Wuckfits All

The denizens of West Bradford have voted Gorgeous George Galloway into office as their MP and by a substantial margin.  Galloway is a chancer of some kind, but no doubt a better man than shits like Blair, Brown, Osbourne, Cameron and my own MP.  His Respect Party  is not widely popular, but even this quirky bunch are better than Labour, the Libdems and Tories.  The question is why we can’t elect a whole bunch of quirky Georges and Georginas on the sole grounds of pissing off the current establishment.  A bunch on men and women in white suits would do, elected to bring and end to our current constitution while Mervyn King runs the country.  He can’t be all bad as he’d have preferred to be more successful as a slow left arm bowler than Governor of the Bank of England.

That the electorate isn’t fit to elect anyone is clear from our response to the petrol crisis over a strike that might happen after we get a week’s notice of it some time in the future.  We are queuing like Soviet citizens and pouring petrol into jugs in our kitchens with the gas stove on.

Some interesting research into why we are such barking wuckfits has been conducted on the US health system.  We are now constantly asked whether we are satisfied with service all over the place, from education through to whether our MPs are any good.  In medicine we are so useless at this that satisfied punters have a 44% greater likelihood of death in medicine than those who are unsatisfied (I’ll cite and summarise more on this when I’ve gone through the research – a gist can be found on naked capitalism).

Galloway has been getting in despite a really big mistake with Saddam Hussein and may be doing so on Muslim votes – I don’t know and would like to.  I’d vote for him if he stood here, just to get rid of the useless incumbent, David Crausby.  Of course, I really want to vote for someone like Martin Bell, promising substantial reform of the system itself.  We have to rid ourselves of the banksters.

More money has been spent on bailing the banks than on WW2 plus getting to the Moon.  To rejuvenate UK town centres they come up with a £10 million fund! (10 pence a business?)  The banks are also being lent money by government in a scheme in which they pledge their shit (worth nothing) and get loans at 1% which they then lend government at up to 6%.  We will end up with their shit and the bill for all the borrowing. It doesn’t build hospitals (and oddly we need fewer of them than we already have) and it will pay bankster bonuses.

We’re being had, fucked over like abused children and dependant on the abusers.  We are queuing for petrol at least two weeks before any strike, causing the same effects a strike might!  We have an electoral system so perverse George gets in, but even this is not as bad as what we elect to government!

George is right we should not be in Afghanistan, but Enterprise is now on station in the Gulf and von Cameron has been lauded by Adolf Obama.  I would guess whether the button is pushed has more to do with whether Obama thinks he can win the election later this year without a war – the Yanks always re-elect an incumbent at war.

The same scams are being used on us over and again.  My guess is that organised crime is now entrenched in our government through the banksters.  Throughout the EU, countries are expressing the government debt to GDP ratios without their liabilities to the EU.  In the US Freddie Mac and Fannie May were just repeats of the Mafia scams in the thrifts a couple of dozen years before (Neil Bush would have been President if not embroiled in this).  The trick is to get hold of  sensible money used to fund housing in order to create Ponzi schemes – and I suspect the clamour to reduce government spending is the forerunner to more of this.  The idea is to manage ordinary money in accounting scams that rely on ever increasing asset prices for long enough to have it away with mega-bonus money, leaving the unwanted shell behind and the debts in the hands of tax payers.  Greece is now one such  shell.

Nero at least played his own fiddle while Rome burned – we just watch news utterly unrelated to the severe problems we are facing.  Galloway’s win in West Bradford was his third – yet Millibore is only now off there to find out why.  Any decent guy would reflect on why he didn’t see the obvious coming and resign.  Note his ACPO and IPCC style ‘we must learn the lessons’!  It’s the Muslim vote Eddie!  George doesn’t stand where they ain’t!  They have more sense on this than the rest of us.

The answers are obvious – as is the fact we don’t give a damn and too scared to put ourselves on the line.  How do they get this cowardice into us?

