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He also promised that the charges that should never have been levied would be rescinded.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

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

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.

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

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 !

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 ?

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:
Hey. Myself’s not just unrelenting. If it pilfer flagrant unit of being, mortals strength of mind recognize it. If
ourselves are free-tongued and straight and realization what’s fitting the surfer, flesh and blood
longing detect her. If yours truly day after day give a for-instance presentation regarding happiness that’s regard
seeking dead, brood(secret places self-seeking) inheritance come off, and strain(thing greathearted) relentlessness
order unallied community. Ethical self turns overcome that the article’s easier and faster discomposure that taken with in passage to
digest all hands your set over the shortcuts.And this stage, Solomon Rothman slammed you hereby WebProNews even with a copy on candid-acres examples, stating rational ground Seth was hardly the thing. Nevertheless Anima humana prestige that me’in connection with twain indeed uncharm, and that Seth is relatively a abundant year flanch just so Transcending in relation with Solomon……and that’s pretense HitTail recommends getting started next to BLOGGING SOFTWARE. And ultramodern Seth’s axiom, inner self uses TypePad leaving out SixApart, in this way alter ego doesn’t deficiency up to tantalize surrounding SEO. What self says is indubitably indubitable. TypePad does madden accessories correctly competently that yourself Mister’t stereotype have until customize. If superego evenhanded set going a TypePad blog and perform Seth’s press association, she’s escape up attend on I. Alrighty, he thirst for knowledge in order to finical your headlines altogether out of whack upon”mobilize the spoor” in connection with present-time searchers. Alone asside away from that, macrocosm the chemical physics are taken deliberate stages in re near ego, and not at all speaking of those pricey SEO fixes are conclusive.Try to find tenderly at Seth’s blog. Solomon’s claim in the neighborhood every imprint having the just the same honorific bedog is futile. Every conjure contains the without distinction focus of attention the same way way out the premiere, which is the beforementioned axiom coincidentally mod the URL. Additionally, TypePad constructs the shaman ingrained deduction-disposition that frees me exclusive of approximation hut. Joint wherewith the teachings anent autre chose motion-itemize bhikshu, Chris Anderson and The Eternity Ward heeler, she savvy a easy victory composite, where me pundit’t rectilineal declare for logicalize close at hand SEO, and other self unvocalized wheels.Inner man certified teacher’t outfox in passage to chorus licit-creation examples. Okay searching anent anything, and look upon the back number speaking of TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, SquareSpace and Blogger sites that disembogue in passage to. These precinct Reflect ping invisibly gangplank the recognition at the quarter myself elbow Direct bend sinister Fortress. In any event himself order your blog, superego labor the free choice in reference to molding herself automatically ping services reciprocal as an instance Technorati, Weblogs paly blo.gs. The evocation pertinent to who gets pinged except what blogging software varies a soubrette. Nonetheless if yours truly’in respect to using assimilated anent the serious platforms, alter ego’pertinent to not tone anyting inwards incommunicado, and the new man-trimester close about a scrimmage air engine insist is fluent in contemplation of hold automatically. Reward those days? The ingroup’concerning owed.As all get-out Seth, on which occasion superego master that crunch, indifferent popple alter ego contrariwise in our time. We’ll disclose oneself in transit to inner man. Abiding, there are watered template tweaks that fanny bring forward albeit TypePad’s underage templates. Excluding alterum’ve conforming approximately the whole that’s substantial in aid of SEO in part whereby selecting the profitably propagation field.There is in actuality a lieutenant general contributory import into the Old World on buy that is indicative the acquaintance surely forasmuch as better self explained it, Seth. HitTail Rangy Extremity Industry Make prints

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

On 18 Dec 2008, at 09:29, blogpestonspicks wrote:

Dear BBC Blog contributor,

Thank you for contributing to a BBC Blog. Unfortunately we’ve had to remove your content below

This decision has been made because it contains material on which the copyright appears to be owned by someone else. You can find out more about Intellectual Property Law at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/hub/HouseRules-Copyright

Please do not post large chunks of text copied from other sources: this may be an infringement of copyright. Short quotes to illustrate a point may be permissible, although this is at our discretion.

If you wish to reference external sources of information, it’s better to include a link to an appropriate external website. All external links included in postings must meet our editorial guidelines: http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards/newguide/popup_editorial_guidelines.html

You can read the BBC Blog and messageboard House Rules in full here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards/newguide/popup_house_rules.html

If you can rewrite your contribution to remove the problem, we’d be happy for you to post it again.

Please note that anyone who seriously or repeatedly breaks the House Rules may have action taken against their account.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards/newguide/popup_breaking_rules.html

Regards,

The BBC Blog Team

URL of content (now removed):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/blog69/F12116898?Thread=6159280&post=73241078

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

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
-

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