2007 NEW EPOCH NEWS, Telework News, Electronic Revolution, Future-Shock, News Blog, Friday, 21 May 2010     E-Wars, IPR, BIG-BROTHER, ORWELLIAN, P2P, MOBILE-PHONES, HOME-OFFICES, INTERNET LAW, ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIETY.

 NEW EPOCH NEWS – THE SECOND EPOCH

How the Information Society is progressing

21 May 2010

Contribute by e-mail to:  noel@noelhodson.com

 

The first era, including the past ten thousand years of written history, has been characterized by tribal politics and the acquisition and maintaining of wealth by force – essentially a system of gang-warfare. It is a physical and psychological fact that using our brains is the most energy consuming activity we undertake. To avoid thinking we cleave to ‘isms – the lazy person’s what-to-think-guide. Nevertheless, over thousands of years, in rebellion against prescribed and proscribed thought, enough people have used their brains innovatively for developed nations to now be able to claim that “We have worked hard to abolish work – and have succeeded.”  

 

In industrialised nations, due to generations of hard work, valour and sacrifice and, recently, the Electronic Revolution - the Knowledge Economy - there is overproduction of most consumer goods and services. Real wealth and the products of the Real Economy are flooding developed countries. The world has never before produced so much real wealth. But the traditional, tribal, Money Economy mechanisms, used to count, account and to share wealth fairly, are inadequate. The Real Economy, over millennia, has been and is maintained by the efforts of the majority of the population while the Money Economy, the legal paper which represents real wealth, is 75% owned by just 4% - some of whom have contributed little to the commonwealth. Despite sweeping, historic, social revolutions to diminish the plagues and powers of aristocrats, aristocracy has resurfaced with a vengeance, this time rooted in America, under the guise of capitalism and free-market forces for the good of all the people. As global society deposes the last of these dynastic dinosaurs, they will lash their powerful tails with potent and destructive rage.

 

The 3 economies, Real, Monetary and Knowledge are badly out of alignment, out of sync and disjointed. The Electronic Revolution will bring a new, fairer, more open reality.

 

Though we would all rather drown in Global Warming floods than cooperate with each other - humankind is on the threshold of the era of intelligent-cooperation. This second phase, era or epoch is characterised by the Electronic Revolution, automated production, free-information, constant, instant global communications and, most revolutionary of all, by individuals thinking for themselves. It is bringing global social responsibility and radical changes; for example, it is probable that voting for and empowering charismatic individuals – gang leaders in politics and business - to decide our futures, will soon be replaced by voting on issues – democratically, well informed, electronic-voting on everything from household waste, to health care, to car production, to travel systems, to global warming, to taxation, to wealth distribution, to whether we should replicate the deadly 1918 “Spanish” flu virus, or go to war, or help the sick and the poor.

NEW EPOCH NEWS notes the key steps of progress and the resistances to entering the second phase.  We live in interesting times.

 

Home to http://www.noelhodson.com

 

SW2000 Telework StudiesSW2000 Intelligent Transport

Telework Transport Environment Economics

 

 

 

 

 

 

LETTER TO OUR LEADERS – MORE MESSING ABOUT WITH MONEY 2010. 5

MESSING ABOUT WITH MONEY 22 FEB 2010. 7

2010 - a pivotal year for mankind - climate-change, internet-freedom, & global banking – 3 feb 2010  8

who will control the internet? – 3 feb 2010. 10

how can the money-system and the real economy be reconciled? – 3 feb 2010. 12

will we drown? are the ice caps melting? – 3 feb 2010. 15

think globally, act locally – 3 feb 2010. 16

Stupid government abuse of the Information Society – UPDATED 16 JULY 09. 19

Bankers and banking – 10 JULY 09. 19

Cyberspace can still stop Emails – SME’s & the Internet - 9 JULY 2009. 20

Universal internet access - Power to the people – 6 May 2009. 22

Historic, momentous, epoch changing, world turning, inspiring, uplifting, hopeful… Words fail us - 5 November 2008. 23

Surveillance Crisis – Cyber War - 23 October 2008. 23

Financial Crisis – Part Two – 7 October 2008. 24

Financial Crisis – Saved from my radical self by judicious editing – 18 September 2008. 26

Give us back our money!– Letter to The Guardian newspaper - 15 September 2008. 27

It’s those pesky kids again, stealing valuable works of art - 25 July 08. 28

Mobile phones and cancer - 25 July 08. 29

Open letter to the Prime Minister. 16 July 08. 29

23 June 08 – Will the world’s thick-headed transport and energy planners ever get it?  31

7 April 08 – Famous Journalist liquidated?. 32

12 March 08 – Point and Counterpoint – Worried about the “Credit Collapse” ?. 34

19 February 08 – Capital repatriation flood begins with a trickle. 38

11 February 08 – Offshore Exiles – Repatriate, Repatriate, Repatriate. 39

11 February 08 – Kids on-line. 39

17 January 08 – Greenfield and Darwin. 39

11 October 07 – Breathless Big Brother/ Sister. 40

3 October 07 – Oxford Brooks & Big Bucks for Bus Owners. 40

25 September 07 - Teleworkers – one-third of UK workforce. 41

25 September 07 – The MIT $100 laptop gets to market. 41

17 September 07 – “IF WE DON’T PAY WORLD-CLASS SALARIES, THEY WILL TAKE THEIR SKILLS ABROAD!” SHOCK – HORROR! 41

19 AUG 07 – GLOBAL FINANCE – OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! 45

18 AUG 07 – PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF THE GLOBAL BANKS?. 46

18 AUG 07 – LEARN TO COUNT. 46

13 AUG 07 – FUNDAMENTAL REDSIGN OF TRANSPORT AND CARS. 47

2 JUL 07 – TAX FORCE & POVERTY. 48

13 FEB 07 – E-DEMOCRACY WILL BE TONY BLAIR’S LEGACY. 48

29 NOV 06 – THE SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL, OXFORD. 49

2 NOV 06 – THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY HAS ARRIVED IN THE UK - OFFICIAL. 51

2 OCT 06 – MICROSOFT CHALLENGED. 53

2 OCT 06 – "LET THEM EAT CAKE". & HEARD THIS WEEK AT A DINNER-PARTY …"IT IS THE NATURAL ORDER THAT 5% WILL ALWAYS OWN 90% OF THE WORLD" 53

11 AUG 06 – WIRED DEMOCRACY – AN HISTORIC PRECEDENT. 54

12 Jun 06 - British Sex on the Net – Time Magazine. 54

9 MAR 06 – PESKY PIRATES THREATEN BLUE MOVIES. 55

24 FEB 06 – $80M CASH STOLEN FROM THE BANK OF ENGLAND. 56

24 FEB 06 – SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL – PORNOGRAPHY FOR THE NANO-TECH GENERATION. 56

18 JAN 06 – BIG BROTHER SUED. 56

3 JAN 06 – US INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES INTRUSIONS CRITICISED. 57

3 JAN 06 – SPAMMERS CURBED?. 57

3 JAN 06 – MIT DEVELOP STACKABLE CARS. 57

3 JAN 06 – ENRON CASE THREATENS DIRECTORS WITH 25 YEARS. 58

7 DEC 05 – A diversion into Intelligent Design. 58

4 NOV 05 – BIG BROTHER in the workplace – A backward step. 59

4 NOV 05 – Microsoft invest in VOIP & “Live Office” 59

4 NOV 05 – Alt. Energy .com.. 59

24 OCT 05 – Time is running out, maybe – The oil fuel crisis. 60

19 OCT 05 – GALILEO is Watching You. 60

12 OCT 05 – Hands off our Internet! 61

10 OCT 05 – GOOGLE and free libraries. 61

7 OCT 05 – God guides George Bush. 61

7 OCT 05 – Youngsters make their own news. 62

7 OCT 05 - $100 laptops run on LINUX. 62

23 SEPT 05 - Tracking Offshore Funds. 62

5 SEPT 05 - Hurricane Katrina.  The Scrooge society. 64

26 AUG 05 - To google or not to google. 65

26 AUG 05 - Music files go legit’ 66

28 JUN 05 - E-Wars. 66

18 JUN 05 - E-Wars. 67

31 JUL 05 - The Future – Accurate social and scientific predictions. 68

17 MAY 05 - Brain Tumours from cordless & mobile phones debate continues. 68

14 MAY 05 - US Supreme Court to Rule on film and music controls. 68

10 MAY 05 - Feature Films on Mobile Phones. 68

24 APR 05 - Music Industry pur-sues schoolchildren swappers. 69

9 MAY 05 - Internet Pornography, Masturbation and Self-Abuse. 69

16 MAY 05 - Electronic Paper Screens. 71

16 MAR 05 - 344 Million customers a month. 71

15 MAR 05 - Men at Home Alone. 71

16 FEB 05 - Nokia and Microsoft Make Music. 71

16 FEB 05 - Who is listening? The Mafia or the Government?. 71

13 FEB O5 - BT channels money to fraudsters. 72

12 FEB 05 - More WEB Music Downloads. 72

3 FEB 05 - Spammers mock the US laws. 72

See top right this page  – News Archive Feb 04 – Dec 04 -   Spam busters, Cable & Wireless, Exodus and SAVVIS – Wed. 8th Sep 2004. 73

20 JAN 05 - VOD – PVR – DVD’s – NTL – BBC – ETAL. 73

20 JAN 05 - Super Fast Broadband. 73

7 JAN 05 - Carbon Trading. 73

7 JAN 05 - Cell-phones change body’s cells and genes. 74

1 JAN 05 - MELTDOWN. 74

The transport letter the Guardian dared not publish – Tuesday 21st December 2004. 74

Pirating films – Wednesday 15th December 2004. 75

Round-up – Thursday 25th November 2004. 76

SPAM fried by court – Monday 8th November 2004. 77

Banks overdose on spam phishing scams– Monday 8th November 2004. 77

WorldCom directors in Court – Monday 8th November 2004. 77

Pirate Movies – The big players start a war – Thursday 28th October 2004. 78

Drowning in Ignorance – Friday 22nd October 2004. 78

EPICUS – Embryonic E-Democracy & Money Laundering – Friday 22nd October 2004. 79

 

NEW EPOCH  NEWS: ARCHIVES   FEB04-DEC04   AUG03-FEB04   JUN02-AUG03

 

 

 

 

LETTER TO OUR LEADERS – MORE MESSING ABOUT WITH MONEY 2010

 

 

Dear Nick Clegg,

 

SHAKING UP DEMOCRACY & FIXING GLOBAL FINANCE

 

I posted this letter to you at 10 Downing Street. In case the paper version doesn't reach you - here is a copy by EMAIL.

 

Best wishes

 

Noel HODSON

16 Brookside OXFORD OX3 7PJ

 

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FAO - Guardian newspaper , BBC Radio News, Time Magazine, Dean Baker - Center for Economic & Policy Research, Congressman Brad Sherman (by mail), Mary Schapiro Chair SEC, Shelia Bair, Chair FDIC, Elizabeth Warren, TARP (by mail), David Cameron PM, Nick Clegg MP, Rt Hon Andrew Smith MP; President Obama.

 

19 May 2010

 

Commodities, Currencies, Derivatives - Open letter to UK and US financial legislators & regulators.

 

Time Magazine, The Guardian newspaper (UK) and most media, report that government agencies around the world are yet again agonising over designing controls on casino-banking speculation and on the vast waves of "private" capital that sweep around the globe, playing with and destabilizing national currencies - which is the dizzy pinnacle of speculation. This private capital is mostly offshore and is part of the $13 trillion defined by the OECD-Paris and Christian Aid as held in tax-havens. Last week the NYSE was spooked by computer-cascades of micro-second auto-transactions, which are built into the trading systems of deranged speculators. 

 

It is now accepted by most intelligent economists that 90% of market trades are merely gambling and "have no intrinsic value for society".   It may also be slowly dawning on economists and experts that 90% of the gross revenues of Wall Street, The City and other major financial centres, simply add to the costs of the commodities we all must consume; they are vast siphons of wealth from the pockets of ordinary citizens - feeding insatiable tapeworms embedded in the guts of the Real-Economy.  

 

Recommendations:

 

1) DELIVERY: The simple solution to incontinent gambling on public markets is to make all margin/on-credit trading illegal and insist upon delivery, settlement and stock holding for a reasonable time. For example; in the Cocoa (beans) market there are about six main real buyers per country who mostly manufacture chocolate, who take delivery of tons of cocoa beans. All the other transactions and derivatives are gambles which drive up the manufacturing costs and drive down the payments to growers.  The unearned profits made by gamblers drive up inflation for all and deplete the Real-Economy.  Having a lorry dump 200 tons of Cocoa beans on their doorstep, beans which they must process or physically hold for, say, 15 days, will sort out the real from the ephemeral. Equally, short-sellers must complete their contracts and deliver real goods.  This sane principle is equally valid for corporate stocks and shares and most "financial instruments and derivatives" - where the holding period should be at least six-months.  Compulsive gamblers would then quit financial centres and migrate to Las Vegas - where margin trading (depositing a small fraction of the contract cost) is not encouraged.   

 

2) OFFSHORE TRILLIONS: All debtor nations, led by the US, could pay off all their deficits if the tsunami of $13 trillion "private" capital that sweeps the world looking for another quick-buck, causing property and other bubbles wherever it strikes land, were to be repatriated and taxed in the country of origin. For example; seek the views of the 88.9% of Greeks who are increasingly angry about poor Greeks being saddled with their nation's deficits, while the international super-rich play poker with their currency.  Form teams of specialist tax-investigators and offer them 10% of all funds and taxes repatriated.  