 

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Transparency (2) – We Need Policing

Max Keiser on France24 (Photo credit: Stacy Herbert)

Bill Black who wrote ‘The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One’ and actually put some banksters in jail is a voice of sanity.  You can track him  down by googling ‘Naked Capitalism’.  I’ve been convinced for a long time, that if we want real social and political change, we have to accept that we’ll need to police the change.  This won’t be easy as we all rightly fear the notion of a police state and our legal systems are way short of being fair and just a lot of the time.  Ignoring the worst possibilities of our behaviour in Utopian notions of our condition with blandishments such as ‘the State will wither away’ is frankly stupid.  What we do under total solutions is clearly horrible.  We surely have some clues when we properly evaluate the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist lunacies and many others like Jihad and Crusade – right down to such matters as the Spanish fascists stealing babies or Pinochet’s cretins killing mothers after the birth of their children.  This is always closer to home than we care to think, with the likes of the vile Thatcher condoning Pinochet or Bliar taking us into war to present himself with a world stage and a job as JP Morgan’s bag man (he may possibly have followed Churchill into this career).

In the UK, the Metropolitan Police has now lifted the lid off revolting practices by some of our media – simply by doing an investigation instead of covering up.  We have seen the absurdly pathetic expenses scandal in our Parliament and are now seeing that all promises of change were paper tigers.  Our Prime Minister, Bliar Mark Two, is involved with people seeking influence through cash donations.  Some clown is now saying, in Parliament, that we need to look into donations – when we should have stopped the farce long ago.  Millibore demands a proper independent enquiry – but the problem is we don’t know how – the Iraq enquiries and many others (Bloody Sunday) do not produce transparency and prove to be little other than reinforcement of secrecy.  Secret cameras and reporter stings do a better job.  Politicians and big business get away with the equivalent of the bookmaker inspired Pakistani no ball on a daily basis.  Government in Britain has taken the same course year in year out,  Under Nulabour the 18 previous years of Tory rule was to blame and now the 13 years of Nulabour is to blame.  This is true, of course, and is true because we can only elect useless shits,

The following is part of Bill Blacks tirade on the JOBS Act in the USA.

“The sixth form of insanity is a counterfactual.  The unique aspect about this crisis is that it is the first one in modern U.S. history in which the CEOs directing the control frauds that caused the crisis have done so with complete impunity from the criminal laws and near impunity from civil suits and enforcement actions.  The worst, most destructive fraudulent CEOs have been allowed to become and remain wealthy through their frauds even though several of them caused greater losses than the entire S&L debacle.  The worst fraudulent CEOs who led the prior epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the S&L debacle and the Enron-era crisis were prosecuted.  Not a single elite CEO from Wall Street or the largest fraudulent lenders has even been charged with fraud arising from such loans even though they, collectively, made over two million fraudulent loans in 2006.  Had the Bush and Obama administrations prosecuted and denounced these elite frauds it would have been politically impossible for an act as criminogenic and cynical as the JOBS Act to be promoted by the Obama administration and adopted by large Congressional minorities.  We are seeing with the JOBS Act the sick face of crony capitalism.

The seventh form of insanity is that there is no greater killer of jobs than elite financial fraud.  Such fraud epidemics can hyper-inflate bubbles (as they did in the U.S. and several European nations) and cause severe financial crises and recessions.  The resulting Great Recession has cost over 10 million Americans their existing or future jobs in this crisis.  It has cost over another 15 million people their existing or future jobs in Europe.  The JOBS Act is so fraud friendly that it will harm capital formation and produce additional job losses.  It may appear to be an oxymoron designed by regular morons, but that underestimates the abilities of the lobbyists that drafted this bill.  They are not morons.  They are doing faithful, clever service to their fraudulent clients.  That makes them more dangerous.”

Black makes the point that most of the right applaud the notion of broken windows policing – and yet at the same time cannot bear the idea in financial services or white collar crime generally.  The City of London is basically the centre of a criminal network of financial exploitation.    This should shock no serious student of history or even watcher of the ludic Keiser report (see a few random episodes – http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-265-max-keiser/).  Things are so bad that a development of Radio Moscow is closer to the truth than our Bimbo Broadcasting Corporation and its embedded incompetents.

