We Have To Stop Lying

Over the years I’ve been urged to teach British managers techniques from overseas.  The first muck was Management By Objectives (MBO), an American interpretation of Soviet production targets.  Then fashions turned Japanese, with quality circles, just-in-time, continuous improvement and various kwality initiatives (TQM, TPM, TPM) and even poga oke (fool proofing).  German stuff rarely got much mention as it involved such “socialist” dangers as works councils and rigorous training.  There was plenty of British stuff about, from Action Learning, the Industrial Society, MRP1 and MRP2 (manufacturing recommended practice) and ISO 9001 (as amended).  Most of this stuff was found to fail as often as succeed and it was all considered seriously as management fashion.  Utter piss like excellence was popular.  Much was just a rehash of organisational management 101 – like business process re-engineering.

There are decent management techniques and ideas – but they are lost in social effect because the system is based on idiot notions of profit and income distribution.  The underlying spirit of this muck is fascism, with leaders ‘creating reality’ for the rest of us mugs.  Thatcher is often associated with this ‘modernisation’ that has led us down the road to serfdom.  The crass promise, remade by Bliar and Camerooney (merely Bliar 2), is that getting us all super-efficient will allow us to dominate world competition, earn our way in the world and so on.  The truth, of course, is that it set us on the route to Chinese wages and conditions of employment – and probably set a Chinese Empire in motion – giving them manufacturing expertise was the equivalent in geo-politics of selling guns and whiskey to the Indians in the old westerns.  It was traitorous.

I have no doubt we should be efficient  where we can be – the real reason being to make work easier and for there to be less of it and for us to be able to do other things with our lives in a secure environment, not to get swollen ankles and suicidal feelings working for a Chinese gang-master or Indian load shark – or be ripped off by the rich and the offshore empire based around the City of London, Wall Street, Hong Kong and Singapore – or to see the efficiency gobbled up by lawyers and accountants.

I teach double entry book-keeping and various techniques based around profit and loss, balance sheets and cash flow.  The stuff makes sense when you get the hang of it – even derivatives in basic form as insurance (though we could use other instruments).  Most  people can get enough of a hand on the basics for it to be worth teaching the complexities that underlie business information.  Business runs in cycles and there is a need to build up cash and reserves to survive hard times and innovate.  There are ways to cut costs through financial moves (e.g. repos being a cheaper way to ensure cash flow than bank borrowing).

If I can’t get much of an understanding with most students, I can get them to learn to use the systems – the spreadsheets are much like driving and maintaining a car as opposed to knowing how to build one.  The real problem is dishonesty.  Rather than variations on primitive double entry book-keeping, we have systems that look more like the two sets of books Al Capone’s accountant might keep.

Here’s an example of German government debt.  This is as close to the real situation as I can find (it’s from zerohedge somewhere).  All you need to do is track down what should count and do the sum.  Simples!    It doesn’t suit Frau Merkel to have the situation like this, but if she was CEO of a large company, trying to pass off her figures (which exclude a lot of contingent liability) would get her arrested.  She likes it listed at less than 100%.

German Gross Domestic Product (GDP):                                   $3.2 trillion

Official German Sovereign Debt:                                               $2.618 trillion

Percentage of Liabilities at the European Union:                          27%

Percentage of Liabilities at the ECB                                           18.94%

Germany’s Percentage of the ECB Debt ($4 trillion)                    $757.6 billion

German annual cost for the EU budget                                      $46.36 billion

German Guarantees for the Stabilization Funds                          $280.6 billion

German Guarantees for the Macro Financial Assistance Fund      $211.14 billion

German Target-2 Liabilities                                                     $656 billion

German Guarantee for the EIB Debt                                        $157.29 billion

Sovereign Guarantee for KFW                                                 $588 billion

Total German Sovereign Debt & Guarantees                             $5.315 trillion

Official debt to GDP Ratio                                                             81.8%

Actual German Debt to GDP Ratio                                            139.8%

Of course, I teach all my students that there are no prizes for being technically proficient in commercial or public sector statistics and plenty of cash for signing off on dud ones.  This is the immediately transferable skill!  We are now a pathologically lying society and it needs to be stopped.  It’s much worse than the example above as we are not allowed to do any stock-taking and accounts offshore cannot be accessed.  The problem has been known at least since Gresham and concerns the fact that once immoral practices are allowed they expand to become the norm.  My gaming on the sports field always increased against opposition who did it.

Our problem is umpiring (and let’s face it we can’t trust them without all the technology and public scrutiny).  We are currently wasting our productivity gains on highly inefficient finance and managerial non-jobs.  We can’t even argue properly because all the figures are fudged and we are more ideological than even the Soviets managed.

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There Is No Alternative?

