), letter and two visits if one took a favourable view about the first visit, certainly NOT £553.36″

RE: SUMMING UP, THE JUDGE SAID THE FOLLOWING:

“All in all, this is a disgraceful performance, which I find particularly disturbing since it seems to be in accordance with the policy of the employers Drakes Group Ltd. I find it a matter of considerable regret that there is no body which governs the company rather that the individual bailiff. If there had been, it seems to me that Drakes Group ought to be taken before it and deprived of any licence it had”.

“It seems to me that it is perfectly clear that firms of this sort ought to be licenced and ought to operate under a statutory code of conduct rather than regarding themselves as……having a licence to rip off debtors”.

Posted by Bailiffadviceonline

GREED AND EXPLOITATION

This is a true story.

There is an organisation called the Birmingham Mudshires Building Demolition Society. It is wholly owned by the Hellifax Building Demolition Society which advertises extensively on television telling everyone trusting enough to believe it that every little extra helps.

What they really mean is not that every little bit extra helps their customers – which is what people think they mean, but that every little bit extra of your money they can persuade you to give them will do very nicely thank you very much towards providing the Hellifax and the Mudshires Board of Directors with an even larger bonus this year and an even more extravagant Christmas lunch at your expense.

Oh, and let’s not forget the shareholders too. I nearly forgot about them. They will do very nicely too from that little bit extra the hardworking and trusting customers can be conned into handing over to the safe keeping of these eminent financial institutions.

It’s a funny thing, but many of the shareholders seem to be Directors on the boards of other financial institutions. Mmmm. I wonder why ?

There’s a lot more to this story. But it is late and I must go to bed and I still haven’t eaten supper yet.It’s nearly midnight already. No lie in tomorrow either, as I have to get my eight year old son up and off to school first thing. I’ll continue this story tomorrow.