Police and Corporate Corruption Off the Gatsby or Max Keiser Scale

Those who enjoyed Gadget and the brilliant Night Jack could take a look at this site – http://www.upsd.co.uk/

Here, you will find a microcosm of the Swamp, Reservation and Everglades in a single West Yorkshire police station – Killingbeck.  I’d say, on language analysis, the site is run by former cops and journalists.  Pedophiles, a voracious female officer, thieves, Jimmy Saville‘s driver, senior cops who regularly lose case files and so on make up the story of this nick.  I’d apologize to any decent officers working out of this hole, and will when I see any giving evidence against the goings on.  I suspect one already tried and they fit him up for an assault.

Evidence is very tough to establish even when one has the relevant authority and resources.  The story in West Yorkshire is of – er – West Yorkshire getting to investigate – er – West Yorkshire.  The Incompetent Poodles of Constabulary Corruption (IPCC) don’t seem to have got in and done anything, though they barely report what they do these days and leak rubbish to the press as in inspiring national riots.  UPSD post the new police commissioner as a big part of the problem.  I can only say their blog rings true and I suspect most forces are as bad.

To understand these matters better we need to widen our view.  Our cops are unlikely to be worse than our general society – on work experience I still trust cops ahead of academics.  The C/Super caught shagging the C/inspector was taken out by the sergeant who lived with her, the C/inspector by the super’s former cop wife – all very ‘Swamp’, very incestual – except there were no arrests.  The shagging was newspaper fodder.  The important stuff is that we have lost (or never had) any sensible ways to prevent corruption in all our organisations (I work for myself and it’s still tough!)

Our regulatory bodies are designed not to regulate, not to weed out crooks and incompetence.  There’s a good example by Graham Smith on the IPCC written years ago (google) that gets to the nub.  You can’t let people investigate themselves or make decisions on what gets investigated.

Neo-liberal politics more or less gives up on regulation and investigation, leaving markets to sort out the crime on the grounds of consumer choice.  This is dumb as consumer choice is very limited, whether in terms of buying cheap clothes made in sweat shops about to burn down, or in reporting a sexual assault to a nest of pedophiles, complaint file losers and Jimmy Saville veneration club.  I drive a VW knowing a former CEO used to fly a prostitute favourite first-class from Angola to Paris.

What I’d favour is test-purchase/mystery shopper stings across our organisations and some strong legislation on transparency – including punishments for people who lose evidence from CCTV and so on.  We have banks telling us they don’t know where money has gone, CEOs who didn’t know what was happening (but want to keep pay and bonuses) and massive stealing of tax money and money laundering.  We could stop most of the corruption without the sky falling in.

I think Peter Fahy has made a positive difference with less resources in GMP.  We still don’t know why shagger Todd was so well thought of and have no clue why similar banksters are worth so much of our money or why so few white-collar crooks go to jail.  I’d bet Fahy would do the job for 6 times (Plato’s recommendation) the recruitment pay of a PC.  I know I could find enough cops at every level at Plato’s rates of pay.  The value of our local bobby far exceeds that of any banker I taught or know.  We need to understand the wider corruption and unfairness to understand why all our organisations are protecting their Killingbecks, selling us horse-meat (its rat as lamb in China and poisoned baby milk) and lie in cover-up at the drop of a hat.  Jimmy Saville was on the radar when I was a cop 30 years back.  We did some extra-judicial work on some of his mates.  Beatings were fairly common – I preferred to get them for something else I could stand up in court.  Against the highest standards I failed – but I can’t remember a single officer I should have reported and didn’t.  Most (not by me) who were reported should not have been, and cops who did make complaints were bullied.  Plus ca change – except in spades?

UPSD may have a great deal right.  News from Cleveland contains a standard excuse on missing CCTV (and back-ups).  Imagine what bank and corporate lawyers and managers allow to go missing when it can take months or years to get warrants for the evidence.  The outcomes across current corruption are the same – very few banksters, very few bent cops in jail.

One can imagine a solution.  We could stop the useless recruitment and selection processes of “great leaders” and go for sortition – roughly qualification by exam and experience to a list and rolls of the dice for appointment.  The lot would stop much cronyism.  We’d need to do something about royal routes through private schools and elite universities and find genuine ways of recognising work achievement for qualification.  We seem to be destroying integrity across our organisations.  On complaints, the IPCC should already have conducted sensible research.  Typically only 6% of complaints are upheld.  A small sample, rigorously investigated, could tell us whether this unlikely figure is real.