When it comes to history the following is a plausible story.

“WW1 started in 1913 with the British invasion of Iraq.  This followed much jostling with Germany, led by Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who would have been King Of Britain under today’s inheritance rules.  The Imperial powers (roughly Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Japan and USA) all had trade interests supported by big armies and navies and had even engage in joint actions, such as that against China in 1906.  Britain, France and Russia had intended to invade the USA in 1861.  The USA had War Plan Red until WW2, which was concerned with invasion by Britain, and even built some air bases near Canada, fearing invasion through Halifax.

Millions protested before WW1 but could safely be ignored.  This war left Germany with reparations it could never pay.  It’s people were generally poor in comparison with the British, though the country was clearly leading in science and culture.  Money poured in under Hitler, with large investments from the USA and banks such as JP Morgan (who had financed much of UK war effort).  The US and UK continued a policy against Japan, starving it of oil and imposing tariffs on its textiles.  WW2 broke the imperialism of France, Germany, Japan, UK and USSR, with the only victors being the USA – who then prevented Franco/British attempts at a ‘come back’ in 1956.”

I’ve always found the American victory difficult.  One can hardly doubt the spirit of its peoples’ war effort – the questions would concern the extent to which the victory was actually the unfolding of a plan and whose plan this was.

In more recent times, Iraq is invaded again, Saudi is controlled by a freak monarchy under US “control” and the invasion of Iran is only an Israeli away.  Bliar is JP Morgan’s bag man out there, and led us into an illegal, unwanted war that has killed in hundreds of thousands, despite being protested by millions.  The excuses for going into the Iraq war look as ludicrous as those for the War of Jenkin’s Ear.  China is now the eastern power with vast manufacturing capacity and a shortage of oil and other commodities.

I’m fairly sure history is repeating itself.  Both Churchill and Bliar may have been plants in our political system to do American bidding – but I doubt ‘American’ is quite the right term.  The increases in productivity in agriculture, manufacturing and even such matters as domestic cleaning should, by now, have produced a world of material plenty for all and much greater freedom from ‘disciplinary government’ and such sanctions as unemployment and poverty.  Instead, we are on the road to serfdom and find we have no democracy ‘because of global competition’.

I can support this historical version and expand on it.  I remain to be convinced of it myself, but the gist of it seems more likely than not.  I’m well aware of the alternatives and the standard model that has WW1 starting because some toffs were shot at by a guy outside a butty shop, or the irreversible German railway play (AJP Taylor).  One should be able to engage in speculation and I’ll even speculate our view of E = MC2 is wrong.

And this is where we have gone wrong as a society – we can’t engage in practical, speculative, scientific dialogue.  The history above may be wrong – but it isn’t as wrong as the political-economic bullshit that holds us in fealty and which just happens to be the only political-economic bull that holds wages down, makes the rich richer and leads to war and planet burning.  How the fuck did we get this stupid? – it must have taken an awful lot of practice and schooling!

The idea of TINA (there is no alternative) is utterly stupid and passed off by ruthless bastards who would do anything to retain their privilege and the means to get their jollies – whether Thatcher through lapping up the Iron Lady adulation or some bwankster flashing out mega-cash on drugs and prostitutes.  If we can create viable alternatives (at least in narrative) to Churchill as our great hero, we can clearly come up with alternative economic-political propositions on how to change things that aren’t either lunatic rich or lunatic leftie.

I don’t care whether Churchill or Bliar were good guys or the most appalling war criminals working at the behest of foreign interests.  I do care we are so dumb we believe in TINA or even organise public dialogue against it.

 

 

Waiting for the storm

I watched the rolling news out of the corner of the eye today whilst doing my admin tasks. BBC, Sky and Russia Today get some part of my attention.  I learn nothing much except I prefer Radio 3.  Sky had some vapid woman who either is of was a police superintendent.  I gleaned little except democracy is not safe in hands like hers.  RT actually spoke to a few protesters about the protest.  The UK clowns seemed to be hoping something would kick off.  What I thought I saw was police over-kill with London closed to traffic and more officers than protesters.

I regard myself as little more than a serial cock-up survivor.  Life as others live it is meaningless to me and allows little moral fellowship.  We do a bit of shopping for elderly neighbours, I cut next door’s “lawn”, clean up crap for the street when I put out our bins and turn up to help next door’s kids when their parents are out if needed (they have replaced a couple of my roof tiles etc.) – but in the wider sense I just see doom.

Gadget’s girlfriend was under attack in Parliament and blamed the previous government. No truth came out other than that the gaggle of clowns in the place aren’t fit for anything but ridicule.  Ms May appears capable of sacking people and I suspect this will lead to more paperwork as people cover arse.  I note that when the clowns present themselves in our roughly five-yearly selection interviews that they don’t say they will do so much of more or less nothing they will still be able to blame the last management two, three and ten years down the line.  Evette Cooper was useless and the point that we can’t muster enough customs people with a reserve army of about 8 million unemployed was never made.