 

3) ON THE RECORD: Require all financial companies, including Madoff, Enron & Parmalat, to file a daily balance sheet and trading account in a prescribed format. Funny-money bookkeeping would stand-out and alert enquiries. All the accumulated balance sheets, categorised, would act as a set of barometers for the health of the money-economy.  Jail crooked auditors and credit-assessors.

 

4) BUCK TRADITION:  Historically, it has been the absolute right of the already rich to screw the unwashed, godless, persistently and deservedly poor and to steal their meagre savings and homes, about every twelve years or so.  Some national politicians may even have been persuaded to tacitly sell out their entire countries by - say - pushing up base-rates to unprecedented highs for seven years, enabling foreign depositors to double their bank balances, risk-free, without getting out of bed in the mornings; Or, for example, by declaring bloody wars to stimulate immense, unaudited flows of tax-dollars ("only little people pay taxes") through opaque channels to feed even fatter tapeworms, and thus deplete the home economy.  On retirement such compliant politicians might be pleased and very, very surprised to find their own off-shore, tax-free Trusts flooded with donated dollars - simply for being such nice, lucky, sun-tanned guys.  Break these 17th Century social traditions, with a five year post-office cooling off period and severe penalties for such revolving-door deals - to be assumed guilty till proven innocent if the politician's national pension is supplemented by strangely generous gifts and receipts.    

 

The World and the next generations are watching and relying on you.

 

Yours truly

 

Noel Hodson

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

 

 

 

 

 

 

MESSING ABOUT WITH MONEY 22 FEB 2010

 

 

 

22 FEB 2010 Time Magazine

In saying that Japan, India and China owe their economic success to following the American model, away from big government, Michael Schuman (Essay, TIME, March 1 2010) is blindsided to the long-termism of Asia - planning and investing for generations ahead - compared to the short termism of our "free" market model, which is now so extreme that 90% of transactions look less than one minute ahead. Addicted gamblers, who use our vital markets as casinos, have wrecked the money system several times.  All margin trading should be banned and all investments should be for a minimum of six months, fully paid for and delivered.  I think the US system needs a dose of big government to restore sanity and to avoid major crashes occurring at decreasing intervals.   

 

Noel Hodson

Oxford UK

 

 

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3 Dec 09 Guardian Newspaper

 

Bankers argue that bonuses are critical to retaining "investment" bankers. These specialists, most natural mathematicians who be-dazzle and baffle their colleagues, make and lose vast amounts by gambling, second by second, on futures, commodities, currencies, shares and indices. They use our normal bank assets, such as savings accounts, as stakes. Their activities have been deemed to have "no social or economic value".  In fact, such speculation drives up global prices, distorts reality and periodically collapses the world's money-economy; economists cannot yet count their total 2008/09 losses. The bonuses are often siphoned to tax havens. Gambling is as addictive as drugs and alcohol; like most addicts, these gamblers will do anything to sustain their habit. We should bless Mr Darling for finding a trigger to have them all emigrate, taking their unique skills as far away as possible.   

 

 

2010 - a pivotal year for mankind - climate-change, internet-freedom, & global banking – 3 feb 2010

 

This year will witness strenuous battles for control of our climate policies, our money and our internet. These 3 vital elements, among others, are under savage and determined attack as the electronic-revolution disturbs and discomfits the primitive, established habits of the intelligent ape. So far, mankind has applied apelike tribal and gang rules, often violent, to take everything and anything we desired, regardless of consequences.  Now we, the self-acclaimed pinnacle of God’s creation, are being obliged to grow-up and, as President Obama quoted in his inauguration speech, “It is time to put away childish things”.  No overindulged, overweight, greedy, thoughtless, selfish, narcissistic, physically powerful teenager wants to be initiated into becoming a responsible adult human-being.  I believe this year, 2010, is a pivotal year for us. Will we try to do ‘Business as Usual’, or will we move into the era of intelligent-co-operation? Thanks to the internet and the world-wide-web and Wikipedia, we all have the required information and we all can see the global picture – if we choose to look.  Three further quotes to take time to reflect on, “An Elder is one who pre-considers the consequences of actions for the next seven generations” and, “We hate to have to think – thinking uses more energy than any other human activity.” And, from another USA president, President George Bush Senior, “The internet means there are no longer any secrets – privacy is dead.” – Or, to put it another way – There is nowhere to hide.               

 

In an era of almost limitless automated, mechanised, computerised productive capacity; the wealthiest Real-Economy ever, we must learn to share, to cooperate …or else. We live in interesting times. I think 2010 will be a memorable, historic year for mankind.

 

Below – is news of the three elements, as we enter the New Year.

 


 

 

who will control the internet? – 3 feb 2010

 

From Oxford Institute for the Internet - OII

18 January 2010

 

I would like to draw your attention to a Policy Briefing written by our Visiting Associate Tony Wales, former General Counsel of AOL International, responsible for the company's worldwide legal affairs outside the US. It looks at socio-legal and regulatory issues arising from the UK Government's Digital Britain report (June 2009) and Digital Economy Bill, which includes detailed provisions for enforcement action against unlawful filesharing (where Internet users share music, video and other entertainment content without the permission of the copyright holders) by imposing new policing obligations on ISPs and other online intermediaries.  - Bill Dutton, Director  http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/  

 

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To OII. Thanks for your thorough briefing on the Digital Economy Bill.

 

If Lord Mandelson and the music and film industry do succeed in their crazed, world-domination objective of obliging ISPs to spy and report on all 2 billion Internet users, allegedly to stop a few children and impoverished adults swapping products, which the distributors lack the competence to protect; will OII then steer its followers to the new alternative internet routes and hardware peripherals, which will spring-up, free from government, business and advertisers supervision? Noel Hodson

 

PS - Unauthorised copying or sharing of my website and texts in whole or in part will be reported to the Peter Mandelson IPR Revolving-Door Media Trust (Bahamas) Inc. and result in Oxford University losing all internet-connections, paying large fines and having its officers imprisoned.

 

 

LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN:

Comic Swaps & Copyright 23 NOV 09 - As a boy, did Lord Peter Mandelson never swap his Dandy for a Beano, his Superman for a gob-stopper, or show his Titbits to a pal? Did swapping wreck the publishing industry? Now he wants to track and criminalise 2 billion internet users, who may or may not copy and pass on content. The simple remedy for the music, film and Murdoch news providers is to get off the net; withdraw their precious content. Or should millions of internet users retaliate by suing all media companies for their use of plagiarised and copied content? This is a Pandora's box that Peter should not open - unless, of course, he is being guided by the hand of God.  - Noel Hodson (Mr)

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19 Nov 09

 

Email to: Mr Rupert Murdoch.

 

CHARGING FOR ON-LINE CONTENT

 

Part of my business is forecasting the future of the Internet. I also advise businesses on novel solutions. If you use this information, please pay me a reasonable, commensurate fee - or - publicise my novels; see the address-block below. 

 

 1) I pay an annual subscription to New Scientist. They post me a weekly magazine and give me full access to an excellent website. This business model should work for The Times and other quality or specialist newspapers. 

 

2) VIP FILTERS - As the Internet grows and adds other alphabets, many, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are designing "intuitive" search engines.  They recognise there is a pressing need for VIP-FILTERS to narrow search results down to the top 100, rather than e.g. "Email Rupert Murdoch - 2,560,000 results".  News Corp does not have to wait for the new technology. Your teams/or machines can review and feed VIP DATA to subscribers by web-searching, archiving popular, intelligent information, and interposing a NEWSCORP search engine, which becomes the first search the (VIP) subscribers try. This turns today's media business model on its head. You copy free information off the web, repackage it, vet it and sell it on high-cost subscription to elite customers in particular niche markets, in specialist languages if needed (including the arts, sports, finance etc).  Robert Maxwell did a similar judo-throw on the Oxbridge academics when his Pergammon Press cheaply acquired rights to their rare research papers and sold them globally at £500 a time to scientific libraries - he was never forgiven. 

Subscription Sales:  Yes, you have to invest in a sales campaign - but you have an edge via your media businesses - and via existing niche-group viewers and readers.

 

2a) VIP-MOBILE hand held screens.  I am reasonably sure there is also an existing market for ultra-high quality, Sony-book-reader-size, mobile hand held screens with good sound and picture quality (good enough for e.g. Opera (n.b. The Met now broadcasts live) - Ballet - Snooker - Football etc).  Allied to the quality data from VIP FILTERS, owning such a mobile phone would be a high level status symbol. The technology parts exist but you need a 15 year old nerd to pull it together for you.  NEWSCORP-VIP-MOBILE would quickly be the top-end mobile-phone-internet-search of choice in many diverse niche-markets - say, £100 a month subscription.  From there it would spread downwards.

 

Almost daily, I search for reliable statistics and calculators - make a STATS-VIP-FILTER for me.  Yours sincerely - Noel Hodson

 

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how can the money-system and the real economy be reconciled? – 3 feb 2010

 

 

26 January 2010 To S Lanman, Journalist. Bloomberg.net

 

"The standard Taylor Rule would have recommended that the Fed raise the rate to a range of 7 percent to 8 percent through the first three quarters of 2008, “a policy decision that probably would not have garnered much support among monetary specialists,” Bernanke said. A variation of the rule used by the Fed focused on anticipated rates of inflation, not actual rates, he said. "

 

Dear Mr Lanman -  Stealing from the poor to give to the rich, via the Base Rate, was most effective under Margaret Thatcher 1979-1989, when Sterling cash-rich depositors doubled their money every 7 years, risk free, without having to get out of bed. Wealthy international Americans must have really wanted to thank Mrs Thatcher as our property crashed, businesses went bust, families lost everything and we suffered the highest UK unemployment ever.  My engineering business was paying 23% on a fully personally secured trading overdraft - until we too went bust. And the cash-rich still didn't get out of bed.  In 2010, in the UK, every 1/4 percent upward shift in interest rates siphons £2.25B from the poor to the rich. The Taylor Rule, with a 7% increase would amount to at least £63B per annum of wealth transfer - or theft.  It is my last, life's ambition to see the wealth transfer go the other way - from the rich to the poor.  You should advise, via your News Channel, investing in guillotines and knitting needles.

 

And move to higher ground. – Regards - Noel Hodson 

 

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PUBLISHED IN THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER - UK

3 Dec 09

 

Bankers argue that bonuses are critical to retaining "investment" bankers. These specialists, most natural mathematicians who be-dazzle and baffle their colleagues, make and lose vast amounts by gambling, second by second, on futures, commodities, currencies, shares and indices. They use our normal bank assets, such as savings accounts, as stakes. Their activities have been deemed to have "no social or economic value".  In fact, such speculation drives up global prices, distorts reality and periodically collapses the world's money-economy; economists cannot yet count their total 2008/09 losses. The bonuses are often siphoned to tax havens. Gambling is as addictive as drugs and alcohol; like most addicts, these gamblers will do anything to sustain their habit. We should bless Mr Darling for finding a trigger to have them all emigrate, taking their unique skills as far away as possible.   -  Noel Hodson (Mr)

 

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LETTER TO THE DAILY TELEGRAPH NEWSPAPER - UK

17 November 2009

 

Sir - Defenders of City bankers, including I fear, parts of your 17 November editorial, and several readers' Letters, seem to be blindsided to the trampling herds of elephants in the room. The City lost so many billions of clients', savers' & pensioners' money in 2008/2009 that our cleverest economists cannot yet give a total, other than that globally to date $14 Trillion ($14,000,000,000,000) of tax dollars has been transfused into the system. The population, saddled with decades of new national debt, is justifiably enraged and would gladly throw the culprits to the dogs - not pay them to stay in office.  - Noel Hodson - Oxford

 

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LETTERS TO THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER - UK

The Toxic Homeless - 13 NOV 09 - UN Rapporteur Raquel Rolnik (...America's housing shame - 13 Nov 09) met with dispossessed LA families, representing the feckless, reckless poor, who Wall St. and The City claim wrecked the global system by defaulting on loan-shark contracts and triggering toxic debt; so far needing $14 trillion tax-dollars to patch it up.  $14 trillion would pay-off 56 million $250,000 mortgages - half the homes in America. Or, coincidentally, $14 trillion is about the amount the OECD and Christian Aid estimate is held in tax-havens. Which is the most likely cause of today's global national deficits? Should we punish the poor or claw-back the offshore assets? - Noel Hodson (Mr)

 

27 OCT 09 - Please deliver this heavily capitalised, expletive message, via Letters, to City pundit David Buik, of BGC Partners, who complains about proposed Tory limitations on bonuses (Osborne angers City with plan to curb cash bonuses - Guardian 27 Oct 09). He says "... (Osborne) is far too rigid if he wants London to maintain its presence at the top of the financial tree". 

 

Hey, David ! Wake Up ! do we have to hit you with a brick! The City of London is at the bottom of the financial tree - wallowing in the mud. Maybe you missed the global meltdown and the massive government bail-outs. You and your pals just lost ALL the !!*frigging!!***  London City profits, gouged out in bonuses over the past 25 years. You have lost billions and billions and billions and billions - hundreds and hundreds of billions - of our hard earned UK money - not your own *!***!!**g money …but everyone else's. Millions of pensions have been decimated. You have lost so much of our money - you can't even count it all!  If HM Government (the taxpayers) removes its Bank Deposits Guarantees and daily injections of Quantitative Easing - all the City banks, brokers, wheelers, dealers and speculators would disintegrate. Our currency would collapse. It would be a hellish, violent social chaos.  Never mind having more! You should pay back all the past 25 years of bonuses, £300 to £500 billion, siphoned off under false pretences; and you should earn the Minimum Wage until it is all repaid!  You have made London a laughing stock as a proficient financial centre.  We can only pray that government can repair the immense damage. Televised public beheadings might assuage some of the nations' justifiable rage.  In the meantime please emigrate and take your unique skills to where you imagine they will be appreciated; try Rockall.