The Great Gatsby is a novel about pathetic desire for an empty woman and money lust.  Max Keiser puts over a more credible ‘Radio Moscow’ message of a world run by bankster terrorists void of any integrity.  That we find this being acted out in a single police station with senior cops in sauna sex trists, fitting up their own, selling and using drugs, perverting the course of justice, shagging children, losing evidence and raising a wall of silence that should bring the ‘Untouchables’ raining down on the place – well it raises questions on whether anything has changed since celebrities were getting away with regular abuse and how far we have all fallen as yet more authority figures tell us ‘lessons are being learned’.  One wonders too, why Gadget had nothing to say on such and whether he knew which end of the whistle to blow.  My post should end with a statement that most cops are good people and the rest.  The shame of it is I don’t think any of us are.  We lack the system to be good in.  The basic problem is that we have UPSD reporting, but evidence from investigation is not put forward for public scrutiny even when we get the investigation.  Even people prepared to follow the evidence can’t when it isn’t revealed.  Hillsborough has demonstrated depravity by our authorities, press and idiot sections of the public.  The scandal underlying international banking is much worse.  This threatens democracy itself.

I don’t really care if a couple of senior officers get up one another in a sauna.  Their business unless they expect us to pay.  I’ve turned a blind eye.  Volunteering a week’s pay to charity and record expunged after 12 months sounds about right.  What would we expect of a Deputy Prime Minister doing much worse?   The real problem is some lad or lass on the shopfloor gets wacked for much less and that serious breaches of trust and law are covered-up.  Anyone thinking the police system impenetrable (away from the Killingbeck unlovely) needs to get out more.  Academe, the professions and bank and corporate accounts are much worse.  Most of us know about the blind eye, white lies and ‘there but for the grace of god go I’.

There are many malicious complaints, lefties who don’t realise the great plan failed in China and the USSR, righties with no clue that austerity is a Black Death solution in the third world and education has failed.  There are arguments about everything,  Did you know Britain was really behind Hitler as part of a plan to waste Germany and the USSR on each other?  The book is called ‘Conjuring Hitler’ – I got bored on lack of promised evidence.  We have known since the pre-Socratics that powerful arguments can be made for almost any view.  The key is evidence (though there are arguments this is not the case) and honesty in collecting and presenting it.

Anyone who has worked on a reasonably complex fraud or murder enquiry knows how tough it can be to collect, collate and present the evidence even before lawyers and judges ply their trade and various levels of disclosure.  Lab experiments can be more complex – but we have at least fucked the lawyers off.  In most social situations the actual evidence is not presented to us.  You must have seen banksters saying they have to get and pay huge salaries.  In 20 years teaching and researching in business schools I have seen no evidence for this at all.  Police forces regularly say there is no corruption problem or only a small one.  I see no evidence to support this.  The main reason in both cases for the lack of evidence is the lack of sensible and impartial investigation.  There is almost nothing that can be taken at face value.  Banksters and rich Harvard professors of moral philosophy point to soccer stars and their massive fees – so two wrongs make a right?  Soccer could bring in a salary cap.  So could banks.  When cops claim CCTV didn’t work or evidence has been lost – well this could be true.  But evidence here would be statistical – are cops regularly claiming evidence has accidentally gone missing and more often when their case might be contradicted by it?  Are the 160 amended statements at Hillsborough an exception or is this regular practice?  None of 17 civilian witnesses at Stockwell heard ‘stop armed police’ shouted – what’s the statistical likelihood?  The chance of me shouting that when about to shoot a suicide bomber is zero.  Tap, tap and explanation afterwards.  There is, at the same time, no evidence most of our cops are bent.

The point across social issues is evidence is being withheld from us.   We take positions without the very stuff that would make them reasonable.  We vote on ‘the economy’ and know no economics.  Some are anti-CO2 but can’t explain likely models of climate change (one of the latest is cloud seeding by cosmic rays – science not clown fiction).  Economists of mainstream ilk based theory on rational man – a joke in biology – and debt being irrelevant (now an agony).   Blair tells us he is sound with god (which we can’t check) and asks if we would rather Saddam was still in power.  One suspects those Iraqis in the death count we don’t have might rather be living – and in any case we could have sent men ashore to achieve no Saddam.  One can argue we went to secure the oil – or that we went to keep the price up.  I increasingly think we live in a world denied evidence.  Our protest politics is UKIP – yet the EU only costs us £74 each and on the Swiss-Norwegian model we’d pay as much after leaving to remain in the trade area.  Of course, one might vote for them to repeal the smoking ban, curtail immigration and register how sick we are with the three main parties.