Police will not be able to find enough officers to ‘anti-protest’ at double the number protesting or setting up tents if the actual nature of our plight dawns on enough people.  It’s not good to see that we now mob protests with police and nick people for camping in Trafalgar Square.  But never mind anything serious, FIFA is going to allow our players to wear poppies that rightly commemorate the fallen but also encourage the forgetting of the imperialist nature of wars millions protested against and then died in because we couldn’t resist the banks and commercial interests any better then than now.

I have no real truck with the protesters, but think they should be allowed to protest around Parliament – to discourage the clowns in the place.  The rest of us deserve little as we remain ignorant and apathetic under the current tyranny of clowns.  I’m just waiting for the run on the banks (what I put by is in gold), a collapse in asset prices and then my little pace in the sun.  I’d rather fight, but tell me where or who with,

I’m going abroad because almost all our society disgusts me and I can get cricket and rugby on Sky.  It’s all easier to ignore as an exile, there’s generally less crime and a less threatening drinking atmosphere when I venture out for a few.  And there are none of those awful apathetic English.  I hope to be out before the storm blows here.

Channel 4 News returned a little sanity, soon back to the despair of a young disabled couple who committed suicide in our Brave New World, yet at least some concern with truth.  I half-expect the studio to be dismantled by a flood of Bobbies!  There is still little on the Italian job and what it means.

Those of us who believe the current model of doing things in the world is hapless are rarely motivated by Marxist jargon these days.  I’ve always thought ‘brainwork’ should be unlicensed and free to all with minor exceptions like bomb-making recipes and skills.  the issue for most of us is debt and the way neo-classical economics (of most governments) leaves this out of the relevant management spreadsheets.  This leads us to think we are in another great depression, with the exception that government interventions this time have been massive (QE and such).  And most of us think these government measures are appliatives for a crooked banking sector, not the real problems.  This isn’t hindsight and most of us concerned with debt predicted the 2088 crash or something like it.  You can find most of the argument at Naked Capitalism, Steve keen (including a full academic course of lectures), David Malone and Zerohedge.

My tack has never been one of economics in the standard sense.  I take it that society needs something simple that most people can grasp – this because I’ve taught too long to believe even university students can get over ‘early learning’ constantly reinforced by our vapid media and stifling workplaces.  More people turned out for Jimmy Saville than to protest.  It is no surprise that Berlusconi is off just after agreeing the IMF inspectors can come in.

Our Human Zoo

I intend my novel to be wide ranging – this statement itself may put a publisher off!  I started out to write a cop story that introduced economic issues, maybe as a read for students.  I’ve given that up, consigning most going through my mind to this blog.  There are already books around with titles like ‘The best way to rob a bank: own your own’ and fantastic realities like there being one offshore financial institution for every 5000 New Zealanders.  For that matter there’s Germany, which does most economic stuff right, but still has broke banks and a decline in working and middle class earnings.

The world is organised by and for the rich and to make this tiny group richer – the rest get what ‘trickles down’ and we live in some terror notion we would do worse without them. I’m no democrat myself because democracies are so easily swayed by politicians already corrupt.  We are supposed to take austerity and yet they never offer to live in it themselves, rather like Scargill in the Miners’ Strike.

I live in a world in which, if I say ‘agriculture is only 4% of world GDP’ hardly anyone twigs, let alone groks what this means (little work is about our survival).  We’re on the verge of an economics that is scientific – this won’t come from existing economists or politicians.  It’s about how much of the land and other resources like air goes into producing our lives.  This is already measured and the news isn’t good.  Western lifestyles cannot be preserved if the rest of the world ‘catches up’ and the world is ‘full’.  Yet almost every politician has to promise ‘recovery’ based on more of what we are doing now.  A rich 1% own nearly everything that monetary value can be put on and are getting more and more of it – and presumably we have to keep on our charitable giving to this group (by the time you get to the top 20% there’s not much left over).  Under ‘trickle down’ we have to work more and more to produce a vast surplus.  It’s madness.