 

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will we drown? are the ice caps melting? – 3 feb 2010

 

(Un)Settled Science - Hole in the AGWzone Layer!

by James P. Hogan  'james@jamesphogan.com'

     

January 14, 2010

 

Dear James Hogan, 

 

I have followed the climate-change and extreme-weather debate for more than 10 years - and I do recall the many scares you refer to; such as the numerous terminal threats to mankind (scientifically) analyzed in the 1960's in The Doomsday Book by Financial Times science journalist Gordon Ratray-Taylor.

 

It seems to me that the present Who-Dunnit squabble is a science-village gossip diversion from the main questions - Are the Ice-Caps Melting? …And… Can we Slow the Process?

 

The weather fluctuations, including unusual cold spells, were predicted at a meeting I attended about 12 years ago at the Climate Change Study Unit, Oxford; through melting North Pole ice adding extra masses of cold water to the oceans.

 

I don't think it matters a tinker's cuss whether or not it is anthropogenic - what matters, if the ice is melting - as seen on TV -  is, can we fix it.

 

In the meantime - read my novel, Over the Rainbow, move to higher ground and move your money on-shore. 

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/novels-table-15FEB07.htm

 

Thanks for an interesting paper. 

 

Noel Hodson

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To The London Evening Standard

8 Dec 09

 

Three climate-change economic myths need correcting:

(1) We can't tackle the additional work: The UK could work 133B hours a year, we actually work 37B hours. There is 72% spare capacity to tackle the crisis.

(2) It will cost the world economy a lot: On the contrary it will create useful work, economic activity and extra wealth around the globe.  What we really mean is "I might have to change my income-stream and leisure activities".

(2) Who dun' it? Mankind or Nature? :  It does not matter a tinker's cuss who or what caused it.  Are the ice caps and glaciers melting? Will it cause disruption, deaths and chaos? Can we fix it?   

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

*********************************************

 

 

think globally, act locally – 3 feb 2010

 

 

Sebastian Johnson, Oxford Strategic Partnership, c/o Oxford City Council, Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates, Oxford OX1 1BX

21 Jan 2010

 

Dear Mr Johnson,

 

One of my colleagues has brought the OSP to my attention. I have looked through the 2008-12 aims, which are worthy and ambitious.

 

Twenty-five years ago, we corresponded with Lord Weinstock at GEC, for a year or so, discussing integrated interlinking transport for Oxford, from electric bicycles, to pedestrian street conveyors, to City-cars to heavy freight systems - all to be manufactured at the Cowley factories.  Today, I am focusing my efforts on a pollution free, underground and CO2 saving goods transport system, Foodtubes.

 

On my local, Headington, transport front, you may like to consider adding for discussion the attached idea for the John Radcliffe Hospital - and perhaps for other similarly large centres of traffic movements.  In my view the JR developers ought to foot the bill for relieving traffic jams.  I would also recommend a single, free, hop-on-and-off bus service from Oxford Centre up and down the London Road to the A40 Park & Ride - as frequent as necessary - to eliminate the queues of rival buses, sometimes empty, competing for bus stops and causing gridlock.  - Best wishes - Noel Hodson

 

NB – The £33M cost of the underpass would be recovered in 2 years from saving the time and fuel of commuters.

 

 

 

The JR-Road Tunnel

 

1 Dec 09

 

As winter gridlock freezes traffic on the London Road, from St Clements to the Ring road, a proposal to link the JR Hospital car parks to the Oxford ring-road resurfaces. 

 

Local firm, SW2000 Intelligent Transport, claims that delays to the 10,000 vehicle movements a day, in and out of the JR, costs the JR staff, ambulances and visitors 15 minutes and an extra litre of fuel a day; 10,000 gallons a week; an extra 19 million gallons of toxic exhaust a week; losing £25,000 in productive time every work-day. Add the other non-JR road users and this traffic congestion costs the community £18 million a year in time & fuel;  plus the impact of toxic exhaust gases, which endanger health and increase global-warming.  

 

The JR should build its own road tunnel link to the ring-road; that is what ring-roads are for.  Oxford's traffic planners could be inspired by Switzerland's visionary 35 mile long, 150 mph, double rail tunnel under the Alps, being built this year to banish freight vehicles from Swiss roads; and by the dozens of long tunnels on the Italian Autostradas; or, nearer to home: by the 249 miles of Victorian tunnels built for the London Tube; by the prize winning 31 miles Channel Tunnel built 250 feet deep beneath the sea; and by the 2,300 metres, air-side-road-tunnel (ART) built in one-year under Heathrow, in 2008. 

 

 To bore a 1/3rd mile - 550 metres - traffic tunnel, from the Ring Road to the JR car-parks will cost about £33 million; which is less than two years of the costs imposed on the travellers and the besieged residents of Marston and Headington. The tunnel would be a low-cost, hugely valuable, permanent investment.  

 

The JR-Tunnel can readily be built with modern boring machines, as used at Heathrow, in less than a year.

 

The long-term value, for ambulance crews, for sick patients, for JR staff and visitors, of having rapid, direct access - and of reducing daily traffic jams for the whole community - is incalculable.   

 

END

 

Stupid government abuse of the Information Society – UPDATED 16 JULY 09

 

16 July 09

 

Popular, successful UK authors and illustrators of children’s books who regularly visit schools are refusing invitations because they now must be computer registered as Child-Workers, pay £65 a year to the Home Office for a licence and be vetted as potential paedophiles and child abusers.  The authors, including Phillip Pullman, say the rules are insulting and create fear between children and adults.  The Home Office says the £65 will enable even more intrusive checks on unblemished, blameless, helpful citizens.  

 

*****************************************

14 July 09

To: Counsellor Jiang Fan (Commerce), Chinese Embassy, LONDON

 

Dear Counsellor,

 

Electronic Surveillance

 

Over the past 3 months, I have read media and science reports saying that computers, telephones and other communication electronics, which are made in China, are being fitted with computer-chips (hardware) and programmes (software) to track the owners' and users' telecommunications. Please send me a list of these bugged machines so that I can make sure I do not buy any device, made in China, which could potentially track and report my use of it.

 

Yours truly, Noel HODSON

  

 

 

*************************************

Bankers and banking – 10 JULY 09

 

Letter to the Guardian - 8 July 09

 

Alistair Darling and the Treasury are not addressing three monstrous and dangerous faults in the system (This mortgage can damage your wealth - Treasury's bank reforms propose risk alerts - Guardian 7 July 09).  First, casino banking must be confined as it was, to individual crazed gamblers risking their own money, not shareholders', depositors' and taxpayers' money. Banks should invest not gamble, with a minimum holding period of, say, six months between shares and commodities transactions. Second, some credit card and personal loans charges rack up to 50%. Loan sharking should be capped at 10% above Base Rate, subject to long prison sentences and fines.  Third, it is alarming for UK savers and the City of London's reputation that while the US authorities send Bernard Madoff to prison for 150 years, for losing £31 billion of savers' funds, the UK sends the ennobled Sir Fred Goodwin, held to be responsible for losing £28 billion of RBS savers' funds, to Monte Carlo to enjoy a tax free pension of £450,000 a year for the next 40 years.  

 

Cyberspace can still stop Emails – SME’s & the Internet - 9 JULY 2009.

 

'cristina.matinez@ec.europa.eu'; 'gerald.santucci@ec.europa.eu.'  

 

This email couldn’t get through to the European Commission.

 

3rd email send - maybe the internet will work this time.

2nd email send - Cristina Matinez seems to be off-line.

Would Mr Santucci's PA please forward this note to the authors of the draft paper on SME's:

20090708-fines-position-paper-draft2 - Public Consultation

 

9 JULY 09

 

20090708-fines-position-paper-draft2 - Public Consultation

 

Dear Ms Matinez,

 

I advised UK SME's on finances for 25 years; promoted Teleworking for 12-14 years; launched the first teleworked business-expansion-service (BES) franchise in Europe (Morton Hodson & Co Ltd) and I am currently promoting a CO2 saving, alternative, freight transport infrastructure, "Foodtubes".

 

I have the above draft paper and recommend further thought might be given by the authors to:

 

1) AUTO-COMPLIANCE - If launching a new small enterprise today, little has changed in 30 years. SME's realistically, continually complain about the cost of "red tape" or compliance with regulations. The Internet could carry out all compliance, registration and reporting tasks, transaction by transaction, and enable all SME's to automatically set aside taxes etc. 

I proposed such an automated one-book-entry system in 1990, called The Electric Cheque Book.  It would save significant amounts of productive time and large direct financial costs. It would provide highly accurate statistics on all SME business activity. What was difficult with 1990 's technology, could now easily be done.

 

2) CONFIDENTIALITY - "Forget Privacy - Privacy is Dead" - said the first President Bush (Senior) about the launch of the Internet and the WWW. However, today's SME's do need to know that the Advanced Telecommunications they are being encouraged to use are private and confidential. Last month, the Chinese government insisted that computer manufacturers build in tracking, spying and reporting hardware and software - and this month the UK learns that newspaper journalists have easy access to all our mobile phone calls.  The EC should publish a weekly list of ISP's, telephone-companies, tools and software that still preserve confidentiality. e.g. I will never knowlingly buy another computer or telephone that has Chinese installed components. 

 

3) VIRTUAL CURRENCY - A large percentage of SME's trade is done with other SME's. The Internet needs to provide a currency that enables such business-to-business trades. Given the present banking chaos and the complexity of bank loans and financing, such a virtual currency will eventually lead to a new banking system and the creation of a global business currency; this should be the "Business-Euro" and it should exclude all previous bad financial practices, cartels, greed, loan-sharking, casino gamblers, etc. The costs of operating such a virtual money system would be a fraction of traditional banking costs. 

 

4) RE-DEFINE PROFITS & LOSSES - In the long term and in contrast to paragraph 2 above; the Internet does open all doors to and provides previously well guarded secret knowledge about capital ownership, trading margins, business models, pay structures and executive rewards. It is inevitable that such information will become accessible to all.  The EC should create a socially-responsible new definition of Profits and Losses for pension, taxes, environmental, employment, wealth-sharing and all other purposes. The presently applied legal definitions as expressed and used by governments, tax-collectors, accountants, auditors and lawyers, come to us from the 18th Century based on 18th Century politics and philosophies. It is high time the definitions, the accepted protocols, were updated for the global Internet era, taking into account social responsibility and eliminating the exploitation of human and scarce resources. 

 

Please circulate this note to all relevant persons.

 

With regards

 

Noel Hodson      

 

 

 

Universal internet access - Power to the people – 6 May 2009.

 

It seems that the Information Society is thriving and has not yet been diminished by censorship - So far so good.  But we should be alert to the numerous threats from would-be censors of every shape, size, hue, religion, political belief, greed and insanity; and we should be rapidly developing internet protocols and delivery technologies that will protect everyone’s right to share and use the network.

 

In the year of 2008 (taken from a New Scientist article 2 May 2009)

 

210,000,000,000 (210B) emails per day were sent.

78% of Emails were spam.

 

Google searches 1 trillion web pages. (1,000,000,000,000)

 

ALL USERS – number approx 1.58B via computers (mostly fixed telephone)

                          Plus 1B via mobile phones

 

China              253,000,000 internet users -19% of the population

US                   220,000,000 internet users -72.5% of pop.

Japan               94,000,000 internet users  -74% of pop.

Brazil               67,500,000 internet users  -26% of pop.

India                60,000,000 internet users   - 4% of pop.

Germany         52,500,000 internet users  -64% of pop.

UK                   43,200,000 internet users  -69% of pop.

 

92% of the population in Greenland have internet access.

 

Internet growth is 50% per annum.

 

On-line advertising spending - $65,000,000,000  ($65B) globally.

 

Danger of Hi-jacking:  The use of Non-Latin alphabets, including Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic could divide the internet if such alphabets lead to the creation of national or regional website directories which are not accessible to the central ICANN directory – and thus would not be searchable by existing methods.  This could enable regional government control.   

 

POWER & ENERGY – Bobbie Johnson writing from San Francisco for The Guardian – 4th May 2009 - tells us that a single Google search uses as much energy as driving a car one mile (really?) and that US data centres used 61 billion kilowatts of power in 2006 (what does that convert to in litres of diesel?), enough to supply the whole of the UK’s power for 2 months and/or 1.5% of electricity used in the USA. Google has invested $2.3B into infrastructure in 2008 (presumably to supply electric power and use less of it). And Microsoft engineers are also on the case. However, my opinion is that the energy used sending an email is a tiny, tiny fraction of delivering a physical letter – and that internet searches and data preservation use a minuscule fraction of the equivalent physical libraries and physical searches of libraries.  Maybe we should mothball libraries and give access only over the internet – to save the planet.  

 

Historic, momentous, epoch changing, world turning, inspiring, uplifting, hopeful… Words fail us - 5 November 2008.

 

Senator Barack Obama today is President-Elect of the USA. 

 

Whatever happens tomorrow; this extraordinary, transforming event truly announces the second epoch.

It is so unexpected that Microsoft’s spell checker doesn’t recognise his name.

 

 

Surveillance Crisis – Cyber War - 23 October 2008.

 

The UK newspaper, the Guardian, today runs an editorial “Surveillance – Data with destiny” and expresses concern that the UK government is debating if it should permanently record all telephone calls, emails and internet-searches to protect us all from terrorists. The article asks whether such intrusive and personal records would ever be abused. Doh! 

 

Most computer savvy people are convinced that all communications are already being recorded; in the UK, by interception and analysing centres such as Cheltenham GCHQ. It is likely that all computers are built to keep a hidden permanent record of everything they do, which experts can recover. Think how much data can be saved in seconds to a flash-memory stick.

