Police Pay Cuts

The police wage bill is £11 billion and this is around 75% of total spending.  The real cuts being made aren’t as advertised – the bulk of the savings are ‘back door’ through the inflation being stoked up through QE and our farcical focus on financial services and the speculative economy.  If we are lucky, two years down the line the average cop wage will be worth 20% less than last year. The cuts themselves are typical of the tinkering done across the public sector.  Wages generally have been in decline since the 1970s.  If one was able to price police pay to market, they would be much lower – perhaps 30% less.  I’m not advocating this, just pointing to the obvious market conditions.  I don’t believe much if any of the pay targeted at the front line will get there.

The situation is almost the reverse of that in the late 60′s when police pay had fallen way behind in an environment of generally rising wages.  We threatened and later voted for strike action then.  Hard to justify in these circumstances.  The only way to get higher wages is it insist on them across the board and for full employment.

The current offer is no or less business-as-usual and doesn’t represent the kind of radical overhaul the CJS needs.  Cops will be less well off like the rest of us except the rich top 10%.  This is what most of them voted for, though one expects they didn’t know as it would have happened if Labour had won.

Our force showed no signs of knowing who its best officers were and who among them was prepared to concoct criminal lies to cover their bad work.  I have no faith in performance based pay when such basics are not entertained.

Negative Alpha and the Giant Peach

We slipped into the hands of organised crime some while back.  Remember ‘The Untouchables’, the brilliant anti-mob series in which ‘actors’ auditioned for parts in ‘Stingray’ and ‘Thunderbirds’?  The mobsters variously ran stuff like numbers rackets (lotteries) and other activities now sources of government revenue.  Now fuckwits like Brown sell off our gold reserves discounted at 10% of real value and plan the resurgence of the East Manchester economy through slot machine ventures glossed-up as super casinos.  Like there isn’t enough real need in the world for capital other than gambling?

This lunatic fairy story is justified by the production of Alpha by sharp-suited (I’ll let Brown off on this one) versions of ‘The Count’ from ‘Sesame Street’ who puke numbers and economic abracadabra like priests wafting incense.  The story holds as much water as a sea-going Giant Peach.  The question is whether we can wake from the trance of the story.  I doubt our ability to do this.

Language is now Orwellian.  Gambling losses are now termed negative Alpha, the gambles themselves having been no more than a perm on all the horses in every race, the whizz kids no more than Horace Batchelor able to take a share only from winnings.  Money, in vast quantities, is not stolen but “vapourised” in hectic trading.  Our authorities, like corrupt US police forces, change the law for the new mob by simply not applying basic justice in their case.  We can get done for picking up a fiver from the street floor, yet they can disappear the odd billion or three.

Everyone in this system is bought and paid for.  What would crime statistics look like if all this activity was publicly accounted?

 

False Consciousness and the Sleeping Public

I was over at Shijuro’s earlier looking at some splendid examples of our loony legal system.  He expressed some hope the public might wake up to what’s really going on.  Hell hasn’t frozen over yet, I thought.

I’ve been struck for a long time that we mostly make decisions in ignorance.  Practical brain research shows this over and over.  We have the idea that the public only has to be shown the truth to accept it, but this is not the case.  Given all the evidence for evolution we still have droves of people who believe creationism – and one can demonstrate similar wuckfittery in many areas.  Even people who profess to believe in evolution generally can’t explain why very well and appear to have simply gone with the flow.  There is no evidence most people are any good at critical reasoning.

We vote on ‘the economy’ but know nothing of economics – the current plague of television punditry tells us this as the coverage is lightweight and haplessly inaccurate and unknowledgeable.  The rich have been robbing the rest of us blind and even this is not established.  The key problem we don’t grasp as a public is that people who take or are given power are the problem if we have no means to regulate and control them in some manageable way that doesn’t become a free-for-all.

In democracy we give up to the will of the people; yet this is clearly not true in any simple way.  I was part of no people willing the Iraq war.  I am part of no people willing the rich more and more money.  I sense no majority in favour of such either.  And just what is the will of the people if it’s based in superstition, prejudice and worse?  The problem we have is one of public accountability.  To understand this we need to see much more laid bare.