My choice is doing something a bit like Charlie Owen’s wonderful stories of madcap coppering so I get out of austerity, or trying to do something to penetrate the madness for a wider benefit.  Teaching once offered some of the latter, but is now an industry in the madness.  In part of my research I signed on at the local job centre – they were predictably useless and most of the ‘jobs’ weren’t real at all.  I applied for a few that would have fit in with my schedule (project management stuff) and discovered most, including one I was offered were ‘fictional’.  I saw none of the readily available, low skill jobs Gadget claims are there for the ‘evil poor’ – but this is ‘England’s Northwest’.  I went along to a ‘job preparation’ course and found it based on a lunatic book called ‘Chicken Soup For the Soul’ – it was like a scene from ‘League of Gentlemen’ with Pauline.  I did help get a bright woman into university instead of the junk she was being recommended – but there was sod all for even people with substantial engineering skills, let alone the willing unskilled.  In short, no help on offer.  Some of the job agencies I’ve used to get interim work have been as bad.  I came across the same problems as those more than 20 years ago, including the fear of many on benefits that jobs would not last long and they’d be in a worse situation reapplying (they are right).  I’d put my work and the books on a back-burner if I could do anything real to help.  I don’t – and much as I’d dig a hole and bury the kind of turds who caused so much trouble for me, lumping this ‘lumpen proletariat’ with most people in trouble at the bottom of our society is wrong.  This problem has been with us everywhere old industries close down for more than 40 years and is an older historical problem – there is nowhere to ‘upsticks’ to for most people.

Some of my worst fears about people and my own anti-democratic leanings have been confirmed in my venture into low-life.and accord with much Francis Bacon had to say on general public argument – it’s dumb and you’d better try hard not to let your own pretensions make you as stupid.  In science one finds most of what you learned at school is not basic, but rather a facile corruption strangely made more difficult than it should be. All kinds of previous work can be found and relied on – one not only gets to use wheels without inventing them, but actively learns to avoid doing what’s been done before, other than in learning techniques.

The ‘real world’ has none of what we rely on in science, though much that makes such claim.  Religious fables have been laid bare, but we have failed, so far, to demonstrate economics as religious, or to make people aware they base their thinking in Idols.  The fantastic story of economics is that we must organise so that the rich get nearly all the rewards.  This makes no sense to the scientist, but one knows the means of demonstration to others is lacking.  The truth is most people are too dumb or unskilled to understand – but try telling them that and you’ll just discover that what people hate most is a smartass.  Most people think I’m lying when I tell them about animals with a spare penis, and can’t tell I’m joking in a long story about low human sperm counts (true), masturbating monkeys and the Human Zoo (not true),links between masturbation and sperm count (true) and that as sperm counts are down all men are wankers (more or less true but the joke should kick in).. Desmond Morris claimed we live in a human zoo on the basis that monkeys, polar bears and elephants masturbate in zoos but not in the wild.  I would point to real mad bits of human history.  Wanking is a lot less dangerous than religions belief in human history or all kinds of things built on the toil of others.  Many human zoos have perished through ecocide, this one is in econocide.  There’s no telling you though.  Most of you don’t even manage a developed sense of humour.  Now, how do you teach real economics to people who mostly can’t get the jokes in South Park?  Did you know the Germans have a better sense of humour?  Or the Danes?  I’d bet not.

Portugal Reduced to Junk

The economic crisis is far from over and I guess most of us haven’t a clue what it is about.  Moody has just slashed Portugal’s credit rating to junk.  Greece is screwed, Ireland screwed and Spain and Italy look very vulnerable.  Germany is riding high, doing export-led manufacturing (which is where Britain should be an is not) – and this is partly due to the low Euro – something of a German currency manipulation.

Economics is at its best when you can be safely ignorant of it – and nearly everyone is ignorant of economics.  The standard now on undergraduate courses is that of a little knowledge being dangerous.

What people need to understand now is that freedom is at stake.  Money is no longer linked, other than negatively, with genuine effort.  Productivity has been rising sharply since WW2, but over the last 30 years wages have been falling.  You need to earn 20% more in the UK this year to maintain last year’s position and inflation is stocked up to rampage soon.  This situation is much worse if you are poor to average.  No political party is responsible for this – politics in this sense hardly matter, though public sector cuts are not the answer.

We have been borrowing to maintain ‘GDP increases’ (this applies to China too, where 12 ghost cities remain with no one in them and massive local government borrowing is being written-off).  This borrowing is odd because we could have prevented private borrowing through higher wages linked to productivity, and governments are using our ‘money’ (futures almost) to prop up idiot and greedy banks.  Essentially, like likes of Fred Goodwin have had it off with our ‘money’ and Lord knows what else.

The nightmare story lurking beneath any notions we are encouraged to have about profligate Greeks, Portuguese and so on, is that ‘our banks’ are the real culprits having made reckless loans and had it away on their toes with bonuses and so on.  I have little doubt this is true on the figures.