 

THE FUTURE:  So the “proposed” laws will merely ratify the existing status quo. How will angry and younger people react to such total surveillance?  They will wage cyber-war. The seeds of civil disobedience are already evident. The inescapable computer law of ‘Rubbish in – Rubbish out’ will sabotage the governments’ best efforts to track everyone all the time. The integrity and value of the data relies on accurate identity and location. Hoodies, youngsters on the streets, hide their heads from CCTV cameras – the next stage will be masks.  Petty crooks clone or steal credit-cards and financial identities, use and discard them. There is a lively internet trade in cloned number plates to disguise vehicles; the favourite numbers belong to politicians, judges and celebrities. Free and pay-for software, which hides computer internet identities, abounds on the internet; some of it may even work. People buy, borrow or steal other’s mobile phones, use and discard them. There is probably software that hides telephone number identities – or if not, there soon will be. Traffic cameras photograph license plates (cloned) and drivers’ faces; (masked drivers). To overcome these deceptions, government will have all vehicles carry embedded chips; all music and film downloads will be reported by embedded chips. The kids will re-program the chips or simply dig them out and throw them away. Clever kids will dispose of all spy-ware in their cars and computers – or steal or swap other people’s machines. The ubiquitous CCTV cameras are vulnerable to crude physical attack and as they are put on taller poles and buildings, the kids will find ways to disrupt the cameras with electrical signals – or catapults. Gangs of otherwise compliant citizens will flood systems with false data.  Otherwise law abiding citizens will habitually give erroneous information when form filling.  Computer centres will be attacked and wrecked. Outlaw internet systems will be created that are not monitored. Do you seriously doubt that a percentage of one billion pissed-off internet users couldn’t do these things? Chaos will reign supreme.

 

As the Nazi Party proved beyond doubt; when the State oppresses people relentlessly, the terrible irresistible government pressure and force eventually confronts, or perhaps it creates, the utterly indestructible diamond intelligence and spirit of the oppressed – and it is the State machine that is ultimately smashed. 

 

The pity is that much of the data being gathered for benevolent purposes is of great value to society, but revolutionary cyber warriors will not discriminate.  Will governments learn to act intelligently?

 

Financial Crisis – Part Two – 7 October 2008.

 

On the day that the town sized population of Iceland (250,000 souls) nationalise a bank and are financially ranked willy-nilly alongside China and America by hysterical journalists; markets continue to crash, pundits to pontificate, bankers to grieve, global politicians to dither and super-rich city executives to fearfully hide their ill-gotten gains. Mr Richard Fuld, CEO of wrecked bankers, Lehman Brothers, with only a slight and modest hesitation, yesterday told US Senators that he felt “horrible” about letting down everyone who had lost fortunes, but, Yes, he felt OK about the $500 million he had siphoned out for himself between 2000 and 2008. Death is too easy for such a modern Midas.

 

This crisis is an Information Society issue. We cannot properly communicate and trade globally in milliseconds if spivs, gangsters, loan-sharks, bribed officials and bent accountants and lawyers install themselves at key points in the system like parasitical tape-worms, deliberately spread Disinformation and, under the obscurantist cover of gobbledegook numbers, they fiddle the books, create false back-to-back transactions and siphon off billions and trillions of the people’s common-wealth – without being taxed.

 

It is worth repeating, to counter the many hired PR, media, Wall Street and City lackeys who parrot-fashion report otherwise - This crisis is NOT CAUSED BY US MORTGAGE DEFAULTERS. If missed monthly home loan payments were the basis of it all, billionaires President Bush and Senator John McCain would have stepped up like good citizens, put their hands in their own very deep, well lined Trust Fund pockets and personally made up the arrears of the poorest in society, to save the world from meltdown – perhaps with a little help from the US Treasury.  A few million dollars a month, supporting home owners in difficulties, would have made the underlying assets strong and non-toxic.  The root cause is actually the 28 years of Regan/Thatcher economics, monetarism and unrestrained manic gambling, feeding gargantuan amounts tax-free to the rich while freezing pay and support for the poor – and fiddling the books to hide the damage being done to gouged corporate balance-sheets.  It should all be clawed back.

 

Western governments, unthinkingly anxious about escalating credit card and mortgage consumerism (by the poor), saw in the alleged sub-prime crisis an opportunity to screw and make an example of some of them; young first-home families and poor late-home buyers, all with large mortgages, via the loan-sharking, boiled frog syndrome; frightening them into prudence and frugality with a property crash and homelessness; without having to hike up base rates and thus stoke up inflation, as Thatcher did to crash the UK economy and create 4 million unemployed. In disseminating for a year the frightening rumours that homes would plummet in value, the governments did not realise what destructive demons their fanciful middle-class doom mongering would unleash.  

 

If only they had properly audited their own nations’ transactions and verified them with global comparisons. The world must learn to count accurately. This fundamental neglect has not been due to lack of computing power. Money is nothing more than a reliable book-keeping system. It has been badly abused and is no longer an accurate account.

 

How can the Information Society fix the global system that is bust?  

 

1) Nationalise ALL financial institutions – world-wide.

2) Properly audit and publish all corporate and national balance sheets; eventually include all businesses.

3) Publish all the balance-sheets every day and explain trans-border variances and sinister siphons. Cap fat-cat salaries.

4) Create a single-global-currency and oblige everyone to convert all their assets.

5) During the conversion process – confiscate and repatriate all proceeds of crime, fraud and tax-evasion.

6) During the conversion process – recoup all “City Bonuses” of the past 25 years and examine their legality.

7) Create a global Domesday Book of all significant assets and who owns them. Start with Land, mapped onto GOOGLE EARTH.

8) Convict and punish all fraudsters – whoever their friends are.

9) Banish all speculators from all vital markets – energy, money, water, food, homes, air, metals, shares etc.

10) Record all the above on computers and publish daily on the web.

11) Reform all political systems as E-Democracies – voting on issues, not for leaders or Parties.

12) Introduce a global minimum wage of $10 an hour; sufficient to support a modest home loan.

 

These actions are radical; but lesser interventions and structures will not suffice.  

 

Financial Crisis – Saved from my radical self by judicious editing – 18 September 2008.

 

THIS IS WHAT I WROTE:

 

17 Sept 08 – Excuses, Excuses, Excuses - The continuing, if not escalating, USA and UK financial crisis is repeatedly punctuated in the media by failed brokers & bankers and their press-officers blaming it all on the fall in property prices. But it is illogical that the booming real-economy should wreak havoc in the money-economy. The reality is that massive amounts of our cash have been siphoned off - much of it via tax-havens - to enable global gambling in impenetrable derivatives, beyond the understanding of senior executives, by unsupervised crack-heads; which has so confused the regulators, auditors and the corporate world that few, if any, understand the banks' Balance Sheets and have lost all track of the relationships between the real-economy and the money-economy.  The alleged property "crash" is a tiny percentage of housing stock being auctioned off. 95% of property is not in forced sale and it retains its (real) value to the owners & tenants. And when traditional banking returns, in a month or so, property, land, factories, machines and other real assets in the real world, used and needed by real people, will still be the banks' main securities for loans. It is the banks' loss of liquidity through once illegal gambling that has depleted mortgage funds, halted property transactions and driven up food, oil and other commodity prices. The real-economy, where real-work is done, is fine. It is the money-economy that needs fixing - and it is a primary duty of government to fix it. We cannot leave our currency in incompetent hands. I suggest the wholesale nationalisation of all City interests, to stabilise currencies, and the immediate repatriation to their source-nations of all off-shore assets - calculated by the OECD to be $10 to $13 trillion. That will more than repair all the deficits.  

 

THIS IS WHAT THEY PRINTED – MAYBE IT IS AN IMPROVEMENT:

 

Risk, recklessness and financial stability. The Guardian, Thursday September 18 2008

The continuing, if not escalating, US and UK financial crisis is repeatedly punctuated in the media by failed brokers and bankers blaming it all on the fall in property prices (Banks: the contagion spreads, September 17). But it is illogical that the booming real economy should wreak havoc in the money economy. The reality is that massive amounts of our cash have been siphoned off - much of it via tax havens - to enable global gambling in impenetrable derivatives; which has so confused the regulators, auditors and the corporate world that few, if any, understand the banks' balance sheets, and have lost all track of the relationships between the real economy and the money economy.

The alleged property "crash" is a tiny percentage of housing stock being auctioned off; 95% of property is not in forced sale and it retains its (real) value to the owners and tenants. And when traditional banking returns, property, land, factories and other real assets in the real world will still be the banks' main securities for loans.

The real economy is fine. It is the money economy that needs fixing - and it is the duty of governments to fix it.
Noel Hodson
Oxford

 

Give us back our money!– Letter to The Guardian newspaper - 15 September 2008

 

Lehman Brother's bankruptcy filing and the massive tax-payer bail-outs for Merrill Lynch and insurance giant AIG, indicate a subterranean fault line of foolhardy transactions over several decades, which will cause frightful after-shocks in the money-economy (Banking crisis - Guardian 15 Sept 08).  It is a primary duty of government to maintain stable currencies as "a means of account and a medium of exchange" which accurately represent what we value in the real-economy; which is more productive, automated, flexible and reliable than at any time in history.  The real-economy has never been healthier. In fixing the money-economy and wealth distribution, government must (1) rid the global system of addicted gamblers - margin and "derivatives" speculators - particularly from money-markets, food-markets, energy-markets, carbon-trading and other vital supply chains, and (2) must claw-back all overpayments made to executives in the last two-decades - which Polly Toynbee's timely new book defines as 'Unjust Rewards' - including all tax-haven accounts.  The rationale for repatriating these assets (OECD calculate $10-$13 trillion)  to their source communities is that much of it has been siphoned off, by stealth or brass-necked greed, by controllers of large and small companies, which are now insolvent or collapsing in value. In UK Company Law - and in the US as Conrad Black learned - such massively disproportionate self-awarded dividends, salaries and bonuses constitute criminal frauds against the creditors and shareholders of depreciated firms; and also in fact defraud all the employees and ordinary citizens who trusted them. These two measures, affirmed by new and existing laws, would repair the cash deficits, discourage executive theft and give us back monetary stability.

 

Noel Hodson
16 Brookside
OXFORD OX3 7PJ, UK

 

 

It’s those pesky kids again, stealing valuable works of art - 25 July 08.

 

The media is full of the news that all the major UK ISPs are collaborating with “The Music Industry” to spy on kids and punish them, their parents, their families and their friends for swapping music tracks on-line.  This, for example, is from Time Magazine today:

If the voluntary (UK) code sketched out Thursday fails to curb piracy sufficiently, regulation could still follow. One possibility: the government could force ISPs to install fancy filtering software that blocks illegal file sharing activity. Measures recently proposed in France take an even stricter line: as part of an agreement reached last year — and due before the country's parliament this fall — ISPs could be required to switch off offending accounts for up to a year.

That Britain's approach is less draconian — the BPI, for its part, supports the French approach — reflects the difficult market for the country's ISPs. Internet providers' margins are disappearing, and competition is fierce. ISPs' need to keep customers sweet is "why we have this compromise solution," Mulligan says.

 

So what will be the consequences?  Firstly the music swappers will do it off-line, away from the prying eyes of governments and media corporate executives and their lawyers. Secondly the swappers will adopt, adapt or create identity scrambling software to baffle the ISPs’ filters. Thirdly the youngsters or adult internet freedom fighters will set up their own outlaw ISPs, beyond the reach of the authorities. Fourthly rebellious musicians will flout the spying systems, change their business-models and issue new swappable music. How soon? Well kids are very quick and there will be fortunes to be made – so the rebellion will start today and make an impact this year.

 

The established ISPs will of course make conciliatory noises and claim they are being forced (by law?) into spying on their customers; and they will hope to make a fraction of a penny for every royalty they help to collect from licit downloads. But ultimately and quite soon the ISPs will lose the confidence of large numbers of their other customers – who will fear that they too are being spied on by ISPs who have sold out to high pressure sales operations.  Nuke the Spooks!

 

 

Mobile phones and cancer - 25 July 08.

 

Time Magazine ran this story today, which follows up the fears raised by earlier research spanning several years that cell phones (and cordless phones) might cause cancer of the brain. It is an issue of public importance that ought to be resolved by a major government sponsored study. 

 

(PITTSBURGH) — The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

 

 

Open letter to the Prime Minister. 16 July 08.

 

Dear Prime Minister,

 

For a man with great power, the vision to see that the ice-caps are melting (Guardian 16th July 08) and with little to lose electorally, you are being extraordinarily timid about tackling Britain's and the world's problems. If I were in your place, I would immediately:

 

1) Lead - do not wait to follow others - in creating all the energy Britain needs and will need from tidal, wave and wind power, which we have in super-abundance. Do this today via a government agency to buy all such green electricity at a guaranteed price, say 10p a unit, for 20 years. Germany has successfully done this for solar power. This cuts our oil-dependency and our import/export overdraft to nil.

 

2) Lead - do not wait to follow China and India - in creating stop-global-warming radical transport and buildings infrastructures. These include electrifying all roads and a new industry to build minimum-weight-vehicles, without internal combustion engines, drawing conductive power from road laid cables. This is not new technology - just neglected. Also adopt my hugely efficient FOODTUBES transport. Rid the nation of all overweight vehicles including empty buses and 475 tonne Inter-City trains. Tarmac and electrify the railways for the new vehicles to use. Though worthy things to do, there is little need to rush to insulate all homes and re-use plastic bags etc. as we can make enough pollution-free energy from our seas to be profligate. Britons do not need to live like monks.  

 

3) Lead - do not wait to react to crises - in controlling food supplies and prices.  The banks, the City, Enron, Parmalat and Wall St etc. etc. etc. have proved that private enterprise cannot be responsible for the essentials of life such as water, energy, money, land, houses and food. The coming era will urgently need massive re-nationalisation for a long period to protect the essentials of life from Thatcher's cavalier, cavorting, chortling "free-marketeers".  Food is far too important to leave to laise-faire, cum-day-go-day, magical-market commercialism - a hungry public becomes a very dangerous mob. 