Many of the arguments on business, politics and economics do not proceed on the basis of fact.  We often justify the utterly ludicrous.  If we want an equal society, how do we justify wealth that makes society clearly unequal?  I have no more faith in democratic socialism than Hayek, but wealth fascism is no more acceptable than this Utopia.  Statements such as ‘the City being a competitive place where ludicrous salaries and bonuses are earned and have to be paid to attract the talent’ are evident rubbish, yet BBC bimbos bleat them out as true.

The public don’t know much, whether about the utterly sinister Nico Bento case or those Shijuro puts forward on what we might term ‘the other side’.  Examples from the wider world as just as bad.  The public offers us no hope.  It is  as incapable as the Bento jury that allowed what their eyes could see to be overcome by lying bullshit.

Banking Is Now A Criminal Enterprise

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/michael-hudson-banks-weren%E2%80%99t-meant-to-be-like-this.html

Most of us have been indoctrinated against conspiracy theories and the idea we can have something approaching full democracy.  If one reads the story above at Naked Capitalism it’s hard not to conclude that international financing  is now puppet master to what we thought was democratic politics.  I’m firmly of this belief and wonder on my sanity.  Plenty of people are making reasonable argument about this and I further conclude that reasonable argument can’t be the way forward.  The questions have to be about why people can’t shake themselves and see the reality.

The laws of economics for the drinker and banks*

Reblogged from reszatonline:

* It’s time again to benefit from my very good friend and occasional co-author Tim Coldwell as a source of ideas and connections. He discovered the following little text for us which allows us to enhance our understanding of economic relations and policy processes, and of the rationale behind current financial regulation. ___ Here is a dummies guide to what went wrong in Europe: Helga is the proprietor of a bar. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no …

Banker Bonuses

My interest in this matter is as an example of how little we are free or democratic.  Bankers and financiers of all kinds don’t deserve their salaries,let alone the obscene bonuses that render full democracy impossible and take the rest of us down the road to serfdom.

The argument is clouded from the start by our legal systems which make this wrong a “right”.

The real argument should be about whether we can have full democracy and have the highly disproportionate wealth such “earnings” create.  My view is this is impossible so the “earnings” should be.  Although this may look crassly naive, the view can be supported.  The problem is that we are ideologically scared of a free and equal society and cannot have rational debate.  This condition of being ideologically scared is not simply a matter of propaganda and is linked to our condition as social animals.  So I would look first not at bankers and sports stars but mice.

Social mice, even in good times, live highly subordinate lives under a male king who keeps the rest in penury.  If we take a subordinate male out of this condition, feed it up and train it to kill a string of palooka mice, it will then challenge the old king, kill the sod and become just the same type of king itself.  The apparent dominance skills of the old king turn out not to be in short supply, but maintained by hierarchy (being ideologically scared).  I wrap ideology with genetics and the environment here and suggest we need to now more on this for social design.  We should not be looking for genetic determinism, but how to overcome it.  We need a much wider view of these animal matters than I have space for here.

In considering banker bonuses and such, we tend to argument based on wads of assumptions about pay, reward, motivation, innovation, fairness and more that may well just be a load of old fables rather than any scientific base.  People can argue (and have) for centuries about notions like the existence of god when the truth is we can’t establish any such entity.  I suspect our general understanding of how the world works is based on the authority of talking snakes too.

When we talk of a banker bonus, I hear only silence on what such payouts and consequent accumulations of wealth mean for the rest of us.  For the payments to be worth anything, they must force the rest of us to deliver something and they  also render the recipients to this welfare.  Many more questions arise, such as the opportunity costs of making these payments and, indeed, those of having a system in which they are sought after.  Is any of this the right quest for our alleged brightest and most able?

We lack a public, scientific account.