The real question is why ‘you’ don’t know.  I’m no ‘commie’ and always detested the Soviet Paradise.  What I’ve seen is the collapse of what was worth believing in – reasonable freedom gained by work reasonably easy to get and reasonably paid in reasonably dignified conditions.  This is almost swept away now.  The classic example may well be Gadget and his claims that to tell the truth would mean he would have no mortgage-paying abilities.  This jobsworthness is now writ large almost as our organisations.  With the ‘Zil Chill’ factor this was the hallmark of the Soviet Block.

The ‘world’s debt’ has not been spent on anything we have as public capital.  You’ll find none of this in Portugal or Greece or Italy or Ireland – it’s gone on speculative gambling and a pernicious form or organised crime.

The plan is to re-adjust money through inflation (you’ll be noticing the price of your food and energy) – quantitative easing and other jargon – but also to buy up public assets to rent them back to us.  This is incredibly similar to Hitler’s plan – Nazi Germany’s expansion was all done on credit they could not repay other than through war-looting.  So who is going to be the target of looting now?  The USA is in Germany’s old position, brimming with debt and military.

We need a new politics to stop what’s coming and there is no sign of any.

Why I’m Not ‘Democratic’

A root question for democracy concerns who is fit to be a democrat.  Many avenues of possibility spring from pondering this.  Are we pathetic wankers who need a Fuhrer, are we such docile donkeys that we can’t make the right choices because we have grown up spoiled brats or in some sectarian religion?  Once one reaches a position on this, one can’t really take the position of deciding who takes part easily.  This can’t be the position like that of the mad religious zealot making decisions on who is pure, or part of the chosen race.

I used to think that new needed a new form of democracy, or that what we had was an imperfect system that could self-correct.  I no longer think this is a good core to any research programme for freedom.  I would still fight and die for what we have in the West, against tyranny – but one has to note the worst tyranny of modern times arose in the Germany of old.  In the Lakotosian sense, democracy is a decadent paradigm.

Postmodernism, before it slipped in its own bullshit, was a challenge of open deep questions on the legitimation of authority.  It has failed entirely, other than in supporting a few academics.  My own inclination is to view it as an inevitable end state of that wordiness that cannot contemplate fact.  It’s just noise, like the political use of statistics – variations on nothing original.  Learning is harder than words and playing tunes with them.

Free ‘thinking’ is a problem for consensus in the animal kingdom we are part of.  The ‘hygiene’ meted out against the non-consensual is total.  Argument really has little to do with what is decided, from cockroach dances on where to live, to human economic posturing.  Originality, other than in puffed-up claims, is a rare as rocking horse shit, disinterestedness at a further remove.  Einstein may eventually prove wrong (though is standing up to modern experimental scrutiny), and as he said, it will only take one.  A key problem for democracy concerns originality and means to cherish it.

Jurgen Hanermas churned out vast tracks on consensual society, communicative action and a lot I agree with – yet there is something glaringly overdone.  Human being is not based in any Reason we have invented, but in the evolution in which we are borne.  The good bits may not be in man-made Reason at all.  Extirpating ideology ain’t it and would be ideological anyway.  I believe we are brought up to be deluded and the time has come to stop this; yet part of the delusion is Reason.  The voting rituals in democracy merely elide this, however import it is to have both them, and power that will stand down.

On the lack of facts

http://bankbabble.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/apathetic-violence/

I watched John Pilger‘s film ‘The War We Don’t See’ (ITV player) and episode 103 of the Keiser Report (Russia Today) earlier this week.  The first pitched the line that we are always at war and governments and journalists collude to prevent us knowing what is really going on.  RT reminds me of the old Radio Moscow, though without the ludicrous propaganda phrases that made me laugh as a kid listening with my elder brother.  Yet its language on the financial crisis, in a bad show, is refreshing.  The idea in the Keiser Report is that fraud has become the business model, and that fraud squared is how it is all being covered up.

What is easy to say, is that we should, in social democracy, be making our own minds up on the facts.  Almost no one disagrees with this, yet the extent to which we ever do, or even can as a populace is very doubtful.  Banksidebabble, linked at the top of the page, ascribes this to people not being able to think beyond their own interests and, if you like, when these interests are threatened with a slap in the face with a wet fish.  That the media doesn’t put facts before us so we can make up our own minds, whether we are watching Pilger, Keiser, BBC lickspittles, Murdoch’s toadies, reading newspapers or listening to Radio 4, surfing the net or whatever, is utterly obvious.  That claims to the opposite are often made by bureaucrats of reporting rules and duties is disturbing.  Most academic material is really only polemic disguised.

Very nasty fascism took over Germany when it was the most educated, cultured and scientific nation (and a democracy).  We like to think we are beyond such nonsense, yet we are as far now from an open society as when Karl Popper wrote about its enemies (around WW2).  Spinoza once called politics the art of survival amongst ignorance, in a statement much like Banksie’s.  In all this, we are confronted with something similar to a response cop, trying to make sense of multiple claims being made in a dispute, or a detective trying to find evidence amongst those set on concealing it.  Often, the very people doing the investigations are the vested interests themselves, or highly subject, like journalists, to reporting what the interests say (the lobby, being embedded and so on).