We broadly allow the criminal City because of the kind of complex morality that allows us to imagine it is necessary in a dirty world.  Police officers are no more honest than the rest of us, but it’s difficult to imagine how any CJS could work if we do not assume their honesty in giving evidence.  Many trials are decided on our ability to choose between competing accounts – though science tells us we are pretty hapless in doing this.  Once one believes it’s a dirty old  world and corners need to be cut (they often do) because we can’t establish perfection (we can’t), there is a slippery moral slope.  One cannot abandon all of a legal system because of a few flaws.  We cannot abandon or over-regulate our criminal City because this would just let monsters beyond the gate to take over.

Even if we could turn all our weapons to plough shares, this would be no use if Al Queda could step in with a few guns, put our women in black bags and so on.  If we give up on economic dominance, we give up the advantage to others who will arm and take us over,  This isn’t  all rot – and is a bigger part of our chronic ideology than most admit.  The old story in this is that when our dominance is perfect enough, we’ll spread the benefits and get everyone playing along with us.  My guess though  is that the world is as crap now as it was 60 years ago when I was born, if we strip away technological advances (and many of these have just ‘improved’ our killing and planet burning potentials).

My belief is we need a mid-range policing solution not economics to change society for the better.  This is difficult to explain, as i believe the purpose of policing is to keep criminality out of our lives and this involves severe policing of police.  My dog needs a walk.

Winsor and the fitness of our police

Many police officers may begin to understand what ‘economics’ means from today.  It means working for Chinese wages or being replaced (outsourced) by the likes of my Zambian trained Laotian Guard who work for a couple of bowls of rice a day and shelter.  Our police have been overpaid since the Thatcher gold-seam when they were needed to cosh miners and could pay off the mortgage through overtime.  Of course, ‘overpaid’ is a tricky term when one considers bankster bonuses or compares the Re4sponse (not a typo – you’ll be working for Group 4 soon) officer’s lot with the work done by those in suits I mix with carrying warrant cards, but somehow not doing police work.

What happened in our factories and mines is now coming to the police.  The question not asked is why this has taken so long and who is responsible for that – the answer being the ACPO ranks.  In the factory model they would be delayered and sent packing because they have failed  for so long and would not be seen fit to use the new broom.  They have also failed to do anything to press for substantial changes in administrative law and the rest of the CJS.

There is little doubt we can recruit cheap cops and people with specialist skills, because the rest of the economy is well-shafted.  Muppets have degrees these days, so increasing the qualification threshold will be easy too, though I doubt the IQ average will shift much on account of this.  And cops will now be subject to fat notices and removal if their health fails, much like Boxer in Animal Farm when his health failed.  All  long overdue – so get ready to get down to Gadget-country job centres and take the jobs the Swampees refuse in droves.  This is what you turkeys voted for a couple of Xmas back. The vibrant, private sector cavalry economy.  It would be here even if we’d voted Nulabour in droves – our votes don’t count anyway.  I didn’t bother.

Asked to cost police pay against the labour market, I came up with a £15K basic on probation, rising to about £25K at the two-year mark – the latter only for those working shifts.  I don’t mean this is what I’d want to pay – but it is the comparator I’d stick with as a manpower services consultant.  There is no competition for labour and a glut in this market.   Cops were as badly paid as this until about 1974 when the labour market was tighter.  You can get academics for around £25K.

I doubt Winsor goes far enough for Gadget’s ‘dark lady’.  She should be interested in the unit  costs of police processes and bringing these down to manufacturing levels.  I’m sick and tired of efficiency in these terms.  It’s why Apple has so much offshore money and manufactures in dangerous factories in China – even using a nerve  agent to clean its i-Phone screens because it’s quicker.  We are dumb to believe any of it – but until now cops have been so  dumb they haven’t seen it  coming their way and haven’t cared at all seeing it happen to others,

We have no politics of anything else, so if you want to do anything about it, you’ll have to threaten strike action and then do it.  The standard response in industry is to declare the strikers in breach of contract and replace them.  There is no right to strike in the UK.  Hard times to come and not just in the annual fitness tests!  My best wishes and sympathy – but we all know where that lies in the dictionary.