 

4) Lead - not wait until after other OECD countries do it - in immediately nationalising the collapsing money system.  As even the USA has discovered, our currencies cannot be delegated by government and left in the hands of rapscallions, playing silly games and gambling with people’s homes, jobs and lives.  Claw-back all unjustified mega-pay packages with a 25 year retrospective 95% surtax. Also, repatriate to the UK all tax-haven funds which have been exported from Britain. Christian Aid and the OECD Paris, reckon there is from $10 to $14 trillion offshore - enough to pay off all the budget deficits and even repair the US mortgage industry.  This may upset JP Morgan and friends, but you might enjoy discomfiting their shy executives, peeping from behind palm fronds and sipping sweet pina-coladas at their beach homes in the Cayman Islands.

 

And, you might enjoy making these changes. All other problems, like your MP's John-Lewis-List and getting Aunty Nellie's hip treated 1.03% sooner, can be delegated to minions. Drop all ambitions to be "popular", focus on statesmanship, make your place in history, rebuild Britain, put the world to rights and have a good time.  What have you got to lose?

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

Coordinator, FOODTUBES

"THE TRANSPORT INTERNET - REALLY FAST FOOD"

Runner-up - 2008 St. Andrews Prize for the Environment

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/foodtubes-project-team.htm

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/NCH18NOV07LewisMediaGroupV8.pps

 

SW2000 Intelligent Transport

16 Brookside, OXFORD, OX3 7PJ, UK

Tel +44 (0) 1865 760994

website  http://www.noelhodson.com

The present and future of Global-Warming - read:

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/novels-table-15FEB07.htm

 

23 June 08 – Will the world’s thick-headed transport and energy planners ever get it?

 

For an InterCity train with 150 passengers, it would be greener to stop the train and give every passenger a Rolls Royce to continue their journey.  Why? Because a UK InterCity train, the great-iron-horse-that-crosses-the-prairies, weighs 475 tonnes, before any passengers get on it, which is 3.14 tonnes per passenger. A Rolls Royce weighs a mere 2.5 tonnes and its engine and rolling efficiency is far better than the steel on steel slipping and friction of trains.  Tarmac the railways! When will traffic planners understand the inescapable schoolroom physics of energy, weight and friction – and insist on MWV (Minimum Weight Vehicles) principles in all transport designs – including those damn great, diesel spewing, often empty buses which block urban streets. Doh! 

 

Before our planners are re-educated in minimum energy Gulags, US and NASA scientist James Hansen may achieve his wishes reported in today’s Guardian of (1) putting all oil executives on trial for killing the planet and (b) having America completely wired to enable green energy to be fed into the national grid – regardless of who makes it or where the generators are. Is the USA still in the hands of ENRON type exploitative companies? Germany buys green energy with a 20 year guarantee and through this has become the world leader in applied solar energy technology. In addition to extending national-grids, OECD countries should also wire all road lanes with induction cables and - back to the MWV’s – all road vehicles should be stripped down in weight and propelled by green electricity. An electric vehicle with an external power source does not need: a heavy battery, a tonne of internal combustion engine, a gear box, drive train, fuel-tank or a 300 pound driver chewing a hedgehog sandwich.

 

On the IT and ACTs front – little new stuff is happening – other than national and local authorities inevitably abusing the existing technologies by spying on their citizens. I think the IT world is in for a period of navel gazing before the next generation of really private, personal PCs, telephones and fast-internet products are created by the upcoming, ever more spied-upon teenage generation.  Every bedroom, bathroom and WC should be officially monitored for illicit activities and self-abuse; after all, if you have nothing to be ashamed of you can have no objections – …And sleep with your hands outside the sheets! 

 

For heavens’ sake - Nuke the Spooks.

7 April 08 – Famous Journalist liquidated?

 

 

Dear Letters Editors - I was hoping to post this comment/essay in your Comment & Debate section but many searches on Guardian Unlimited for Larry Elliot do not locate him or today's article. Has it been expunged by the Ministry of Truth and Larry liquidated?

 

If not - where is it?

 

SEARCH:

"Larry Elliot" Monday April 7 2008 - We're in a winter of discontent again - but this time big finance is the villain. Page 28 Comment&Debate.

 

********************

 

7 April 08 - Economies in Crisis

 

The global economy is not in crisis. In fact, the global, real economy has never produced more goods and food, more efficiently, more automatically, with so little human labour, in our entire history. We have never been wealthier. Once we stop people burning things for energy (coal, oil, gas, trees, crops, cooking oils, sugar, uranium rods etc) and harness the almost limitless energy from the sun, geothermal and tidal energy - supplemented by our western overweight kids on treadmills - the world will be fine.

 

What is wrong is that the Money-Economy is out of step, out of alignment with the real economy, and has been hi-jacked by myopic, greedy, aggressive, neurotic, power crazed, IQ challenged, compulsive gamblers; gambling with our money - our sweat and toil.  Money is "a means of account - and a medium of exchange". It exists to make it easier for us to swap the real-goods and services we create and to be a handy record of who owes what to whom. It is a paper trail that should be impeccably reliable (or gold, silver, cowry shells or whatever else we decide to ac-count with.  To protect the bits of paper we have legitimately collected, friendly bankers offer us their safes and vaults.  That is the money-economy.  The City exists to keep accurate track of the paper and to be a focus for collective investment into major social enterprises.

 

But, many of the bankers and their friends, relatives, fans, admirers, copyists, main board directors, dependents unto the fifth generation and tribes of compromised auditors, brokers, debt-raters, loan sharks, lawyers, judges, politicians and book-keepers have been cooking the books in ever more imaginative ways and found that dipping their fat, sticky fingers into the global tills and raking out handfuls of money at an ever faster rate, is not only not challenged as criminal behaviour, but is applauded and awarded by the vast majority of the political system and the media. If you have defrauded your neighbours and work-mates and half-inched a thousand times more loot per hour than they are awarded in a week - you are deemed to be a hero.  A little less obviously than grasping wads of money, our politicians and top civil servants guide their careers and policies towards the revolving doors held open for them years before their early retirements. Every unearned, unwarranted shilling that these sociopaths grab is an inflationary act and, worst of all, their ill-gotten gains impoverish, demean and insult the vast majority of patient citizens who work for a reasonable reward.  The unstoppable money siphon from the average, poor and starving to the already wealthy, super-rich and grossly over-rewarded - has to be stopped; globally.

 

So, it is the money-economy, not the real economy that is broken and needs to be fixed. 

How? (1) Retrospectively cap executive rewards with a 98% tax band, back to Thatcher's last stand.  (2) The present money-system is broken, so introduce a new system that bans speculators and gamblers by ensuring minimum time holdings of real stocks and commodities, and remove all obfuscation - make it simple - and register all business transactions daily for public record (a good laptop should cope - or maybe a few laptops). (3) Without warning, introduce a world currency, EURODOLLARYUEN, and oblige everyone to convert their wealth, on record - or lose it.  Repatriate all offshore, tax haven assets to the countries where the real-economy created them and ensure they are properly taxed or are confiscated.  This will pay off most global deficits. (4) Introduce capital distribution mechanisms such as BIRTHRIGHT to share the wealth base fairly and a minimum wage to provide a decent family living for a 40 hour week (not less than £10 an hour). This will abolish poverty. (5) Consign the present incumbents to lunatic asylums equipped for their eternal pleasure with super-casinos, where they can play to their hearts content with old money.

 

Or - the solution at a stroke - abolish money. Read my book AD 2516 to see how that will work.

 

In the meantime - Move to Higher Ground.

 

Noel HODSON

 

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/novels-table-15FEB07.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 March 08 – Point and Counterpoint – Worried about the “Credit Collapse” ?

 

 

 

Subject: The Credit Collapse of 2008

 

The Credit Collapse of 2008
by
Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.

The Credit Collapse of 2008 has begun.

The place is every home, business and government.

The time is now.

The credit collapse is not just an ordinary recession that repeats itself with each new business cycle of the 21st century. Nor is it the Great Depression returning to haunt us from the depths of the 1930s.

The credit collapse is a sudden surge in debt defaults by borrowers ... and an equally sudden disappearance of new loans by lenders.

It's an unprecedented surge in home foreclosures ... and an equally unprecedented cutback in new home mortgages.

It's causing unexpected corporate bankruptcies ... plus equally unexpected demands by banks to put up more collateral.

It's threatening to sink businesses, paralyze local governments and gut the investment portfolios of millions of Americans.

It's even starting to sabotage the best laid plans of government — neutralizing the Fed's interest rate cuts ... pre-empting Congress' economic stimulus plan ... and threatening to strip Washington of its traditional powers to fight a recession.

And I'm not the only one who sees this.

Yesterday's New York Times reports ...

that the government's usual fiscal and monetary policy tools are failing ...

that this failure is raising questions about what more the Fed can do, and ...

that its actions so far have done little to counter sinking housing prices, the falling stock market and disappearing jobs.

"The Fed's main weapons against a downturn," says The Times, "are ill-suited to a crisis that stems from collapsing confidence about credit quality."

Meanwhile, economist Edward Yardeni, formerly still holding to the theory that the economy was OK, has now reversed course. Ditto for economists at JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers.

They don't yet call it the Credit Collapse of 2008, as I do. But they see it just the same — and they are beginning to recognize how serious its consequences really are.

What they may not yet recognize is that the Credit Collapse of 2008 could attack everyone and everything that depends on debt, including, ultimately, the U.S. government.

And it's moving fast!

Just in the past three months, we've seen the Credit Collapse of 2008 drive a dagger into the markets for prime home mortgages, commercial mortgages, business loans, student loans, credit cards and municipal bonds.

We've seen the credit collapse rip apart little-known-but-important "structured" securities — Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS), Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs), Auction Rate Securities (ARS), Credit Default Swaps (CDS), Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) and Variable Interest Entities (VIEs).

And just last week, to the shock of federal authorities, the credit collapse struck bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Although not backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, these bonds were thought to be immune from the crisis because of their special status as government "sponsored" agencies. But they weren't.

The New York Times puts it this way: "If investors lose confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have become the only major remaining source of mortgage financing in recent months, Fed officials fear that homes sales and housing prices could plunge further and foreclosures could climb even higher than they already have."

Plus, there's still another, unspoken fear:

If the Credit Collapse of 2008 can slam into the market for government-sponsored bonds, could it not do the same to government agency bonds like Ginnie Maes, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government?

Further, if the Credit Collapse of 2008 can hit agency bonds, then, at some point, could it even bring down long-term U.S. Treasury bonds?

Fed officials are afraid to give an answer. They're even afraid to ask the question. But on Friday of last week, March 7 ...

They Could Wait No Longer.
They Were Frightened.
And They Panicked.

In a desperate attempt to avert a full-scale collapse of credit markets, the Federal Reserve declared it would offer ...

An unprecedented $100 billion in long-term loans, accepting virtually any kind of debt instruments as collateral — including bad paper that's at the core of the credit collapse.

An equally unprecedented $100 billion in short-term loans, accepting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds as collateral.

Plus, as much additional funding as needed to ease the pain for the next victims of the credit collapse, whomever those may be.

That's a heck of lot of new paper money flooding into the banking system — especially considering that it stems from economic weakness, not strength ... and that it comes in the form of devalued paper, not wealth.

 

*************************

 

 

 

10 Mar 08

 

  

Thanks for the interesting paper by Martin D Weiss, where he extrapolates from recent and past news to forecast near and far future economic outcomes. Overall he sees governments losing control of money - in its broadest sense as a "medium of exchange and a means of account" - as has happened in Zimbabwe and as happened in Germany after WW1. Martin Weiss senses a return to a barter economy - with gold, metals, oils and food commodities etc as the only "money" worth holding. But he can't have it both ways - if money collapses then people flock to real goods; the mainstay of which is land-housing - then water - then food - then fuel - clothes - medicines etc etc. To hold only mobile high value real goods such as diamonds, jewellery, art, etc etc which are quite a long way down the chain of tradable necessities, is simply substituting official money with bags of gems and bullion as the new money - which in turn can only be economically useful in stable, settled societies with tradable amounts of necessities (i.e. surpluses).

 

My view is that world treasurers / chancellors know what they are doing - and matters are not out of control.

 

However, I believe that the 4 economic continents, Land Labour Capital & Information, are badly out of sync and that the money economy is operated on 17th century principles and no longer properly reflects (as the major "means of account" or the world's bookkeeping system) the Real 21st Century economy. The very much automated and computerised Real Economy has been built over thousands of years of effort, cooperation, invention and war/defence by all the population and our ancestors - and yet through rapacious and good old aristocratic crooked instincts, is increasingly "owned" by a tiny minority (e.g. in the USA by about 3% of the population) and the Legal system has been hi-jacked to affirm this perverse warping of the money system (means of account).

 

So for very different reasons from Martin Weiss, I see a turbulent time ahead for the world's economy as it adjusts to having the most efficient and extraordinarily wealthy Real Economy - mostly and increasingly being generated by robots - alongside the sociopathic resurgence of the insatiable greed of aristocracy; such as the French, the Russians and many republics violently rebelled against in the past 200 years.  

 

So I agree that "we live in interesting times ". But the aligning of the 4 continents and the corrections of ownership in a fair and reasonable and intelligently cooperating society need not involve primitive bloodshed, destruction and guillotines - this time.  There are clear signs that cooperation between nations (OECD Paris - NATO, UN, etc etc etc etc) and treasuries within nations are moving strongly towards curbing aristocracy and towards fair wealth distribution. These trends are being propelled by our new global knowledge and the Information Society through crises that demand global cooperation - such as Global Warming, Oil shortages, Water wars, Food crises, Banking crises etc. 