One might say, that the Lakatosian legal-commercial paradigm in the West has become decadent (articles in the Harvard Law Review etc.) – but what’s the point of that kind of intellectual argument?  We need something we can drive!  The biggest fact we seem to miss is that life could be much easier than it is, with much less work and that we are screwing even this up with ideologies suited to the days of spades rather than tractors.  The big fact on street protest and the ‘militarisation’ of our cops is that our society is so dud we need either.

Immigration Concerns

The indigenous population shrinking, immigrants and the underclass  having too many children, well-educated native s too few. Biologically, culturally and professionally the country is dumbing down.  Anyone want to disagree this is Britain’s future?  In fact, these are German concerns, and publishing a book on them got a banker sacked.

The anti-immigrant line snowballed into a ferocious debate about how Germany should deal with its 16m immigrants (or people with “migrant backgrounds”), especially its 4m or so Muslims. Even those who revile Herr Sarrazin accept that he has struck a nerve. Germany clearly isn’t doing enough to bring immigrants into the social and economic mainstream. Too many drop out of school and live off the dole. A worrying minority form “parallel societies”, and a few actively plot harm against their German neighbours.

Most Germans favour “sharply restricting” Muslim religious practice, a third think the country is overrun with foreigners and a tenth say they want a strong leader.  Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), went furthest among respectable politicians: Germany is not an “immigration land”, he  proclaimed, and it certainly does not need more immigrants from “other cultural backgrounds”, such as Turkish or Arabic.  Thilo Sarrazin’s, book is, Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany does away with itself”).

As in Britain, German business (currently with double UK growth), wants more and more immigration, and moves are afoot to make imported professional qualifications count.

Frankly, all this is bloody stupid.  We have economics and HRM working as though countries are top sports teams who can select from the world’s best.  We need a new model, and will have to accept that we will have “under-performers” and disabled people in our teams.  We can do this with a change in the rules.  So far we have wasted money giving kids degrees that do nothing to hide their idiocy, and prevented them working in jobs where they used to develop into non-idiots by other than academic means.  We have used education as an export business, flooding our best institutions with paying foreign students and many of our really poor ones too, to meet demand.  This has been a rotten trick all round, and many academics should fall on their swords.

I don’t know if our cops have become so bad we could replace them with some of my cheap Laotians, trained in Zambia, but if you can’t see the metaphor here is this is more or less what we have done in our factories, taxi fleet, town halls and so on, you need educational help once you’ve been to Specsavers.

Politicians are making no contribution to solving these kinds of problems.  We need to reject them all.  Germany, as usual, is some way ahead of we plodding Brits.  You must have noticed that nothing that really concerns you ever gets on Newshite or even the Channel 4 News these days.  Bimbos of both sexes ponce about telling us what politicians have just said, over and over and over – but they never discuss what we are talking about, pissed off with and so on.  That Laura Koonsberg woman vibrates so much I spill my tea.  She’d be more use digging holes in roads. Time to get rid of these medjaah-wallahs too.  Blog on people, until we find some other way.  It’s time we really saw through political correctness and realised its just nasty power waiting to bully someone it can gain power over into censored silence.  It has been making us all lie to the point we are likely to have to fight.

In the US, anti-immigrant people stress that immigration adds $13 billion, or about two weeks’ growth in an economy growing 2.5% a year.  This is the ‘net benefit’, as opposed to $13 trillion of activity.  In the UK, one third of new households will be due to immigration, based on 2004 data.  An English Housing Survey in the last couple of days provides further evidence of the pressure placed by immigration on the housing sector. Foreign nationals now occupy 8.4% of the social housing stock. Among occupants aged 16-40 that figure rises to 12.6%.  We are looking at 1 million new school places in 10 years.

The EU/India Free Trade Agreement due to be signed in December will permit Indian corporations to transfer specialist staff to EU countries, notably the UK, without any upper limit on numbers.

This has potentially serious implications for Britain:

–  the initiative will be in the hands of Indian companies who win a service contract in the EU.

–  there is, apparently, to be no limit on numbers.

–  staff only have to have worked for one year with the Indian company concerned.

–  there is no test to see if a British worker is available.

–  the concessions become irreversible by individual member states because they will have been granted under the trade arrangements which are matters for Commission competence

–  the UK will be the main target of Indian companies, largely for language reasonsbut also because they are already well established here.

–  the period that workers are allowed to stay will, in theory, be limited to three years but, in practice, it will be impossible to find and return any who overstay.  This is before we start to worry about any corruption.