I’m surprised the Home Secretary hasn’t prepared better.  I’d have recruited some large lads for weekend duty by now, in order to have a black-leg backup.  If you aren’t familiar with Winsor-type plans, there is always another one to come.  This one will be the most acceptable.  Once they have cheaper recruitment under way, they will expand into getting rid of more costly workers through redundancy.  No one cares I have years of varied experience these days because they can get my subjects taught for buttons by someone with a PhD who has never seen a factory – but then, they are teaching people who will never see one either.  You will find they don’t really care about your long-honed skills either.

Police are about to be the latest victims on the war on labour.  The stupid thing is we could all get decent living wages.  I’m off abroad.  I’m too unreliable to remember to switch the lights off.

The Issue On Fox And Werity

There’s innuendo in the media that Fox-Werity might be a gay affair.  This hardly matters, but would sell copy.  It would be a fascinating triumph of magnificent deceit and risk.  The real issue is how our politics has come to the point at which “interests” can be so easily infiltrated into our government.  In recent years we can wonder how Blair worked his way through the Labour Party – was he CIA, when did he become a bag man for JP Morgan Chase etc?  Much effort was expended on whether Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy and we know about Burgess, MacClean, Philby, Blunt and other ideological spies.  How much easier for people working for interests more apparently on our side?  One can even make a case for Churchill as a JP Morgan bag man furthering general US interests (War Plan Red etc.) -who knows and how could we really know.

Fox has been ‘carrying on’with Werity in full view for over a year.  One might ask where our secret service was and the further question of what might be going on if this could happen in plain sight.  Most of us despise politics and only tiny numbers are party members.  How easy is it to use a bit of cash and support to establish a cadre of ‘sleepers’ one can control and supply with the kind of information that gives them advantage in the last phases of the race to the top of the greasy pole?  One can, after all, meet the banksters without the kind of suspicion that trips beyond the Iron Curtain used to engender.

Fox has been incredibly stupid – not a quality I want to see in the government of my country – and also entirely brazen.  He and Cameron clearly believed they could brazen things out against very clear evidence.  The interests involved are not the general interest of this country and I wonder whether treason is reasonable to suspect as in the case of the Cambridge spies and other loons.  I don’t fully know what damage they did, but we didn’t end up fighting wars and killing large numbers as a result of their infamy.

One might say that linking arms’ sales to other export projects is good for this country – and one can hold the opposite view.  One might favour the Israeli situation (I have a daughter there bur don’t) and other right-wing views (one can make a case for all kinds of stuff, including off shore banking and the American Empire as a good thing) – but this is not government and nor is associating so clearly with paid lobby as though this is government.

Lying, Bliaring

Why do  we think it’s a good idea to allow massive differences in wealth?  Do we really believe some people really work so much harder, smarter and so on than the rest of us? Do we really think people should be allowed not to work just because they have plenty of money and that scum should have to work because they have none?

I hear all kinds of rubbish about hard work, work ethic, bonuses, talent and other stuff that makes no sense in terms of what work is really about.  It’s better explained in Family Guy as a teacher’s fine words on educating children turn to rushing off calling them brats as she wins the lottery.  If we all loved work so much none of us would even enter a lottery.  And given we’d all give up work on winning, much of what we say about work just isn’t true.

We lie about our religions of peace too.  Finally, like Blair, we turn Catholic and ask for absolution for war crimes.  I wonder what the CIA had on Nulabour’s finest?  Robert Frost’s book had Mrs. Blair as the CIA mole – mine would have him in trouble in his Elvis leather days doing charity work with young girls and an incident in that he was helped through.  A  young boy would fit the Catholic profile better!

 

Immigration Does Not Play A Vital Role In Our Economy

Most jobs are not complex enough to require high skill or knowledge articulation.  Migrant labour has always had the effect of pushing wages down.  The small number of people with high-level skills and knowledge are generally a tiny minority of actual labour flow.

I haven’t noticed any of the wonderful customer service skills either.  Just barmen and taxi drivers with no sense of ‘crack’ and worse.  If this really existed, you’d expect our cops to be brought in from abroad.  For that matter, I notice  far better qualified and decent lecturers abroad who work for less than half my rate.