Pity John Prescott wasn’t elected a police commissioner.  They might be repealing the farce by now.  Two Jags outside the sauna, compliant chief inspector … we’d be better off with Max Keiser running the show.  If you watch you’ll see he only pretends to be mad.  The real psychos are running our organisations.

Advertisement

The docile body-politic

One of the problems with the way we argue is summed up in this post – http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-comfortably-numb

Most people really don’t want to engage with the world and the consequence for argument is that full facts hardly ever become the issue.  All rhetoric needs to do is engage a numb-skull mentality of people rendered docile.  The zerohedge post complains that US government has been taken over by a few evil people.  I agree and suspect the historical truth is worse.

The excuse for not being able to provide decent education and modern living conditions for all people is essentially that this is a dirty old world and we have to put up with gross inequalities or else end up in the doom of ash-grey uniformity and dictatorship.

Nearly all argument, in my view, is crippled by this kind of foreboding – from questions on arming police officers to whether we should teach real history in schools.  The conundrum is that if we are to settle matters and direction through argument we need a populace that is skilled in argument and, of course, don’t have one – unless we place faith in some unconscious processing.  Plato’s answer (in theory) was to plough vast resources into his Guardians (including husbandry) in education and life-style to create  an elite that would not be corrupted (though he admitted this was inevitable in comments on human nature).

My own view is that education is a failure other than in technical areas, child-minding and soldiering.  The neglected element from Plato is his communism of the free table – the taking away of the temptation of power accumulated through personal wealth.  I see almost no discussion of this that does not start with some Mumbo Jumbo on the role of vast personal fortune in motivating “our best people”.  This turns anything said on the issue to total bollox.  Thieves have similar motivation.  I would say people motivated by money in this sense are unlikely to be trusted in other human endeavours.  Our societies have been gerrymandered to bring about fealty to wealth and the desire to grab it.  I do not believe this is human nature at all.

Key terms in what passes as argument in the general public domain are wrong.  Work is one of them – most people avoid the real thing here, as surely as pompous Greeks believed it scarred the soul and barely even bother to justify slavery for all their show of intellect.  Much of what is discussed is as hopeless as speaking of ‘life-force’ rather than in the language of genetics or using Descartes’ (hapless) physics rather than the lines developed from Galileo, Newton and Einstein.  We talk in ideologies and myths, not about reality.

This reality is dire.  Think about what goes on in the world in 30 minutes.  A child dies unnecessarily in each four seconds, an Indian farmer commits suicide and a whole load else.  We like to keep our comfort by calling anyone revealing this doomsayers and by denials anything we do is responsible.  How welcome it is to have high-level theories telling us such matters are just the unfortunate consequences of ‘free trade’ (now there’s another term that is never true) and things would be much worse if we organised from the eradication of such problems up.

I spent a decade of my life trying to teach British industry to plan. Even in this kind of work heads are buried in the sand.  Many of our industries simply could not compete with the massive structural change to mass production and away from skilled,almost artisan work in many of our industries (shipbuilding was the classic).  Work has primarily been redefined by it being taken away as a means of making a living in my adult life.  We have coped better than rural India, but that’s about  it.

We can grow stuff, build stuff and provide a basic standard of living for all better than the existing one in the UK with no world trade.  Most of us wouldn’t miss the trinkets.  So what is all this international finance about, really?  The really gloomy answer is war.

Another example of blowing the whistle leading nowhere useful

You can’t catch some interesting Australian News on the banking system by following the links in this David Malone post – http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/11/whistleblowerirl-revealed/ – the story is pretty much routine in terms of what happens to whistle-blowers and describes how farcical ‘honesty is the best policy’ has become.  I no longer believe rational argument is possible on the economy and banking until we understand the current system is about thieving by an elite group.

I haven’t actually believed in rational argument for about 20 years.  What we have of it is a sham – which of course leaves me with problems on how I know this and how I can communicate it as I can’t appeal to rational argument itself.  Habermas followed Weber in appeal to an ‘ideal type’ – in his case the special case of ideal speech situations.  Of course, Plato beat him to this with his Guardians and their intense training and communist free table – which can look like elaborate reasons for dirty old men to get to look at gymnastics in the nude!  So farcical is The Republik that the Guardians are presumed so dumb they won’t know even their reproductive activities are being organised behind their backs.  Our “advanced civilisation”, of course, relies on such mad stuff as ‘greed is good’.Economics is often perceived by adherents as ‘Dr.Strangelove’s Game’ (Paul Ormerod) and we have generally forgotten (I polite term for ‘never known because we are too idle to learn’) its roots are not in Adam Smith, Richardo and Marx, but gambling and war financing (really, I’m not making this up – you just don;t read enough).

