Yates (once of the Yard) is now a standard Bahrain thug cop

We learned today that Yates was so economical with the truth in front of Parliament over Ms Wallis’ job application that most of us would consider him to have lied.  He can also be seen on Channel 4 News lying that the resistance in Bahrain is about criminals in the villages attacking unarmed police.  For a place with “no crime” Bahrain has a vast police force in addition to a very large military (both massive for somewhere with a population of about one million, half of which is expat).

I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of this video in which the unarmed police sport assault rifles and (towards the end) another throws a petrol bomb.

I find it extremely disturbing that anyone like Yates could hold senior office in the Met.  After 8 years the IPCC is now merely addressing the problems of senior figures retiring before disciplinary action as something they can do nothing about..  It is more likely Yates was appointed for his ability to bullshit in cover-up than any reforming ability.  Is this a mere continuation of his role at the Met?  He is now condoning an oppressive regime, though we  would be unlikely to fully support the opposition, some of which is crude, sexist and backward-looking in its fervor – though also full of splendid people.  Some years back the Bahrain Government denied there were any prisons in the country, let alone torture.  There was a massive jail near Jaws and 10% of my students had suffered torture.  Yates is now a mouthpiece for the current lies.  I find it intolerable senior service with the Met has produced such a monster and wonder how many more there are.

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Who Would You Rather Lose?

So now public sector workers are fair game for pay freezes until they match their regions private sector levels.  Our armed services are losing good people to more attractive pay guarding ships from pirates.  Our cops, if they have any sense, will be applying to Canada, Australia or the EU if they speak anything other than English.  John Yates is no doubt on a good bung in Bahrain, where his ability to turn a blind eye will be useful.  I am also off to sell my skills abroad, though this won’t extend to ignoring torture.

Public servants in the UK can expect pay cuts to bring them in line with the Chinese-serf levels the private sector manages through its innovation, creativity and competition.  The rich, meantime want more and more or they will all go abroad leaving the country they ‘owe allegiance’ to to sink to its knees.  Who do you think we can afford to lose – skilled professionals in health care and the public sector and armed services, or a bunch of shits who think they are so special the deserve salaries that amount to more than a life’s earnings for most?  I rather gave my own view away there!

I think we should have a cull of those allowed vast wealth now – I’m rather against killing people off, but we could just strip them out of our system at around £80K a year equivalents and give them three months to settle elsewhere with their in demand skills.  Rooney would no doubt leave his ‘beloved’ Manchester United and City have to put out the youth team, but who cares – do we really think we  haven’t got replacement talent to run the necessary show?

Even in the “industries” (like children’s games played by men) where the best have to prove themselves on level playing fields on open display, there is no need for the absence of reasonable salary caps (this just removes the competition via money element).  When you can hire bent accountants to “prove” success it’s even worse.  I’d be happier to live amongst people who accept reasonable pay and wealth retention as part of an obligation to everyone else, than grasping Einsteins (which they ain’t) prepared to live off the backs of everyone else – where will they be if we go to war – next to you in the trenches or suddenly off on holiday to neutral territory?

I understand “modern economics” and have seen how little benefit those on big  pay bring, and how the wealth is manipulated through various offshore, transfer pricing dodges, land and mineral theft and the rest.  We can do better than this pornographic society and have the technology to rebuild from the bottom-up, embodying management knowledge into a machine utility needing regulation.

In Bahrain, a colleague was asked to prevent an IT system operating at a particular point so a favoured bureaucrat could make decisions. A bit like the days when police investigation systems produced format (more or less wordperfect) incompatible with prosecution systems – with the outputs needing re-typing.  We are doing this over and again in management and finance, largely to allow fraud and the high-paying jobs of the machine overseers whose skills are obsolete.  The last successful innovation in financial services was the ATM.  Give me decent cops, soldiers, nurses and doctors to form a community with, not money-grubbing creeps selling bags with the smell of cakes, or bananas produced at subsistence wages at a price inflated by offshore management dodges to ten times the price that would provide a fair wage for pickers, transport and retailing.

The truth about most work is that it is routinised and we need to share it under fair exchange and regulation.  We have failed to organise a fair global society, yet insist that management organisation is so good its worth 150 times the reasonable salary we can’t pay our  soldiers or public sector workers.  In science, stuck with a core research programme as dud as this we’d abandon it.

Is Sue Akers Pointing To Widespread Police Corruption?

Sue Akers is certainly getting some work done.  I don’t believe in widespread police corruption, though I do now think our society is shot through with the stuff.  Akers’ claims are presumably backed by the initial evidence arising.  Evidence clearly available had any enquiry really been done in the past.  The big problem doing any enquiry is being able to get access to and investigate what’s been going on.  We would, of course, not known about the thieving parliamentarians if money had not been on the table to a whistleblower.  Even subsequent to the Telegraph and the intrepid Heather Brookes, material was still issued with material redactions.