None of this justifies racism, but I suspect that was never the real issue.  We have done almost nothing to address proper education for those not suited to school – probably 50% of our population.

I know of no country happy with its ‘guest workers’.  The general model has been to export manufacturing, organisational and physical labour requirements – to avoid more difficult routes in competition – or to deskill like McDonalds or import skills as in the Poliish plumber and NHS staff.  Our more bureaucratised jobs have largely been spared this, or at least the pace has been slower and barriers to entry, often fictional, higher.

Human populations around the world are more or less devoid of differences other than those formed in culture.  So racism is baloney.  The big question is governance – the social contract involving legitimate authority – or too often crass authority.  This is what we are suffering from.

Essentially we have no democracy to trust in.

 

Decriminalising the police (to let them get on with preventing crime)

A happy New Year to all the decent officers we can’t do without.  All our lives would be better if we could find a way for these excellent people to get on with keeping the peace.  I’d like to see a lot of policing decriminalised, from the odd bent cop who turns up to a lot of what makes up day-to-day coppering.  The aim would be to find a way to value police work and officers in a different way.  All very challenging, with a need to better understand the challenges on the street good officers put themselves in the way of far more than some.  The system will never be immaculate (except on HMIC visits), but it could be easier to work with, and both more democratic and effective.  What analysis there is tends to be managerial-financial, and needs to start with the street-level even for any of this to work.  My suspicion is that the discipline society needs cannot be enforced or encouraged by criminalisation.  This need not be some kind of ‘leftie liberal whinge’ as we could proceed with a view to coming down harder on disorder and dire behaviour.  We need something radical because our CJS is a busted flush.  We lack a real public dialogue on this and what really affects most of our lives.  In the meantime, brave men and women get it in the neck in a system that is ‘criminal’ in all the wrong ways.  Good luck to them.

The most discussed decriminalisation concerns drugs.  I’m generally in favour, because the ‘war on drugs’ doesn’t work, and is part of the creation of a wide criminal industry.  This, of course, can’t be the end of the story.  Apart from treating the issues through a medical model, there remain severe nuisance problems (not coped with well now) and criminal adaptivity (what rackets might be created and where would the criminality transfer).  Questions remain about how much of the bulk of current minor crime and violence could be subject to alternatives to police action if we could understand them differently and how new procedures could be effective and tough, rather than wet.  There are clues in the average IQ of people passing through police hands (dumb), the welfare sponsored, sub-minimum wage economies exploited by wealthy criminals and lack of alternatives in legal employment.

There seems little doubt that we have created a monster in our public services generally.  There is a fatal nexus of managerial over-staffing, over-payment and bent performance management that suits politicians in power.  I suspect even the financial drain of this exceeds all criminal industries put together, and that the real costs on moral and lack of necessary change exceed this in real, personal terms.  We end up with an excuse culture that is hostile to fair criticism and shuns responsibility.

There is a general tendency to set up an ‘evil poor’ as the problem, perhaps as minority groups have always been set up.  Yet it is other interest groups that grow richer.  We have an over-populated managerial-political class that interferes with everything, yet under-manages and creates systems that suit its needs, not the problems we face.  ACPO is a classic example, but only an example.

The decriminalisation process needs to replace current IPCC, HMIC and PSDs with a single body taking account of local public concerns (no elected police chiefs), victims’ representation and civilian organisation of complaints.  The rest is about getting a great deal of effective power to street officers through decriminalised processes as far as possible, in order to release our forces into work that is real policing, to break the cycle of hopeless, recidivist cases and drunken mile regulation.  It would be interesting to know more about who and what actually causes the need for so much expenditure on wasted cycles of recidivism in the tide of petty crime and antisocial behaviour, even to the extent of protest movements of those who feel there is no alternative to turning out on the streets, or into shops and businesses perceived as not playing fair.