My interest in policing and criminal justice has little to do with my time as a cop.  The CJS is an example of society trying to contain pathology and I’m looking to formulate a model that might be the basis of an economics that works for more than a tiny number who then also control politics.  There has to be a way that doesn’t create “Guardians” or knowing people who want to control others for their own ‘reasons’, however good they are at hiding them in “cool objectivity” (which we know is never as claimed).

I’m inclined to the blunt – if there was nothing wrong and a sensible system was in place, we wouldn’t shit on whistle-blowers.  That we do this in high-ratio is obvious.  The BBC’s most gawping loon, Peston, wheeled on to ‘explain the figures’ tells us people just sense something is going wrong.  No they don’t you turd – they are unemployed, under-employed or see their kids with no jobs, no prospects and worry about paying the rent.  The figures you don’t give us concern massive debt brought on by neo-classical economics as sound as anything preached in religious sects, a theory that was always about enriching a few by stealing from the many, looting by bankers and a lot of other stuff you could track down if you were a reported and not a stooge,  Channel Four finally produced a woman with an MA selling teas and coffees from a van.  ‘Politicians’, she says, ‘don’t know what they’re talkin’ aboot’.  My written Geordie is poor!  I believe they do and are lying to us.

The problem for ‘dissident economics’

I have no problems with arguments made over a long period against capitalism.  I find much of my own reasoning in this area moral.  I believe in freedom, so I find allowing individuals to amass wealth that defies equality of opportunity and equality  under law wrong.  This, of course, is not the end of the argument, as in most civilized attempts at ‘communism’, vile parties arise screwing freedom even better than ‘money’.  We write off the vile Sino-Soviet ‘experiments’ at our peril.  Plato’s communism was to be based on slavery.

Freedom is a very difficult concept.  We want it for our children, but do not leave them free to test out fire or strangers.  Argument on human rights do not ‘ground’ – they tend to deconstruction.  We cannot, even in argument, create a perfect society.  Even Plato admitted his elaborate training and precaution would eventually fall to corruption.

Dissident economics really only point to how ignorant we are and how consumed we are in false consciousness.  We are perhaps sophisticated enough now to recognise that transforming consciousness is a danger.  One can teach the management speak of this, in which leaders are key players in creating reality for others.  Hardly democratic stuff. Dissident arguments often seek to establish a new consensus, but consensus is not what we think.  It’s an animal system, not one of free thought.  The dissident economist has as much chance as the dissident cockroach wiped out by its fellows in the hygiene of consensus.

What we might offer is genuinely different, practical operating systems that evade banks and traditional leadership costs, in order to expose the extent of the parasite, and see if we can form another capital and people who understand what this is (this is happening to some extent).  Yet hierarchy and other biologically built-in patterns emerge.  What we are trying to deal with is both animal and mad.  I suspect any real change can only come by getting rid of the ballot box and extending voting to matters that matter on a world basis.  Dialogue on this is almost impossible, challenging real power.

Currently, we can’r keep Rooney at Manchester United or bwankers in Britain without allowing massive salaries and bonuses.  The answer is a genuinely international competition, that can enforce salary caps.  The economic question is how they keep us from such a society.  Technology and knowledge have changed and I see little on how we might change our arguments as as result.  Instead, we are on the march to war.

Time To End Representation?

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.  There’s a brilliant joke on this theme in Peter Cook’s film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (a couple of quid for the DVD – it’s genius from about 1968).  Rimmer gets to the top by ruthless tricks.  He then has us all make decisions on everything, leading to sacks of work being delivered to us all by post everyday,  Appalled at the work we are all burdened with, he becomes President in order to take all this work off us.

These days we have the technology to make representation unnecessary.  All current ‘democracies’ are representative.  We thus cede administrative power to a very few and to election processes involving a few parties.  This may have been the best we could manage in history and did not prevent Hitler coming to power in what was the most cultured and scientific nation then on Earth.  It did not stop the British or American Empires either.  These may be seen as ‘holding positions’ for freedom if there is future history, though may be seen as considerably more vile than those of us bred to their propaganda currently believe.

Those in power have always been reluctant to accept that power can really be given to the people.  It’s clear we could now organise reliable referendums that involved us very directly in decision-making.  Questions around this are the ones we should be considering in our politics, not piss like AV.

Of course, power to the people on this scale can be ridiculed.  25% of our populations, even where there is education, remain functionally innumerate and illiterate.  Critical reasoning capability is in very short supply – I doubt more than 5% can really do this (in terms, say, of the current ‘A’ level) – and I doubt we can ‘educate’ people up to it in academic terms.  The resources Plato outlined for his Guardians were immense.  Trying to equip everyone for the kind of citizenship apparently needed for genuine self-rule seem daunting.