We should have stopped immigration from outside the EU decades ago and looked to long-term solutions to skills shortages and what to do with those who can’t do much other than manual or unskilled work.  We should also have prevented many of the blockages to people getting jobs that are to do with HRM and other bulldung, especially demands for effectively false qualifications and the ‘Spanish practices‘ of professions.  Schools should have been redesigned to get kids who can’t benefit from them out of them into supervised jobs with educational release.  Most jobs I see are not intellectually demanding or high skill, and most of our own people could be doing them.  UK plc is not MUFC and we have no need of Rooneys, or rules that discriminate against so many as sports selection does. In scientific tests, we all show racism lurking under our politeness and pretence, with Asians having marked problems with blacks.  Many who profess to be ‘colour blind’ and so on never really live near the problems caused and assume racism in others whilst being full of it, unresolved, in themselves.  Some are so guileless and self-delusioned they can work in places like Dubai without noticing it has been built on slave labour, and the brown guy next to them at work gets only a third of their pay.  They will have no clue what it is to find pay in the brick works down to minimum wage, and to be working with colleagues in dangerous conditions who cannot even shout a warning in English.

Current immigration policy in the UK breaches our covenant with our own poor and disadvantaged people.  If they were a race, the policy would be racist.  In effect, poor, decent British people who complain about the decline of their areas under immigration are treated as racists.  They rarely are, but come to have contempt over lack of friendship, their own exclusion by the ethnic groups the decreasing chances to have neighbours who are friends, noise, including children who cannot be sorted out by reference to their parents and ‘Mosque noise’ and on to feeling threatened on the street and in their own town halls.  Even in Sweden (Ambush Predator notes) some are forced to the madness of killing, and I must say in Sweden one can at least vote meaningfully for an educated version of our BNP.

I have long been anti-racist and remain so.  I see disgusting racism going unchallenged and challenge it.  Some of this racism is now coming from the very places one would expect it to be impossible – the EOHRC being one, town halls and bleat after bleat from some quarters that sees racism as underlying all kinds of action, a perspective that is  that of similar mechanism to racism itself, and is prepared to shit on poor and often rather innocent people, rather than establish and help with their concerns.

Police, Public Sector and Banking – Cases Of The Same Excesses?

I can remember times when working-class wages were high in the UK, though we never got up to German or Swedish standards.  The UK is now listed as one of the worst places in the world to live, and though I’ve met many ex-pats abroad who agree, it isn’t entirely true.  We might think of ourselves as up to our knees in alligators and only just seeing the swamp as the problem.  Working-class wages have dropped very badly here, and in a lot of our country there is no decent work for people to get hold of.  My father once earned less as a secondary school headmaster than supervisors in the steel and wire factories, and when I was a cop, people with PhDs queued to become binmen and there really were plenty of jobs around, though it was obvious industries were taking big hits.  Key ways of getting jobs by turning up on word of mouth and so on have all gone as far as I can see, few of the old working-class ways of my youth are now in operation.

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It’s all about to get much, much worse.  ConDem may have noticed the swamp conditions, but they seem set to make things worse.  We won’t known until after October 20th and the spending review.  What I keep seeing in the press looks like more of the denial this country has been in since we competed and cuntilitioned with the Dutch in imperialist trade from around 1300.  We never were as good at this as the Dutch, but hid this behind grandiose history-myth.  Russian-European imperialism generally has been vile and continues.  The US has been no better, though it cornered the market for a while.  The Germans would have won through by fabulous industrial science, but fortunately had the most barking aristocracy of all working as government.  The Russians, Brits and French meant to get around to hacking up the US between them in 1861, but couldn’t agree the money.

As all business underwonkers know, the SWOT analysis is the answer for every occasion.  I knew so little of the marvellous technique when I started management teaching on the basis of substantial experience, I thought SWOT was a misspelling of swat.  I’ve actually been at quite senior meetings of our best and bold doing SWOT on UK plc (ltd actually – I’m ancient).  We need to do this, but the problems in management are usually nothing to do with baldly obvious solutions like this.  You can do all this kind of work and then find yourself presenting the report to Herr Hitler or some prat who pretends to listen for five minutes and then nips off to his private office to screw his new secretary.

We’ve been paying our bankers, cops and public sector workers far too much for two decades, just as we used to pay people in whatever industries that seemed successful too much in the past – people on 8 – 18K excepted.  A key weakness in the UK is we never keep enough back for investment, and have never got round to fair pay systems or realistic industrial relations as in Germany and Sweden.  We end up with a right versus left thuggery.  We build empires rather than trade or manufacturing capacity.  We build bureaucratic structures to deal with other bureaucratic structures

History repeats itself so pathetically, that our cops may end up being sacked in droves (good riddance to the idle, under-qualified, rude bastards?) and find themselves armed only with the industrial relations tools of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.  Strikes are no answer to much, though we should all remember those who fell and suffered more often than we do, as should our biased media with its war lies focus.  Cops might think the current threats to their sinecures are just to get them into a malleable state to do the governments dirty work as others strike.  Maybe not this time?