Victoza Talking

I’ve been spending a lot of time bored of late.  It’s a losing weight thing – plus adjusting to my new diabetic medication.  I’ve been fat since training slipped from 4 days (plus playing 2) in the week – even in my last days as a university amateur.  That’s 30 years and seems enough.  I don’t do fast food and despite the legend don’t drink much either.  The big issue in recent years has been exercise – my muscles seem to scream on the equivalent of feather-dusting a few objects d’art – not that I keep either!  I’ve lost 2 stone but have no diet advice to give as this has been done by not eating and being hungry.  The Victoza (once a day jab) has helped in the last 10 days as it’s made me vomit at both ends.  Touch wood this phase is over and I’ll be back on my porridge only diet three days a week and the Holy Grail of walking the legs off the dog.  He’s already grumping about for his evening session.

The Victoza seems to help me feel less knackered and my blood sugars are on their way down.  Diet advice seems either banal (eat less than 1500 calories – which at least complies with something a bit like e = mc2) or ludicrous (F-plan etc.).  With a quarter of our population now fatter than me (in BMI) you’d think we’d do something better.  Nothing bores me quicker than chefs on television except people with PhDs in nutrition and supermarket vegetable selections.

It couldn’t be the case that something as simple as porridge only three days a week and a ban on fast food and snack sales and processed crap would work, surely?  Or that we haven’t done this because it would depress GDP?  Our pubs are still closing and apart from television and the Internet I’m not sure what there is to do.  I certainly have to earn a lot to do anything much other than this.

I sense a radical overhaul of economics needs to start with issues like whether people who don’t get fat don’t because they have reasonable diets.  This might seem as unlikely as my plan for UDI for Scotland and Greater Lancashire, but note the first is underway.

 

Plus ca change?

A month away constructing a book and all I can come back and say is “what’s new”.  Police have recorded 4% less crime in a year of riots and the BCS has found a 4% rise. Sadly, the admirable Steve Bennett isn’t commenting at the moment.  None of the 2008 farce has been fixed and the BBC is belatedly noticing the Japanese went through much the same a decade earlier.  There are moves afoot to strip Fred the Shred’s knighthood and those who always told us they were getting payments for results are demonstrating quite what the results are doesn’t matter.  The hacking scandal is missing the point – which is surely what a load of wankers we are in being more interested in shagging footballers than being dragged into a war with Iran or seeing what should be our wages snaffled by a tiny few.  Leveson is proving we have almost no journalism and will even watch extended spectacle on this obvious statement.

The ‘capitalism must be reformed’ debate is a replay of the 1970′s ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’ stuff on Slater-Walker, Tiny Rowlands and so on – without noting nothing changed then and asset stripping has become more sophisticated and criminal since.

My conclusion is that those with power don’t have to do anything right and don’t need any ideas.  Why should they when we can’t see through the same old promises offered over and over that are never tested in any genuine market or reality?  Bullshit is cheap.

Problem Families – Non-Solutions From Government and Gadget

Must get back to the book, but not in the mood following blue-in-the-face meeting with an idle solicitor.

The government is proposing to fix problem families with around £110 million a year to put one person in charge of dealings with said.  The estimate is 130,000 of them so this means about £800 a year on each.  That’s sod all – not much mroe than the cost of one of the 200 police visits they may get a year.

My suspicion is this measure will actually create bureaucrats who will juke performance management reports on what’s going on.  Louise Casey has been a failure for more than 10 years.

Gadget does the usual running down of the scum and is, of course, right.  The problem here is that moral urging over the years has made no difference at all and the problem, described in history books for centuries, is getting worse.

Cameron was even saying we first had to identify these families – given they have often been occupying houses in the same locale for generations, this seems absurd.  We already know who they are.

The problems are much deeper than any crass ‘putting someone in charge’ management scam can deal with.  The relevant authorities have been lying about ‘excellent partnership working’ since partnership working became a buzz phrase – underneath you find the very inspector issuing this bureaucratic grease saying working with the Council is like trying to plat snot.

I’ve lost nearly all sympathy with the scumbags – as I say, Gadget is right on what their problems are.  This isn’t the point.  I favour a cull.  The social problem is the damage they do to other people and this is immense.  There is another group who cause the rest of us as much pain and moer damage – the very rich and their financial services lickspittles.

The scumbags cause pain for the rest of us of such magnitude that we broadly do everything we can not to live near them (higher mortgage) or have our children go to school with theirs.  My grandson is at a school that can’t cope with its catchment from the Everglades and we are taking him out.  They are using measures like collective punishments.  There is bullying and most lessons are not worth much in learning terms because of disruption.