Politics everywhere is a form of dictatorship of a rendered-docile proletariat.  Rule is enforced through hierarchy of one form or another.  We still give up to an absolute much as Hobbes described.  I prefer what we do in the West to what goes on in Syria or Saudi, though this may well be ‘our doing’ too.  I don’t want to give up government to half-wits who watch soap operas.

Yet surely, we should have dialogue on what we could do with new technology and the obvious abuses of representative and judicial power.  Blair was Thatcher in drag and Cameron uses the ‘Blair touch’ as well as the war criminal himself.  We are always at war, employers can always use the threat of moving to cheap labour and tax, or move the labour in.  We are destroying the planet and … enough said.  Harwood hasn’t been arrested and the DPP, really making a decision on himself, will try to quietly not have a trial, hoping time will kill off any fuss.  We can do better than this.

That we can’t move instantly to voting on everything is obvious.  What is so sad is that we don’t understand the importance of thought experiments and what they can reveal.  We are rightly scared of countries with more or less no government where piracy and banditry prevail.  Yet we are not aware of what is really going on in our own system, or whether this is remotely the best we can manage.  In this ignorance we have moved from the potential of bildung to bulldung.  We do not know there is something very rotten in the State of Denmark.

Crap Cops Learning Lessons

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1379934/Police-accused-cover-failing-identify-officers-abandoned-blinded-street-attack-victim.html#ixzz1KQmk8Itf

The link is to a Wail story found via Dickiebo.  The story is typical of ‘those Gadget won’t print’.  Cowardly cops not doing their job, and not being brought to book through police complaints.  The Ian Tomlinson saga grinds on, long after his death.  The crap cop in that ain’t in jail either.  These are not isolated incidents – they are incidents made isolated by the non-working complaints system.  Lessons are not learned from them as they go on and on, with vile cop-toadies puking out the insulting jargon like ‘learning lessons’ making matters worse.  Anyone genuinely trying to complain is subject to vilification as a ‘nutter’, ‘cop hater’ and the rest.  It’s time, yet again to bring down the whole shebang of complaints against the police.  This, as Graham Smith has pointed out, is part of a pathetic vicious cycle that ends up with a new version of the same old crap.  The latest same old crap is the IPCC.

Complaints systems are problematic.  To work, they need to be established along with firm understanding that the organisation concerned will be transparent to criticism.  This is almost impossible in Britain.  We shit on our whistleblowers almost as routinely as vile Middle Eastern regimes.  Trying to do anything here is subject to our own ‘wasta’ system.  Wasta is the name for the corruption in countries like Iran, Baharain, Saudi and so on.  We have our own.  An extensive sociology is available.  People are blogging, writing books, we have Dispatches, Panorama and some genuinely critical journalism, but it is all to no avail in our dismal country.  As a boy reading about the Gulags, I was distressed about the forced labour forced to eat ‘boiled grass rations’.  Now, I can see old people dying of malnutrition in our NHS and meals unfit for my dog slopped up.  There is always some vastly overpaid turd around saying everything is hunky-dory.   The critical material around may as well be Samizdat, the undercover ‘voice’ of ‘subversive material’ found in the former soviets.  I no longer feel it is too strong to say our ‘performance management’ is in the shit league along with ‘wasta’ and ‘Samizdat’.  Indeed, the bread in the shit sandwich is now the filling.  The lunatics are in charge of the asylum and have been for so long we can hardly make this out.

Although I have massive sympathy with notions that ‘selfishness’ is at the root of our problems (Banksidebabble writ large if you like), I also know that ‘virtue ethics’ is not the answer.  This form of thinking did not help Plato, his memory-invention Socrates or even the admirable John Locke get past slavery.  Indeed, one thing evident in much ‘clever thinking’ can be just how smug it turns out to be.  Plato imagines ‘Guardians’ rather like himself, Spinoza makes out a politics aimed at defending people rather like himself and some donkey-professor of  happiness tales his £70K for years, only to pronounce that being more happy leads to happiness.

My partner is just introducing our new puppy to the cats.  There are arguments we should not keep the animals given global warming and human squalor elsewhere.  I expect a treatise from the cats soon!  We have our foibles.  We need simple answers to our human problems, yet the first stage of this, if we are not content with shooting all those of promoted rank across our society, will be unraveling the complex myths and idiocy of current society.  I will start buying the Grauniad again – though any reading will be secondary top its use in pup-potty training.