The issue that interests me is why “we” have so little clue as a public about what is going on.  We have banks because we didn’t use  North Sea Oil and Gas to ‘refit’ the country, we have excess cops who were bound to be useless because of everything Gadget says on the rest of the clown and bottleneck system, and our public sector and benefits problems are bloated because we have banks, not other places to work.  We don’t need banks now we have the Internet and I suspect competition in financial services is contrived and generally not needed.

We haven’t done the SWOT, they keep us too uneducated to do it (in principle very easy) and do their own in secret to maintain their interests.  The general rule is to remain a chocolate-dipped strawberry eater yourself and develop that ‘confidence’ management developers insist on and means ‘let them eat cake, but send them shit not flour to bake it with – by the time they realise what the ovens are for they will be too weak to protest).

When I left school (Shijuro tosses Hovis onto table and plays air-violin), oil was involved in only 5% of our chemicals industry and by the time I’d studied chemistry at university it was up to 98%.  We knew then that we needed to move into other industries, new energies and so on.  Forty years on we still just know, and have had people waste lives doing non-jobs, or like me for twenty years, selling our real educational technologies like whiskey to the Indians.  There is not a social problem in the UK that is not tainted with our lack of factories, growing technology, energy harnessing and other lacks.  Deep analysis might well show our benefits’ bill is 30 times what we think and has been going to rich people and a massive number of jobsworth clerks.  We are lacklustre.

I went to school near a big petro-chemical plant, and was a cop in the town built round it for a while.  The plant only lasted 10 years – it was easy to copy and was replaced by a much bigger one in Saudi.  I used to think new management might save us, but the truth is the UK has long had a dependency culture, one that prevents us changing.  The key is the dire fear of losing your job because we are worthless without one.  I’m not sure how we got back to this condition or who wants us in it.

SWOT and other management crap I taught and wrote on for 20 years is available in all major languages.  It works in some degree, but as your competitors have it it ain’t, like strategic management techniques ain’t, competitive advantage.  What we have done is given all thius lnaguage to turkeys and clowns who can soun d sensible using it, even intelligent and knowledgeable to the majority who read Harry Potter as adults and think arithmetic is maths.

Image via Wikipedia

There is a lot of new work, not idiot-commie in origin, that could take us into new ventures and practices.  It ain’t about business schools – they produce goons who can’t come up with ideas ans will lie for any master.  For now, I would just suggest a revolution of laughter.

It’s not that business and management models are somehow new saviours – the problem lies in them being very much not in common sense, even though they aren’t intellectually hard.  Idle academics may make them hard to evade teaching more difficult thinking and creativity.  Everyone by now has met the vapid, half-taught, half-assed Managerios who couldn’t lead us out of a wet paper bag, but get staff busy writing mission statements, personnel development planning plans, equal opportunities policies, empowerment policies and other crap in our newly committed organisation that feels so strangely shit to work in.

It shouldn’t be rocket science to work out financial services are Sooty’s Magic Wand products and that 20 to 1000 transactions over every vanilla one can’t make sense.  It can’t make sense to hire more expensive of cheap cops to sort out crime if the cops are already prevented from sorting chummy out by an idiot court system now designed to help chummies and frustrate and criminalise decent people.  It can’t make sense to give people jobs in job centre plus when there are no other jobs.  It doesn’t make sense to start paying managers and professionals more and more, or soccer players and the rest – there are salary cap models – and it makes no sense to pay more and more when there is no link at all with success, other than in a form that can be manipulated by those who get the bonuses.  I can fiddle most accounts I see for at least three years, and if I get the auditor in on the deal, potentially forever.  We fall over and over again for the Emperor’s cast off invisible threads.

There is another way forward, but it’s not in my interests to give it away free.  I would, in principle, and in principle Cameron and his boys have some of it in taking away middle class benefits, a bit like HRM Duke of Edinburgh did on MIRAS.  This is only at the extracting the piss from the bucket of water stage though.  We have yet to establish the extent of middle class benefits or what they really are.

I’m off to a finance meeting at my local Council soon.  Their plan is to cut services and poorly paid staff.  Sooty’s Magic Wand again.  I won’t ask for suggestions on where to shove this implement of middle class benefit thieves, but will no doubt be accused of diversity crime when I add the push to the shove.  Sooty was yellow, so I’m probably offending the Chinese.

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