 

To deal with these in an intelligent way - (1) I think a world currency will emerge (in some senses we already have a world currency via  computer translations of trading)  (2) That offshore capital (maybe $10 trillion) will be repatriated by a sudden issue of one-currency, requiring all existing assets to be re-valued in the new money (3) That the 80% or so of gambling in the money, stocks and commodity markets will be outlawed - and steady prices will become the norm (4) That massive re-distribution programmes will share out the world's wealth in a fair way.

 

The more accurate Martin Weiss's Cassandra forecasts are - the more rapidly will world governments bring forward the changes towards a single-global-money-unit (the EURO-DOLLAR-YEN). A basic requirement for the stability to prevent chaos or the world plunging back to a barter economy is a stable society and economy where the Real (houses, food, clothes) is valued over the gamblers' insane, unstable, anxious, neurotic Unreality. 

 

 

Noel

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

Coordinator, FOODTUBES

"THE TRANSPORT INTERNET - REALLY FAST FOOD"

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/feb08foodtubes-croydon-v5.ppt

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/foodtubes-project-team.htm

 

 

19 February 08 – Capital repatriation flood begins with a trickle.

 

It seems that the first to blink are the Germans. A headline in The Guardian newspaper, Tuesday 19th February 2008, reads “Tax swindle police raid companies across Germany– “Evasion by executives may have cost €4 billion – Prominent figures said to have siphoned off money”. With names from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Klaus Zumwinkel (Artful Dodger) and his merry robber band are being pursued by Peer Steinbruck (evil Finance Minister) and Otmar Hasler (wicked Prime Minister) magically armed by Angela Merkel (green skinned Minister of Retribution), through labyrinthine legalistic paths, to the vaults of the Royal Palace in Liechtenstein, where a great golden hoard is secured for them by the noble ruling family – who selflessly seek nothing in return. The German people think the treasure is theirs. In fact they imagine it has been knicked, lifted, burgled, purloined, stolen, fraudulently converted, heisted and siphoned from their major corporations, by previously trusted directors and - being crass, clay-footed, low-browed, heavy handed, vulgar peasants who do not know their lowly place in society and who understand nothing of high finance – they are unaware that by revealing “The King has no clothes” and by taxing their superiors and limiting their hard earned “bonuses” - some of which took as long as ten minutes of intensive, concentrated, exhausting, highest-level work to electronically finesse from Deutsche Bank to LGT Treuhand Trust in Lichtenstein - Germany will immediately see a massive exodus of all top talent  - will suffer an instant flight of capital – will see all their organisations collapse in chaos - and will be plunged back into the dark ages. Fortunately for the bold swashbuckling executives and their super creative accountants, London welcomes all capitalists, regardless of ethics, morals and whinging Johnny Foreigner Laws, and laughs in the face of Stolid Germanic Bureaucracy. From deep in the greenwoods of the Home Counties, a mysterious aristocratic figure, master of disguise with a marked predilection for green tights, slips across the Channel into Europe by night and leads these brave, suffering, dispossessed souls back to Tax-Free UK Non-Domland; where the lower classes are quiescent forelock-tugging serfs and where all billionaires are automatically granted vast estates and Le droit de seigneur. Known only as The Skarlatt Pumpernickel, his identity has long been a closely guarded State Secret, but we can exclusively reveal that this heroic chap is none other than Britain’s very own Saint Anthony (No honestly - If I were you I’d use a Swiss Trust like Margaret or a Singapore bank) Blair - tirelessly working for Oil Democracies, Multinational Banks and the Holy Free Markets. The only sour note in this stirring tale is that killjoy Germany is promoting a pan-European initiative to deal with Tax Havens and (heaven forfend!) Managers’ Compensation. But despair not, you sticky fingered righteous Knights of the Ever Open Till –  your saviour, Josef Akermann, boss of Deutsche Bank, stands, sword in hand on the bridge, holding back thousands of barbarians, and shouting “Thou shalt never limit executive pay!”

 

There is between $7 Trillion (TIME) and $13 Trillion (OECD) out there for repatriation – so the Germans have just started the tap trickling. Let us all hope that our governments don’t leave it too late.

 

11 February 08 – Offshore Exiles – Repatriate, Repatriate, Repatriate.

 

As we forecast some years ago vis-à-vis the ENRON, Parmalat and similar massive accounting frauds and thefts by sociopathic, insatiably greedy criminals, an infamous list which may come to include the recent possibly back-to-back $7 billion “losses” from Societe Generale,  the Information Society is enabling governments and all interested persons to accurately track wealth, earnings and taxes – and “they” the newly informed, habitually defrauded majority are starting to react angrily while the new aristocracy gather their shock-and-awe troops to strike back. Examples include the UK’s Sunday Times 10 Feb 08, spitting tacks with headlines such as “Non-dom raid will lead to capital exodus”, as the UK and many other OECD countries close the net around wealthy families who opt to remain stateless – and tax-free – on the capital and earnings they or their ancestors have creamed-off from the sweat and sacrifices of their neighbours and communities where the wealth was created. TIME magazine February 18th 2008 reports that $7 trillion dollars in offshore assets is held in private banking centres around the world; $1.82 trillion in Switzerland, $1.57 trillion in “others”, $970 billion in the Isle of Man, Channel Isles & Dublin, $900 billion in Luxembourg, $870 billion in The Caribbean and Panama, $320 billion in Singapore and $270 billion in Hong Kong. This is half of the OECD & Christian Aid estimate of $14 trillion but either amount would clear all the budget deficits of every OECD country – and feed all the world’s starving poor.  The super-rich are being lured from one tax-haven to the next as rules change – Singapore and Switzerland making ever bolder promises to protect them to the death (duties). To cut through the whole vexed and complex issue, a Gordian Knot woven by imaginative lawyers and accountants, ALL offshore wealth, by definition being surplus to family needs, should be repatriated and the owners required to reclaim it, after proving it has been properly and fairly taxed. $7 trillion is $7,000,000,000,000 or $70,000 for every US household. That would clear up the sub-prime loans and personal debt crises of the underpaid and oppressed wage-slaves. 

11 February 08 – Kids on-line.

 

Another long forecast emergence of the Information Society is gathering pace. School laptops, originally designed for third world communities and based in LINUX and other freeware systems, are being adopted by schools in developed countries and distributed to all school-children. Next year they will also have Microsoft software. Who knows – this subversive movement may enable the kids to track who is fiddling the accounts and where all the money goes, before they start working and saving. We should never have taught them to read – never mind count.

 

17 January 08 – Greenfield and Darwin.

 

Students and schoolchildren who copy large chunks from the www for their assignments and homework – may be signalling a practical demonstration of Prof. Susan Greenfield’s theory that personal computers and the information society are driving a rapid evolutionary change in humans. Prof Greenfield believes that the memory of computers, “the C-Drive”, and the world-wide-web, the largest library ever – and fully accessible, are being subsumed into our being, supplanting the age old need for memory by rote. What the plagiarising pupils may be really saying is – “its all out there on the web – what we need to do is to use it, not to memorise it”.  This evolution, it is conjectured, includes growing larger areas of the brain that control the texting speed of thumbs. What would Darwin think of it all.

11 October 07 – Breathless Big Brother/ Sister.

 

Email to BBC Radio 4, UK - Will the BBC please insist on all presenters learning basic arithmetic to give a balanced perspective. On Monday 8th October, Libby Purves encouraged two women, of the deeply-sad-hushed-voice-we-are-doing-it-for-your-own-good type to promote laws that would ban all new drivers from travelling after 11pm or carrying any passengers. Imagine your 17 year old daughter being told to walk home at midnight because her boyfriend cannot take her as a passenger. These thoughtless, breathless Orwellian restrictions are to save, the hushed voices claimed, 1,000 young lives a year (stats source?). In the age group cited, 17-24, are 2-3 million "young" drivers. The deaths are 0.03% a year, so 99.97% of them drive safely. We all want to save-lives but it is immensely disproportionate to restrict the vast majority who drive safely. I fully agree that all new drivers should be taught on Motorways, in bad weather and on skid pans before being let loose.

 

(Editor - The proposed laws would presumably be enforced by satellite and computer tracking of the novice drivers.)   

 

3 October 07 – Oxford Brooks & Big Bucks for Bus Owners.

 

At least one major shareholder in these privileged, privatised bus companies has bought  a castle in Scotland – far removed from gridlock.

 

LETTER TO THE OXFORD TIMES - UK - In my car travelling east on Tuesday 2nd October at 4pm, I was stuck in gridlocked traffic by Headington School and Brookes University. The immediate cause was a westbound Oxford Brookes bus filling up with students for 8 minutes (while the driver took fares and issued tickets) - with all traffic behind unable to move and blocking all eastbound and westbound movement.  Even cyclists had difficulty getting by. Two minutes after the first bus moved on - a second Oxford Brookes bus took its place and blocked the road for another 8 minutes. After 40 minutes of no movement I headed back on a detour. On Headington Hill, in the eastbound lane were twelve other buses all puffing out diesel fumes, mostly empty - all with the same solo-driver-ticket-seller system - which has to be the most stupid, selfish, polluting and obstructing, monetarist, Friedman/Thatcherite method ever conceived - merely to boost the profits of Stagecoach owners, which all other travellers pay for.

 

Brookes has forecourt space - its buses should pull off the road, as should all buses. Bus passengers should pre-purchase tickets. Or put clippies on the buses. Better still, run a free hop-on-off single bus service along London Road and ban all other (mostly empty) buses and coaches. The John Radcliffe hospital should link direct to the A40 ring road at the developers' cost. Can we sack all the traffic planners and bus licensors and start again. 

 

...And to pre-empt the inevitable shower of green insults and assaults - I rarely travel by car and for 15 years I have actively promoted the reduction of business journeys.     

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

25 September 07 - Teleworkers – one-third of UK workforce.

 

Pollsters YouGov UK, commissioned by Zurich Insurance, questioned 1,000 UK workers and found that a third telework at least  “16 hours a month” at home – and that more of the workforce foresee that they will telework in the coming year.  The UK workforce is about 25 million, so one-third equates to 8.3 million who sometimes telework. This provides a base for calculating how many UK households have home-offices linked into the telecoms networks.

 

25 September 07 – The MIT $100 laptop gets to market.

 

Good news – The new wind-up/solar powered, low energy laptop designed for children in the emerging world is being offered for sale in the USA on a two-for-one basis. Americans can buy one for their children for $399 – but they get two machines – one is shipped off to a child in an impoverished country.  The One Laptop Per Child organisation has been struggling to get the price down to $100 – and seem to be on the right track if their calculations now allow a machine to be shipped for $199.  Three months ago I suggested in emails that they bundle the MIT laptop with standard-laptop sales (DELL, IBM, TOSHIBA etc) in this way. I hope I contributed to the distribution strategy; their 2-for-1 idea is better. 

 

17 September 07 – “IF WE DON’T PAY WORLD-CLASS SALARIES, THEY WILL TAKE THEIR SKILLS ABROAD!” SHOCK – HORROR!

 

 

*********************

This is the week that the 5th largest UK ex-building society (transformed from a mutual society into a “bank”), Northern Rock, fell apart. The UK government have authorised the Bank of England to lend as much as it needs to keep Northern Rock safe – but the UK Chancellor, Alistair Darling, this morning refused to say that 100% of savers’ money is guaranteed – so the deliberately engineered run on this bank continues unabated. The share price has collapsed.  (Follow-up – later that sane day the Chancellor promised that savers’ accounts at Northern Rock were 100% guaranteed by the Bank of England/Government.)

 

The UK must move back to manufacturing – how about making pollution free energy systems and lightweight eco-vehicles? …No; they’ll never catch on.

 

***************

 

Guardian Letters – 17 Sept 07

 

On the 6pm news, I have just heard the sensible decision by the Chancellor to fully guarantee Northern Rock's depositors' savings. The announcement is being accompanied by hysterical accusations that Gordon Brown has presided over an incontinent borrowings decade and unnecessary house price boom. Commentators should know that the pressure to lend arises from my generation, the Baby Boomers or War Bulge - now entering retirement with a tidal wave of pension savings, desperately seeking a safe haven. The safest we can find is to lend our savings to the next generation, to buy their homes, and to pay us mortgage interest.  This hunt-a-pension pressure will increase for the next decade.  There are too few attractive homes - so as our children search for a decent house - they drive up house prices. That part of the problem can only be solved by building more good homes. There is no economic fault here - but the reality does require more of the steady management that Gordon Brown has applied for ten years. If the financial institutions cannot cope - they should be quickly taken into public ownership and refund the £14 billion bonuses they have just taken. 

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

Coordinator, FOODTUBES

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/foodtubes-project-team.htm

 

 

17th September – to BBC News:

The Northern Rock crisis arises from the familiar mistake of the bank lending long term (20 to 30 year mortgages) and borrowing short term from other banks. 

What is extraordinary is that the blithely enthusiastic CEO, Mr Applegarth, last year took £1.3 million in pay and this year (2007) is scheduled to take £3 million - with the support of the executive and non-executive directors. Did none of them, including Sir Derek Wanless, recognise the business risks?

 

Best advice to all savers and share investors is never, never, ever invest in any company, of any sort, where the executives have siphoned off or arranged their own retirement millions - and so lost the motivation to work for a living. The exceptions being innovative, workaholic tycoons like Gates, Branson, Sugar etc.

 

Noel HODSON

 

**************

 

17 Sept 07 – Guardian Economics Editor

Dear Larry Elliot,

 

Do I understand from your recent articles correctly? - That bankers world-wide have been buying packaged mortgage debts for tens and hundreds of millions of pounds, without knowing what's in the packages?  Should any of them keep their jobs? Is any banker really that incompetent?

