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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t like what Mark Andrews did and can be seen doing on CCTV.  What really upsets me is the way  what was a minor incident became such a big problem and waste of money.  I worked with and through people like Andrews when I was a cop and we all “benefit” from hairy-arsed coppers.  Working with him and present at the time I would have stopped what he was doing whether below or above him in rank.  It was wrong and, in my view criminal.

With this view one might expect that I support his arrest and conviction.  I don’t.  That he was convicted and then this was quashed by “Judge Roy Bean” seems to me to demonstrate just how ridiculous and unfair our CJS has become.  The arrest and treatment of the woman concerned seems equally absurd.

It’s too easy in cases like this to get into arguments like ‘one rule for us, another for the police’.  The truth is we are getting all sorts of stuff out of proportion.  Gadget’s ‘argument’ that you have to know about dealing with drunks and so on doesn’t hold either, but is part of a valid, wider set of considerations.  What we need in situations like this is a discipline and supervisory system that works and what’s exposed here is that there isn’t one, even when police officers initiate a complaint.

Whilst I don’t condone Andrew’s behaviour I also know the dangers of working with officers who won’t get stuck in.  The current system is encouraging them not to.  It needs radical reform.  The answer, and only in part, is to have civil tribunals we can trust to bring such matters to light and deal with them through discipline under public scrutiny and in ‘real time’ (i.e. ‘quick’).

We should be looking for ways to stop police custody incidents through night courts and other measures to bring speedy resolution.  I’m fairly sure I would work with Andrews and would see his treatment as unfair if I did (unless this is his general form).  This doesn’t make me feel the woman’s treatment was remotely decent.  And how did Andrew’s come to feel he could get away with it in front of other officers?  And how did they come to believe they didn’t have a duty to stop him at the time (in my view a general duty of decency towards the woman and towards a colleague ‘off on one’)?  I believe what we might call “Gadget immorality” played a role in that.

Without enough detail I’d guess Andrews has been the scapegoat in a system that has lost all sense of proportion.

My thanks to anyone who has done any thinking as a result of these left-overs, especially those on the more lively intranet blog.

I leave you in interesting times.  By the late New Year I expect something big to have given in Europe that will have sad implications for our broken country.  There’s a big chance that Pakistan and Iran will be in the news too.  We’ll get through it in some form.  The best route would be to set some honest cops on the banks.  Yates of the Yard is off to Bahrain. He’ll be there just in time for the Shia uprising and to have his morality tested.  Expect him not to be able to stop very grim, torture-based repression.

“Plan A” is an appeal to a kind of lumpen right-wing core feeling that austerity will bring the world back to where it was.  I think people view this much as they would on realising their household was overspending and deciding to cut going out, fashion, Chinese junk and holidays – making the car last a couple of years more than usual and that sort of stuff.  Much as this could work for a household, it’s dullardism in economic thinking.  No politicians can believe anything they tell us on this and they are all up to their ears in the cheating that led to the mess.  My guess is the politicians think the truth is too much for our tiny little minds and know they can poll our votes as they always have with the same old lines.  I’m hearing nothing I didn’t in the 1970s, though the jargon has changed and phrases like ‘balance of payments’ have all but disappeared.

“Plan A” is all about a spreadsheet of Treasury models.  If you know anything about spreadsheets you’ll know you can change figures all over the place and the software will reconcile all the figures and outcomes.  My first use of such stuff was in chemistry and later manufacturing.  In both, if you have the conceptual model wrong, they just produce useless shite.  They work very well and are very useful when the theory of what is linked to what and in what proportion is right – approximation can be good enough.

It is possible to think of a “Plan B” by shoving other numbers into the existing model.  In chemistry and manufacturing this is often done by putting real test numbers in.  Generally, chemicals and manufacturing processes don’t screw about with you like bankers and accountants interested in outcomes linked to their bonuses.

The problem with austerity is that the cutting back (like not taking a holiday) is to cut back on the nation’s “earnings” as GDP.  You’d take that holiday if any savings in not doing so were wiped out of your own account.  We all don’t take holidays or even feed ourselves and so there is less trade, and the thought of less trade makes productive investment unattractive.  We use things like business cycles to make sense of fluctuations in demand and write business and strategic plans.  The idea is to have product and product capability for the return of demand.  We take on debt in order to invest in order to get a higher return over time than our costs.  Simples!  It’s not and some business plans are so barking it would be better to do nothing and put the money in the bank and take the interest.

The problems with any “Plan B” offering is that it will be based on “spreadsheet A” – I can shell these out faster than peas from a pod.  The Japanese are 20 years ‘ahead’ of the game on this one and up shit creek with a very aged population that is shrinking, about to lose prized jobs to its manufacturing in developing countries.  Speadsheet A relies on growth forecasts that are wrong as they hit press and assumptions made long in the past.

We need a spreadsheet with other assumptions and outcomes built into it.  The essential problem here is not in constructing one but tearing the old one down.  To start this we have to realise we’ve been conned and put trust in ourselves.  This is more or less impossible because we have no model of rational dialogue in our public life.  A quick look at the amazingly awful GOP candidates or half an hour of PMQs is enough to tell.

There are still questions to ask about what our governments are currently up to.  The US and UK have refinanced their banks to a much larger extent than Europe as a whole.  We don’t know what the Euro is – it increasingly looks crackpot and a third German invasion, with the US and UK waiting on the fringe for it to go tits up and then going in for the fire-sale kill for assets that will produce rent.  All the basic “answers” rely on an upturn in innovation and new private sector jobs – this message is more than 30 years old and has a history of failure.  I would rather be German in terms of adaptation to this model than British, but the more insular and xenophobic Japanese are now in great trouble despite trying hard with it.

Times aren’t tough enough for most of us to give a damn.  A few are collecting in the streets with no real message and even less reporting.  In the UK these have taken the form of picnics with police, stealing some signed copies of celebrity-donated books and little else.  In the States more former soldiers are involved and more are more badly affected and there is more disruption and violence.

Outside of a few academic and market interests there is little of any alternative around and it’s more or less impossible to translate any of this into ordinary speak,  In fringe economies like Portugal, government is stealing from pension pots as surely as Enron and Maxwell; we currently get them delayed or reduced.  We’er so dumb the fact that a tiny rich have most of what money-value can be put on hasn’t dawned on us as we are told there is none for us.  In laughably “workshop Britain” even the effort on soccer pitches isn’t British.  The vultures aren’t just circling, they’ve landed in Iceland.

The answer is a limited debt jubilee, though when RBS is 30% exposed to Greece and all UK banks might lose 80% of core capital in a continental run, this can’t be a simple one as so many times in the past.  This would only be a start.  The next bit is to avoid fighting a war for the rich and taking them on instead.  The basics in this concern re-organising money so that it is fairly earned and deployed by utility banking.  To get even this far we have to reject the existing model of consumption and that means re-writing what life is about.  Bugger!  It’s tough.  Greater Lancashire UDI floated on our shale gas looks easier!  After all, we did the industrial revolution up here and produced George Formby. We’ve already started with the County Championship and a fracking-induced earthquake at Old Trafford will produce another (by making us play on grounds where it doesn’t rain 24/7 365.

You can see why people give up on plan B.  One reason OccupyX isn’t saying much yet is that we wouldn’t understand anyway.  You’ll know when you and your kids are skint or dying in Iran.