Maybe what’s really at issue here is secrecy and the need for information to be much more freely available – with people responsible for its publication also being criminally responsible if they fail?  The Met is hardly covered in glory and we have hardly missed Yates and Stephenson – the former presumably making no impact on high salary in Bahrain either.  If we are to believe the story that this was not investigated because there were other much more pressing demands like terrorism, should we now conclude we are at more risk because Ms Akers and her team are diverted from such purpose with the Olympics pending?  From what I’ve seen she would be better fitted to the complex, multi-sourced enquiries involved in terrorism, than the buffoon men of the past.

Soup Kitchen Economics?

I have occasional passion for tinned soups.  Being an idiot with some intellectual slants, this has led me to ‘tinned soup economics’.  Our “governments” are ‘printing money’ to some massive tune and “our banks” are awash with the stuff, seeking to make more money out of it than the mere fees they extract in “buying” it.  This all leads to my Heinz Tomato Soup four packs surging up in price more or less overnight (and the cheaper stuff from Aldi).  My inflation rate is highly food-related, as I’m not much of a consumer.  Things must be much worse for those closer to the bread line.  Bank of England figures at 5 and 7% are puny in comparison with what many of us are experiencing as shoppers.  My petrol allowance doesn’t go up, but petrol does.  I’m worse off.

There are some scary figures about in The Economist on world food prices.  Many of my former economist colleagues ‘aspire’ to teaching students to be able to read what the Grauniad, Times and Economist print on the subject.  I have flattened my expectations to soup over recent years and why we pump irreplaceable helium into space via children’s balloons.  Balloons are important in economics, as bubbles burst.  If you can answer the question, ‘is there any such thing as free soup’, you are probably a better economist than me, or those who believe economics is about making money from demand.  There are big questions about why my average can of soup went from 25 pence to over 50 pence.  Did I set a trend and demand double?

World food prices have risen by around 50% in the last year.  It’s much worse for wheat prices.  Countries that import a lot of wheat per capita happen to have ‘street unrest’.  Whilst my ‘Tinned Soup Price Liberation Front’ is not yet active on the streets of Britain, bread prices may have some part in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and food riots elsewhere.  Demand for wheat has not doubled, but its price has.  One can ponder on how this has been ‘manipulated’.  My guess is that it has to do with surplus capital in the banks that have just “borrowed” so much from our public purses (in the end our pockets).  They have form for inflating property prices, including buildings designed for non-existent Irish people, after all.  I think it likely that the cost of wheat is particularly high where it is imported in great quantity per capita.  I have the theory, but lack the data.  The broad brush is that something like the property fraud is going on, because property no longer cuts the accounting mustard, even with banks ‘marking to model’ rather than market (that is, not showing their true losses and hoping we will stand them again).  Food may somehow be the latest Ponzi.

This said, places like India and China, which generally produce their own wheat, may be about to increase demand.  Perhaps a third of China’s wheat-bowl is under drought conditions.  The pictures in this link are worth a look. http://shanghaiist.com/2011/02/10/in_pictures_chinas_worst_drought_in.php?gallery0Pic=2#gallery

I have explanations to offer in detail.  The gist is we have long conflated democracy, in the West, with a politics that is really about bread and circuses through which rule of a libidinal economics takes place.  This all has a long history.  My guess is that the bowl of soup with which I start my first meal on our long-weekend and the roll and butter, have greater connection with bwanking bonuses than I will bother to think in time off with Sue.  The answers are not really going to be “intellectual”.  I hope to explain why.

Cameron and Osbourne now look (inside a year) like Tory Twaddle Twins.  Their “plan” is to turn us into the ‘New Ireland’, a tax haven for global corporates, maybe like the Caymans without the weather.  Blair was the ‘third twin’, which makes sense in mark to model accounting.  Our laws have been changed to accommodate this, with companies now allowed to count earnings abroad for tax purposes here.  We have no politics in which to contest any of this, other than the drivel forced on us by people presenting themselves in suits and an accessorised media filling air-time with 365 24/7 undergraduate pouting.  The basic UK bid is to show us entirely unlikely to have politics meaningful to people, and politicians easily bought with jobs in the boardrooms of banks and big companies intent on capitalizing on Britain as an offshore financial brothel.  Even FIFA might consider relocation here!

What is our problem as people?

We’ve seen people around the world protesting about rotten governments around the world for a lot of the last twenty years.  The Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact fell and hopefully we will see and end to the worst Middle Eastern tyrannies and barking-mad Burmese military fascism.  How nice if simple democracies arose, or if there were any to copy in history. There is no hope on this.  Some of my friends will have been on the streets in Bahrain, no doubt wondering what ‘liberty’ might bring, as much as calling for it.  Even the relatively peaceful revolutions of recent years have generally lead to blood-lettings.  Bahrain is only the size of Bolton and Bury put together, yet potentially has enough feuds to destroy itself.

I find myself wondering what it is peaceful people need rid of everywhere, and how we might do this without creating the kind of vacuum that just sucks in the same old problems we had before.  How do we get institutions without corruption?  Even Plato devoted a book on corruption as the eventual doom of his own Republik.