 

I read yesterday (Sunday Times) there are 690,000 US defaulters (If that's accurate - it is 7 times larger than earlier estimates - but lets say $200,000 loans, X 7% interest X 690,000 = $805 million a month of repayments) . They are highly unlikely to be 100% write-offs as people cling onto their abodes - lets say 50% write offs = $402 million a month. This is hardly enough to bring the global system to its knees.  It is equivalent to about 80,000 people losing their jobs and going on benefits. Surely the OECD world deals with that every other day - without a blip. 

 

Are we being conned into a cash-crisis - by the City or by Government or both? Is this a cunning ruse to carve house-financing away from the Bank Base Rate?  

 

I will read your columns with interest.

Noel Hodson
************* 

 

14 September 07 – to The Guardian journalists – UK.

FYI - These are the directors the public are bailing out    ...Did they get their Maths O level?

Northern Rock plc

Annual Report and Accounts 2006

Recommendations from 2007 for director's incentives, made by the Remuneration Committee:

Ms N Pease                         (check out the paid, non-exec directors below)

Mr N A H Fenwick,

Sir Ian Gibson

Mr M J Queen

Miss R A Radcliffe

Sir Derek Wanless

 

Executive Directors

1) Internationally competitive basic salaries (compared to the 8 largest UK banks).

2007 basic pay:

A J Applegarth £760,000  (2006 total package £1,364,000)

D F Baker £530,000

K M Currie £415,000

D A Jones £415,000

A M Kuipers £415,000

and 15 other directors from £90 to £250,000

 

PLUS

2) 200% Short term bonus e.g. Applegarth £1,520,000

3) 200% (of after-tax bonus) Share issue e.g. £912,000

4) A long term incentive plan  £???

5) Must retain 50% of any vested share awards (not sell half their shares up to 100% of salary).

 

6) Plus pension - 2/3rds of Final Salary, at 60. If died, 4 X salary as a lump sum + 50% pension to spouse.  

PLUS substantial accumulated share options.

 

Non-Exec Directors

Chair £315,000

Senior £72,000

Basic £45,000

+ additional fees for e.g. committee work.

Dr M W Ridley

N A H Fenwick

Sir Ian Gibson

N Pease

M J Queen

R A Radcliffe

Sir George Russell

Sir Derek Wanless.

 

Noel Hodson
16 Brookside
OXFORD OX3 7PJ, UK
email  noel@noelhodson.com
+44(0)1865 760994 Fax - phone in advance
website www.noelhodson.com

 

***************

 

Liam Halligan's report and his article (Can we count on the Old Lady to get it right? Sunday Telegraph, September 9 2007), tell us that the executives of major UK banks are waiting in anxious confusion to learn what the collateralised US sub-prime debts will cost each bank. Are these the same City of London and stock-exchange managers who took £14 billion bonuses last month and who advise on international transactions? Surely they have competent, detailed, professional, computerised, day-by-day analyses of their own and every other banks' positions - without having to wait-and-see, like uninformed amateurs? Some of them also complain that the grudging offer by the Bank of England to pump £4.4 billion of tax-payers' money into the system may be too little too late. To save the banking system from collapse and us all from an alleged global recession, they have a clear duty to immediately repatriate their £14 billion.  - Noel Hodson

 

19 AUG 07 – GLOBAL FINANCE – OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

 

 Three of the letters, below, reflect that the most important element which urgently needs reforming to make a better world is the control and redistribution of wealth.  The Real-Economy, the Money-Economy and the Knowledge Economy are badly out of alignment. The jigsaw of What we make, What we know and Who owns it, is fractured. The August 07 global banking crisis is being manufactured on the back of a few thousand poor Americans struggling to pay overpriced mortgages on their homes. Wall Street’s reaction is being broadcast in the vacation “silly-season” by irresponsible city-players who would celebrate financial chaos as “opportunities” for gambling with the lives of honest citizens. The so called crisis pretends that the mortgage defaults have been sold-on in such complex ways that are now untraceable and unknowable. In the computer-age, when we can guide Mars explorers and track tens of millions of cars on the roads from space satellites – we know this supposed miasma of financial ignorance is complete  bullshit. It really is time that these incompetent, greedy, overpaid, IQ challanged spivs, scam artists and compulsive gamblers “working” in the global financial system were evicted – and banking and investment put on a proper footing.  Perhaps we should consult the Chinese on appropriate treatment of financial crimes against the public interest.  

 

Then, as the ice-caps are melting, we can tackle global-warming with investments into massive infrastructure changes.

 

18 AUG 07 – PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF THE GLOBAL BANKS?

 

LETTER PUBLISHED IN THE GUARDIAN - UK

Today's (17 AUG 07) Guardian headline and Larry Elliot's scary analysis of the (possible) $54 billion deficit on $1,300 billion of US sub-prime mortgages, should be viewed in context. One year of the US tax Budget is $2,500 billion, forty-six times as large as the (possible) defaults, which would represent only 0.5% of the US housing stock, most of it long paid for. And the OECD report a massive $11 trillion global cash-buffer held in tax-haven accounts, which could be and perhaps should be repatriated to deal with this alleged emergency. On a global scale these mortgage defaults are trivial. America has gained tens of thousands of new homes in its real-economy and can easily assist it's own impoverished debtors. The US will obviously prefer to dump their bad-debts around the world in a fog of panic and confusion. If global banks and stock markets lack the competence to cope with such readily forecastable problems - then shouldn't they all be taken into public ownership? 

 

Noel Hodson

 

18 AUG 07 – LEARN TO COUNT.

 

LETTERS TO TIME Magazine:

Barbara Kiviat's authoritative account (TIME Aug 27th, 07) of the local and global impact of sub-prime mortgage defaults, worries me in that supposedly high IQ and informed global financial managers are bewildered, in this computer age, about which banks are carrying what amounts of the sub-prime defaults. Are these city people so incompetent that they cannot track a few tens of thousands of loans and repayment schedules - however thinly sliced across laid-off bets. It is even more worrying that they panic about, say, 100,000 impoverished borrows, defaulting on, say, $20,000 a year interest or a mere $2 billion, being capable of crashing the US or the global system. Are these guys kidding us - or should they all be replaced now by people who can count and make lists? Perhaps the global stock markets and banks should be taken into public ownership if the private sector can't handle the jobs they are immensely highly paid to do.

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

 

Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 8:14 PM
To: noel@noelhodson.com
Subject: Re: US Aristocrats

The half percent fall in average US family incomes which you report (Why Voters (and Politicians) Are Anxious SEPTEMBER 18, 2006) works out at $25 billion dollars, which is a very small part of executives' annual bonuses. It seems that the US has dangerously recreated the excesses and imbalances of income and capital that caused the French and Russian Revolutions. The blight of sociopathic aristocracy has resurrected in the heartland of America from its old European graves. To catch up the 'flat wages' since 1970 that you report, the average wage should have increased from $36,622 a year to $89,084; costing an extra $7 trillion - which is less than the amount TIME  and The Tax Justice Network reckon is held in offshore accounts and thus surplus to the depositors' needs. It also mirrors the US budget deficit. Are top US families as willing as the French were to lose their heads to defend their unprecedented macho differentials?

Noel Hodson
16 Brookside
OXFORD OX3 7PJ, UK
email  noel@noelhodson.com
+44(0)1865 760994 Fax - phone in advance
website www.noelhodson.com

 

(US Labour force 143M, unemployed 4.7%, leaves 136M x wages$36,622=$5 trillion x 0.5%=$25billion).

 

 

13 AUG 07 – FUNDAMENTAL REDSIGN OF TRANSPORT AND CARS

 

 

UNPUBLISHED LETTER

The Guardian headline today (Revealed: cover-up plan on energy target) and Lynsey Hanley's comments, promoting public above car transport, address problems that require massive changes - not timid tinkering. Transport is the second largest cause of air pollution and our biggest import cost, but failing to force people to walk, cycle and take buses is no use. The UK should accept that 80% of its 62 million democratic citizens vote to use cars - door-to-door powered vehicles. We should stop attempting to cram people into ancient, costly and dirty rail carriages and buses - and change cars (and all vehicles) into small, electric lightweights.  Fast and fashionable UK prototypes have existed since 1975 and much earlier, for example William Town's Mini based "Microdot". Within a few years, most cars could be 1/3rd the present weight and half the size, which would annually save 2/3rds the fuel/energy, being billions of pounds and billions of litres of imported petrol and diesel, and would take half the road space and maintenance. The UK's renewable electricity should be focused on tidal power - we "Kings of the Waves" live on an island surrounded by oceans with twice daily tides of, for example, up to 6 metres at London. Massive concrete floating docks could carry large power-stations (and windmills), constantly driven by this free and irresistible tidal motion. Electricity could be fed direct to the road system. These modern, but by no means cutting-edge, industries would give the UK clean air, a positive balance of payments and a world lead in exporting global-warming solutions and products.  

 

Noel Hodson (Mr)

 

 

2 JUL 07 – TAX FORCE & POVERTY.

 

UNPUBLISHED LETTER – THE COMPUTER SOCIETY KNOWS WHERE THE OFFSHORE-FUNDS ARE. WHY DOESN’T GOVERNMENT COLLECT THE TAXES.

The G2 article "Who'd be an oligarch?" (Guardian 2 July 07), with the Sunday Observer's "Tax evasion taskforce to probe UK", and the termination last month of the UK's offshore-tax amnesty period, might make the world's billionaires and multi-millionaires feel unloved. To regain international respect they could band together, perhaps under the Gates/Buffet banner, and rid the world of poverty and ignorance. They have the power and wealth to do it. Will they assume the responsibility and put in the work?

 

Noel Hodson

 

13 FEB 07 – E-DEMOCRACY WILL BE TONY BLAIR’S LEGACY

 

 I have not been taking a long vacation since the last News entry back in 2006; there simply has been no momentous New Epoch news to put on record. Until, that is, one million UK citizens, this month, signed an on-line petition to stop the government from proceeding with road-charging. For those overseas: Road-Charging is a proposal to computer and satellite track every vehicle and levy a tax on the length of journey – and probably on the traffic density of areas visited.  The public is balking at the invasion of privacy this entails – where every stop, start, pause, illicit address and nose-picking is to be put on record. Britons are also generally rebelling against being the most CCTV’d population on Earth.

 

Why is this petition, which the government has immediately said it will ignore, important? Because the mechanism enabling the vote is a website built by the government – and it is being used to vote on issues, not to vote for or against elected representatives. Note this date. E-Democracy is momentous. It will transform society as much as or more than the printing press did.  The day of the infallible leader, voted in as a personality and supposed to have an answer for everything, is almost over. In the near future the policy power handed to leaders by the people will be withdrawn – and the people will vote issue by issue. It is scary; it liberates Caliban; it empowers mass-hysteria, the lowest common denominator, crowd stupidity, panic, misinformation, bigotry, bias and etc. But it is inevitable and will have to be managed – through, as Tony Blair promised at the beginning of his long reign – education, education and education.

 

On the same theme, also in February, an angry lunatic sent several letter bombs to addresses connected to traffic surveillance and road-cameras, chief among them being the offices of CAPITA, a computer bureaucracy that administers CCTV for London Congestion charging and handles similar automated government strictures and penalties. This alarming, terrorist type news, of a criminal indiscriminately injuring  post-room clerks, was met with a thunderous silence from most commentators and the general public. The police considered arresting 23.5 million licensed, CCTV, Parking Gestapo and Speed-Camera harassed, drivers as prime suspects but realised that as UK prisons are full to bursting, the arrests would be impractical. In the near future E-Democracy will hold the executive and elected representatives to task – and let the rulers know if the majority want particular policies to continue, such as are being imposed on drivers by crackpot control-freaks and worried “Health & Safety” cranks. The End (of ignoring the majority opinion) is Nigh.

 

As a footnote – the instincts of the majority of UK drivers are correct in rebelling against the claim that “We are only filming and arresting you to prevent accidents”. Statistics show that 99.99% of all UK road journeys are safe. Of the 3,000 deaths a year on UK roads, half are of drunken pedestrians; could the rest be due to natural causes from among the 650,000 who die naturally each year? Most drivers now assume the Speed-Cameras are a method of squeezing more money out of motorists.

 

29 NOV 06 – THE SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL, OXFORD.

 

I reproduce the whole Guardian headline article below, not because it is likely to be a significant event for the Information Society, but from self-indulgent nostalgia and sad-self-justification for the years 1980 to 1993, which I spent leading an excellent team of developers and award winning architects in competitions to develop 20 brown-land acres at Oxford Station. In those stirring Thatcher and Jonathan Aitken years of “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” and British Innovation, the old, unused coal yards at Oxford Station were owned by the British Rail Property Board, which invited ideas and bids three times between 1980 and 1993. At great expense we entered each competition in good faith and each time won it and made the highest bid for the land with our £80 million plan to build The Oxford Research Science Park with masses of Social Housing. Astonishingly, each time we won, the Chairman of the Property Board then refused to deal with us. Being paranoid, after experiencing 13 years of extraordinary obfuscation and a major personal “City” financial attack, I began to suspect, slowly, very slowly, too slowly, that all was not what it seemed. (Read my life story The Haunting of a Favourite Son, ISBN 1-4137-0791-2). The site was subsequently developed, on our winning ground-plan, but cheaply and nastily with bad housing and the most unintelligent, gridlocked traffic system in Europe, as the Said Business School. Various politicos mentioned below became officers of the new School alongside the once Oxford City Chairman of Planning – and the main funding came from the same Wafic Said (pr. SA..EED) cited below.

…And maybe, airing these lessons on how to get things done in the UK will help the Said students understand business ethics, politics, university sinecures, obtain their degrees and fit them for senior positions in British government, industry and commerce. Never mind the quality feel the width. Or – Would you buy a used Sword of Righteousness & Shield of Truth from this man?