The problems that need taking into account extend well beyond anything police officers do, and what we want them to be able to do and they cannot.  Glib phrases like ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ need to be treated as dire lies, unless they are costed and worked through in terms of how they are to be effective other than as political salesmanship.  What we have is complex problems that feed many vested interests and wallets.  We need a grip on what the costs of the vicious circle are and who is bearing them, who is retaining the money and whether any of the actions being taken are likely to reduce the costs or change any behaviour or quality of life.  I suspect the police fail so much of the time because they are dealing with symptoms not the disease and the real problems that should not, in the first place, be in their remit.

There is no point in doing projects that have massive and obvious costs we can’t afford so politicians can point to ‘success stories’.  We need to take the whole bag on and accept a change in balance on civil rights towards the maintenance of a right to quiet peace.  Things are so bad, we can’t even get this in many classrooms, let alone the drunken mile or next door to drug addicts.  The answers are complex, but we can’t even seriously talk and debate the problems.

Education, education, education – one word, three repeated lies

I first heard ‘education, education, education’ in East Germany (DDR) at some dreadful conference.  The academic was droning on and referring to a speech by a DDR politburo minister in the 1950s.  At dinner, a long way from prying ears, she apologised and told a very different story to the one for public consumption.  I didn’t see Blair in the DDR audience, but had the same reaction hearing him bleating out the same , though thankfully shorter speech years later.  There was no dinner for him to roll his eyes at me either, though he did that to us all at the drop of a hat.  The key element in Nulabour education planning concerned bullshit performance management, something they clearly did with crime figures and everything else.  To do this you create a well-paid nomenclature and make its well-paid interests match those of government targets.  ACPO is the paradigm case, but documentaries have revealed the same in health, care, schools and pretty much all sectors.

Against international standards, our schools are failing (OECD reports).  Yet we have been told they were improving.  More and more kids get qualifications, yet are really falling behind international standards on literacy and numeracy.  Crime is forever falling, yet no one really believes this.  No one really believes the educational bull either, with 8% of kids privately educated and loads more got into the right schools through house-buying and other dodges.

Finland has a much better school system than the UK.  There is no private education you can pay for there, everyone gets free school meals and education is genuinely comprehensive until 16.  Teachers are very well trained.  You can see, before we look at what they do in classrooms and getting kids out of them more often, that we have a very different culture.  This is also before we think of how much money we waste in sending so many to university.  Talk of copying the Finns is hapless unless we understand the aims of their education system and what they think society is about.

We now have people across our public sector paid to lie about its ‘success’.  The culture is one of juking statistics.  We have become stupidly millennial on leadership to the point where we will have to pay £200K for every head teacher to ensure standards across the nation.  Our responses look increasingly like the means of producing 10-fold crop yields under Mao – dumping all the fertiliser in one place for a success story whilst ignoring the general famine.  Bung a couple of million into Liverpool to do something about Cash-in-Transit robberies and cut them down to size, whilst they go up in Manchester and Cheshire.

We should be listening much more directly to teachers, cops, pupils and victims to get a proper hang on what the problems are, cutting out these ‘performance managers’ and their costs.  Instead, the only outlet is blogging.  I enjoyed my time in Finland and think their schools better than ours.  Their cops were less insular and more pleasant too.  Yet I’d also likely be dead from alcohol excess by now if I was a male Finn.  International comparisons require a lot of knowledge to be effective.  I should have asked whether many of their secondary schools were full of bullying louts from problem families that neither teachers nor police could deal with, or racial tensions.

We should be finding out what is wrong with our system before looking to Finland or Korea.  Our teachers will know most of it.  They need asking in a direct and confidential manner, not one that will expose them to an Ofsted black mark.  Our inspection culture needs to end, as it now involves one set of bureaucrats providing the ‘information’ another requires.  We see this across varieties of management by objectives systems, appraisals and other clapped-out dross that needs sweeping from our organisations.  It all started long before Nulabour and we have a generation of a hands-off, promoted class with no critical perspective and excellence attitudes that are patronising, arrogant and corrupt.

The aim should be to put our teachers back in charge of our schools, our police on our streets, people in work and recognise that we can tell whether this is all happening or not.  We need an end to fictional politics, even if the Finnish school model is attractive it is fictional to make out it can transfer here, and a distraction from the investigation needed into our own failings.