The scumbags, as any cop will tell you, know that the first line of defence is to get out a smear story on anyone complaining – what I’d like to hear more from cops is how they deal with this inevitable issue – silence when I do.  The same is true across agencies – they have almost no clue on how to gauge evidence and end up leaving the complainants in the lurch – an often violent lurch.  Complainants end up complaining about the service from the agencies and, surprise, surprise, get smeared to make them seem non-credible.

What’s needed is to identify the victims and provide support from that point.  Moral urging fails on the immoral – whether scumbags or banksters (you won’t believe what they are doing until the next collapse – coming soon).  And victims need to be contacted so that there treatment at the hands of cops, townhallsters, courts and others can be collated and used as a genuine performance measure.  Many cops would welcome this, knowing there are some knocks to take.

The current system is so crap you can’t even get noise stopped and includes such provision that this is OK if generated by certain ethnicities.  If you are ill and likely to be seriously made worse by intrusive noise the law says – well fuck you.  The agencies will lie and do complainants serious harm to protect their own incompetence and organisational performance – to the extent of conspiring to false prosecutions.  Politicians are worse and want to pretend their system and people are working.

Both Cameron and Gadget are a sell-out on this one.  What we need is someone with the balls to take the lid off and design something that works from the ground up.  Or give me and Gadget 00 licence and declare free-range on the shits.  Horrible as it is, a cull would do a lot to fix estates, housing, schools, NHS and many other problems.  Gadget might not join me in carrying a ‘banksters next’ placard.

What’s needed is not identification of the scum – I could organise most of that in a day (local cops know).  It’s the full extent of the problem and how it affects others that needs identification and sorting.  Fuck the scum – make them live partioned lives on trailer parks with barbed wire round them and a strict curfew.  They are beyond cure.  Start building these colonies now after reading Gadget’s riot act and move them on first breach.

Their houses will need a lot spending on them to enable decent families to have a home, and we could organise this as a youth employment-skilling project.

The cost of these scumbags will exceed any figure we can put on it.  The cost of non-policing them for others is vast,  We don’t police the banksters either and they are out to cost us democracy.  My guess is they are engineering another collapse and using a combination of derivatives trading and bankruptcy law in a plot to steal bail-out money and, indeed, any other assets they can grab.  We aren’t policing this either.

The gist of the bankster scheme involves bankruptcy rules on hypothecated debt which all banks to grab any assets ahead of other creditors (including us).  We may be seeing such a scam at JP Morgan now in the MF Global collapse.  It’s sort of this – that in a world in which all go bankrupt those first in line for what’s left end up winners.

My guess, if the truth was out, is that we wouldn’t want to live with either scumbags or banksters.  All this needs more than some designated bureaucrat to fix.  Gadget’s moralising won’t work on either end – and what would a Gedget do when the right thing isn’t protecting its mortgage-paying ability?  I suspect this morality is one and the same with the scrote and bankster.  Self at all costs – and it’s costing our democracy.

Another financial wangle

Just a few minutes to spare before I go and kill my lawyer.  He is now claiming to have lost several forms I signed last week.  I’ll let him off if he buys lunch.  Hapless dork foisted on me for a probate transaction.  His general tack is to promise to sort things by next Monday.  This has now slipped to Tuesday.

Re-hypothecation is a word that Robert Peston will be wuckfitting your way soon.  What it means is pawning customers’ assets several times until no one knows where the original bauble or cash is.  The general rule is you can only do this to 140% of the original value, but in the City of London you can do it until the cows come home – and at this point someone turns up claiming the cows are theirs.  It’s all a bit like lending your lawn-mower to a nextdoor neighbour who rents it out to the rest of the street.  It has a long history going back to the times when goldsmiths lent money on gold you deposited with them for safe-keeping.

So watch out for comingled re-hypothecation and get ready to shout ‘Bingo’.  Whenever you hear nonsense like these terms you should ask ‘who pays the bill’?  Which is precisely the question we should ask about the City in general.