 

BAE secret millions linked to arms broker

Swiss bank accounts traced as row over Eurofighter contract escalates

David Leigh and Rob Evans - Wednesday November 29, 2006 The Guardian

Secret payments of millions of pounds from Britain's biggest arms company have been found in Swiss accounts linked to Wafic Said, a billionaire arms broker for the Saudi Royal family, according to legal sources.

Mr Said refused last night to speak about the allegations. But the discovery presents the biggest potential breakthrough yet achieved in the Serious Fraud Office's three year investigation into allegations that illegal commissions may have been paid to Saudi royals by BAE Systems.

 

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Details from the accounts would help to establish whether money was channelled to members of the Saudi ruling clan, and the amounts involved. The development comes amid threats from the company and its chief executive, Mike Turner, that the SFO's ongoing inquiry threatens to damage the UK economy. He has claimed that the Saudi royal family may take a £6bn contract from BAE and give it to the French instead.

The company wants the SFO to abandon the investigation before the Saudis pull out of the deal for a new fleet of 72 Eurofighter Typhoons.

Speculation over the progress of the inquiry led to a dip in the company's share price earlier this week.

But the SFO appears determined to focus on the accounts and their links to 68-year-old Mr Said. A billionaire in his own right, he is a friend of Peter Mandelson and has been a donor to the Conservative party. A tax-resident in Monaco, Mr Said has built a huge Palladian mansion on his Oxfordshire estate.

Though he is not regarded himself as a target of the inquiry - BAE acknowledges that the inquiry is aimed at the company - Mr Said has been a business manager for the sons of Saudi crown prince Sultan.

He has previously conceded that he has been an intermediary on Saudi arms deals struck over 20 years. He is credited with playing a key role in launching the Al-Yamamah deal in 1985, which has brought £43bn of revenue to BAE and has been the focus of the SFO inquiry.

Mr Said has always denied receiving commissions from BAE.

Legal sources say the SFO is likely to want to inspect his accounts to see if they show whether BAE payments were passed to members of the Saudi royal family, and when. Officers have been looking at whether any payments were made after 2002, when they were outlawed.

According to City sources, Mr Said's link to the investigation emerged after official notification to the arms broker by the Swiss authorities that access was being sought to bank accounts of a company registered anonymously in Panama.

Both the Swiss legal authorities in Bern, and the SFO director, Robert Wardle, have been keeping their moves secret.

Swiss authorities said yesterday: "The office of the attorney general of Switzerland confirms being in charge of the execution of a request for mutual legal assistance in criminal matters from the UK serious fraud office relating to this case." They and the SFO refuse to give any further details. But after Mr Said and other account-holders were alerted by the Swiss, he hired the City law firm Clifford Chance to represent him.

A series of British newspapers were briefed that the latest Saudi contract to buy Eurofighters was in danger and that the SFO should "put up or shut up".

The MoD, which is negotiating the deal to sell Eurofighters, remained silent.

The only person with the power to halt joint SFO-MoD police inquiries is the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. But Britain is party to an OECD agreement, under which national economic interests are not allowed to stand in the way of efforts to stamp out bribery. Britain criminalised overseas corruption in 2002, but has not yet brought a prosecution.

Lord Goldsmith has been scrupulous in not bringing political pressure to bear on investigators, Westminster sources say. To do so would cause political uproar. Yesterday, a Lib Dem frontbencher, Norman Lamb, said: "The idea that pressure from a foreign government can hinder a serious criminal investigation is abhorrent."

BAE said: "BAE Systems is not obstructing the investigation and continues to fully co-operate with the SFO." Their spokesman said: "We will not be commenting on any point of substance. This cannot be taken as any kind of admission."

 

From a kebab shop to Oxford: unlikely rise of the fixer in the biggest ever arms deal

Billionaire Wafic Said straddles worlds of Saudi royals and Westminster
David Leigh and Rob Evans  - Wednesday November 29, 2006  The Guardian

 

Wafic Said is one of Britain's wealthiest men, owning country houses, private jets, a stable of racehorses, a Picasso and a Matisse. But how he accumulated his estimated £1bn fortune is a much more opaque question.

At the age of 30, it was not obvious that he would later live such a gilded life. Born in Syria, he came to Britain and helped his brother run a kebab restaurant in west London in the late 1960s.

 

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It was there the son of an eye surgeon made connections that were to transform his life. He became friends with two young Saudi princes: Bandar and Khalid. A charming man, he was - within a few years - organising their financial affairs, making investments and looking after their property.

By the 1980s, he was persona grata with the Saudi royal family including the princes' father, Sultan, defence minister then but now Crown Prince. Wafic Said was well-placed to manage the Saudi way of doing business. He is credited with helping the regime buy British in 1985 in the biggest arms deal in history, known as Al-Yamamah.

Whitehall files suggest the Tornado aircraft concerned were over-priced by as much as £600m, and Saudi dissidents were quick to suggest payoffs to some ruling Saudi princes.

Wafic Said's role as a fixer was initially secret. Nowadays, he admits he was an adviser on the deal, but has always denied receiving millions in commissions. He has said : "I did not receive any commissions from the Al-Yamamah programme and nor am I an agent for British Aerospace. Due to my contacts in Saudi Arabia, I played a very small role. The big role was played by Lady Thatcher."

It has been alleged that Mr Said employed Mark Thatcher as an unofficial back channel. Mr Thatcher has consistently denied allegations he received up to £12m as part of the Al-Yamamah deal. But Mr Said certainly had entry to Mrs Thatcher's circle, donating an estimated £500,000 to the Tory party.

After Labour came to power, the 68-year-old became a confidant of Peter Mandelson. Their introduction is reported to have been made by Charles Powell and his wife, Carla. Mr Said had met Powell, now Lord Powell, in the mid-1980s during the arms deal, when he was Mrs Thatcher's chief foreign affairs adviser. The peer is close to the Syrian financier, who made him chairman of one of his companies. Lord Powell is also on BAE's payroll as an adviser.

Lord Powell is the brother of Tony Blair's chief of staff at No 10, Jonathan Powell. Contacted in China yesterday, where he was accompanying the trade secretary, Alistair Darling, on a trade mission, Lord Powell declined to comment on whether he had discussed the SFO inquiry with Mr Said. But he said he had "not discussed anyone's Swiss bank accounts with No 10 Downing Street".

Married to an Englishwoman, Rosemary, with two children, Wafic Said now has houses in Mayfair, Paris, Marbella and Monaco. But his most ostentatious property is his 3,000-acre Oxfordshire estate, which he bought in 1987. He has spent a reputed £30m on it.

He runs a charitable foundation these days. He gave £250,000 to the victims of the July 7 bombings, and £20m to set up the Said Business School at Oxford.



2 NOV 06 – THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY HAS ARRIVED IN THE UK - OFFICIAL.

 

The UK’s Information Commissioner warns us that there is a CCTV camera for every 14 people in Britain. The cameras capture people up to 300 times a day as they go about their usual business. The new National Health System is intent on uploading the medical records of all 60,000,000 UK subjects to “The Spine” – where they will be auto-updated with every medical visit, treatment and event – with access given to 250,000 health workers, the police, security services and anyone else the government deem fit. There is a new and ever growing DNA police data-base. All credit-card transactions, Internet searches, phone calls and emails are monitored and logged. Cars and clothes are increasingly fitted with anti-theft chips which track the vehicles and trousers – and mobile phones are used to track people. Crackpot control freaks in authoritative positions are demanding that all vehicles be monitored at all times to banish harmless traffic “crimes”; which include speeding, crossing white lines, invading bus lanes, parking, etc, etc, etc and etc.  Store cards record what we buy. There is a proposal for chips in refuse bins to monitor what we throw away. An article in today’s Guardian predicts that it will soon be possible to make an internet search such as ‘what was my wife doing at 2.30pm last Tuesday?’ and get an accurate answer. It is ironic that the extremely precise science of computer engineering has created these tools, now adopted by the most unbalanced, fascist and insane elements in society.  In his worst nightmares, George Orwell never dreamed Big Brother would be so empowered. Today Britain leads the world in prurient surveillance. And tomorrow the inquisitive, wide eyed human race will follow.

 

If global warming does not get us first, as last week’s Stern Report predicts it will, and if Bird Flu’ does not wipe us out, what will all this surveillance do for society?

 

After some decades of data errors, gross privacy intrusions by the morbid, stupid and credulous key-hole monitors; after violent reactions by the spied upon, and increasing power being handed to the gossips and self-righteous who want to spy on (and curb) their neighbours’ lives and bodily functions; the majority will eventually react and banish the underlying concept of “sin” which drives and legitimises the spying. This revolution will end the religious guilt that has sustained armies of clerics for millennia. It will be led by society’s celebrities and leaders, who will crack under the strain of having spy-cams inserted in every orifice and up their lavatory pans. “Yes! Even the Queen wipes her bottom. We are all equally human.” All trivial ‘offences’ will be seen as normal, acceptable, human behaviour, within the bounds of acceptable life-risks – and will be struck from the statute books. Sane traffic, travel laws and moral laws will emerge which will include the liberalisation of all our small self-indulgences. But, to bring about this state of relative sanity and reality there will be an horrific period of finger-pointing-hysteria and ‘we-know-best’ restraints – based on the primitive god-inspired-village-elders codes. There will be spied upon people ostracised from society with or without reason. There will be people incarcerated due to errors in the data. Third nipples will at last be discovered under armpits and glittering eyed zealots will punish the ungodly. There will be people whose credit, livelihoods and futures will be ruined. It will be as terrible as and worse than George Orwell predicted – but eventually the healthy majority will take control away from the deluded and sickly curious – and the world will, eventually, be a better and economically more just place for the flood of useful information which remains in circulation. We are about to witness the end of illogical rules, which are currently enshrined or assumed in society’s moral and religious codes – and the beginning of international Intelligent Cooperation based on accurate facts. But it will be hell getting there.

2 OCT 06 – MICROSOFT CHALLENGED.

 

The Guardian reports that monster food supermarket chain TESCO, with 1,300 stores, has announced its own software packages, Ability Office, to compete with Microsoft Office and other programmes such as Virus protectors and photo-editing. TESCO is starting a price war with prices as low as £20 sterling, compared to £300 sterling for an equivalent M/Soft package. The software is written by Formjet, Cambridge, UK. Now - if it only works…

 

2 OCT 06 – "LET THEM EAT CAKE". & HEARD THIS WEEK AT A DINNER-PARTY …"IT IS THE NATURAL ORDER THAT 5% WILL ALWAYS OWN 90% OF THE WORLD"

 

This month, Marie Antoinette is being renovated. The archetypal example of uncaring, greedy, vapid French aristocracy who married Louis XIV when she was 14 years old, did not, it is now claimed, ever utter the infamous words "Let them eat cake" or even brioche. She was the victim of a bunch of English criminals who set her up for blackmail by printing pamphlets accusing her of everything from starving the poor to incest - and far worse. The blackmail worked and the French court paid up in exchange for all the pamphlets. But a zealous bureaucrat archived some at the Bastille and when it was stormed by the revolutionaries the pamphlets were found - it was decided to believe the lies - and tens of thousands were printed.  And the rest is history.

But - the curse of aristocracy did not end with the guillotining of a few thousand French and Russian landowners. Boardroom privateers have learned the secrets of how to raid the treasuries - regardless of company results - and, more important to them, of aristocratic-counting. "One for You - One for Me" What a nice man. "One for You - Two for Me" Its OK I suppose "One for you - Ten for Me" Golly - but managers are really hard to recruit aren't they? "One for You - A Thousand for Me" …Well he's such a rich man; I'd better kow-tow to this and work harder. "One for You - Ten Thousand for Me" …Heavens. God must favour this man. I'd better bow down at his feet. He must be a superman.

 

The Guardian newspaper reports that (mostly male) directors have awarded themselves 28% increases this year and take an average of 100 times the standard pay package. Gosh they must be good. In the UK about 1,300 of these new-aristocrats enjoy the bonanza and ensure all the money stays in the club by surrounding themselves with supportive and very well paid advisers and Non-Exec Directors. As corporations are owned by shareholders and have thousands of employees and suppliers who want to be paid - it is time these self-serving, self-important, infinitely greedy people were curbed by legislation. The Guardian still has the grace to refer to their "rewards" as "earnings". 

 

 

 

 

11 AUG 06 – WIRED DEMOCRACY – AN HISTORIC PRECEDENT.

 

While the nation reels under the “greatest terrorist threat ever” requiring passengers to dump their hand luggage and all and any liquids before boarding their planes (we await publication of the evidence of this threat with interest), Big Brother may unintentionally be ushering in the political era of direct people power – and be hastening the end of voting individual political representatives into power. The Guardian 11th August 2006 reports that the UK Premium Rates Services watchdog, ICSTIS, is taking seriously complaints from 2,700 TV viewers that they telephoned the low-brow, crass, reality, Channel 4, TV programme ‘Big Brother’ in response to invitations to vote for/against residents of the Big Brother house; only to have their majority votes ignored and their democratic decisions reversed by the TV producers. The voting is via high premium rate telephone lines and as the advertised service seems to have been abused, ICSTIS is considering a $5 million fine by way of refunds to the voters. What a precedent.

I predict that this event, allowed just 100 words in the media, will be hugely more important for the world than the terrorist scare – which is dominating the media, which is devoting about half their time and broadcasting to the bomb in baby-milk news.

 

12 Jun 06 - British Sex on the Net – Time Magazine

 

 

These statistics support the findings in Brett Kahr’s report, below.

Pornography on the Net – 9th May 05, which is also a survey from the UK.

 

 

 

TIME MAGAZINE 12th June 2006 published more of their enigmatic stats: