2007 NEW EPOCH NEWS,
Telework News, Electronic Revolution, Future-Shock, News Blog, Wednesday, 06 May 2009 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
06 May 2009
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
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 Studies – SW2000 Intelligent Transport
Telework Transport Environment Economics
Universal internet
access - Power to the people – 6 May 2009.
Surveillance Crisis – Cyber War - 23 October 2008.
Financial Crisis – Part Two – 7 October 2008.
Financial Crisis – Saved from my radical self by judicious editing – 18
September 2008.
Give us back our money!– Letter to The Guardian newspaper - 15 September
2008
It’s those pesky kids again, stealing valuable works of art - 25 July 08.
Mobile phones and cancer - 25 July 08.
Open letter to the Prime Minister. 16 July 08.
23 June 08 – Will the world’s thick-headed transport and energy planners
ever get it?
7 April 08 – Famous Journalist liquidated?
12 March 08 – Point and Counterpoint – Worried about the “Credit
Collapse” ?
19 February 08 – Capital repatriation flood begins with a trickle.
11 February 08 – Offshore Exiles – Repatriate, Repatriate, Repatriate.
11 February 08 – Kids on-line.
17 January 08 – Greenfield and Darwin.
11 October 07 – Breathless Big Brother/ Sister.
3 October 07 – Oxford Brooks & Big Bucks for Bus Owners.
25 September 07 - Teleworkers – one-third of UK workforce.
25 September 07 – The MIT $100 laptop gets to market.
19 AUG 07 – GLOBAL FINANCE – OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
18 AUG 07 – PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF THE GLOBAL BANKS?
13 AUG 07 – FUNDAMENTAL REDSIGN OF TRANSPORT AND CARS
2 JUL 07 – TAX FORCE & POVERTY.
13 FEB 07 – E-DEMOCRACY WILL BE TONY BLAIR’S LEGACY
29 NOV 06 – THE SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL, OXFORD.
2 NOV 06 – THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY HAS ARRIVED IN THE UK - OFFICIAL.
2 OCT 06 – MICROSOFT CHALLENGED.
11 AUG 06 – WIRED DEMOCRACY – AN HISTORIC PRECEDENT.
12 Jun 06 - British Sex on the Net – Time Magazine
9 MAR 06 – PESKY PIRATES THREATEN BLUE MOVIES.
24 FEB 06 – $80M CASH STOLEN FROM THE BANK OF ENGLAND.
24 FEB 06 – SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL – PORNOGRAPHY FOR THE NANO-TECH
GENERATION.
3 JAN 06 – US INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES INTRUSIONS CRITICISED
3 JAN 06 – MIT DEVELOP STACKABLE CARS
3 JAN 06 – ENRON CASE THREATENS DIRECTORS WITH 25 YEARS.
7 DEC 05 – A diversion into Intelligent Design
4 NOV 05 – BIG BROTHER in the workplace – A backward step
4 NOV 05 – Microsoft invest in VOIP & “Live Office”
24 OCT 05 – Time is running out, maybe – The oil fuel crisis
19 OCT 05 – GALILEO is Watching You
12 OCT 05 – Hands off our Internet!
10 OCT 05 – GOOGLE and free libraries.
7 OCT 05 – God guides George Bush.
7 OCT 05 – Youngsters make their own news
7 OCT 05 - $100 laptops run on LINUX.
23 SEPT 05 - Tracking Offshore Funds.
5 SEPT 05 - Hurricane Katrina. The
Scrooge society.
26 AUG 05 - To google or not to google.
26 AUG 05 - Music files go legit’
31 JUL 05 - The Future – Accurate social and scientific predictions
17 MAY 05 - Brain Tumours from cordless & mobile phones debate
continues
14 MAY 05 - US Supreme Court to Rule on film and music controls
10 MAY 05 - Feature Films on Mobile Phones
24 APR 05 - Music Industry pur-sues schoolchildren swappers
9 MAY 05 - Internet Pornography, Masturbation and Self-Abuse
16 MAY 05 - Electronic Paper Screens
16 MAR 05 - 344 Million customers a month
16 FEB 05 - Nokia and Microsoft Make Music
16 FEB 05 - Who is listening? The Mafia or the Government?
13 FEB O5 - BT channels money to fraudsters
12 FEB 05 - More WEB Music Downloads
3 FEB 05 - Spammers mock the US laws
20 JAN 05 - VOD – PVR – DVD’s – NTL – BBC – ETAL
20 JAN 05 - Super Fast Broadband
7 JAN 05 - Cell-phones change body’s cells and genes
The transport letter the Guardian dared not publish – Tuesday 21st
December 2004.
Pirating films – Wednesday 15th December 2004.
Round-up – Thursday 25th November 2004.
SPAM fried by court – Monday 8th November 2004.
Banks overdose on spam phishing scams– Monday 8th November
2004.
WorldCom directors in Court – Monday 8th November 2004.
Pirate Movies – The big players start a war – Thursday 28th
October 2004.
Drowning in Ignorance – Friday 22nd October 2004
EPICUS – Embryonic E-Democracy & Money Laundering – Friday 22nd
October 2004
NEW
EPOCH NEWS: ARCHIVES FEB04-DEC04 AUG03-FEB04
JUN02-AUG03
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
Japan 94,000,000 internet users -74% of pop.
92% of the population in
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
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
Most computer savvy people are
convinced that all communications are already being recorded; in the
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.
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
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 E
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
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 (
That
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.
(
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
1) Lead - do not wait to follow
others - in creating all the energy
2) Lead - do not wait to follow
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
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
Noel Hodson (Mr)
Coordinator, FOODTUBES
"THE TRANSPORT INTERNET - REALLY FAST FOOD"
Runner-up - 2008
http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/foodtubes-project-team.htm
http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/NCH18NOV07LewisMediaGroupV8.pps
SW2000 Intelligent Transport
16 Brookside,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 –
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
11 October 07 – Breathless
Big Brother/ Sister.
Email to
BBC Radio 4,
(Editor - The proposed laws
would presumably be enforced by satellite and computer tracking of the novice
drivers.)
3
October 07 – Oxford Brooks
At least
one major shareholder in these privileged, privatised bus companies has
bought a castle in
LETTER TO THE OXFORD TIMES -
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
...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
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
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
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
The
***************
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.
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 –
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
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
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,
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
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 -
Today's
(17 AUG 07) Guardian headline and Larry Elliot's scary analysis of the
(possible) $54 billion deficit on $1,300 billion of
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:
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
Noel Hodson
16 Brookside
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
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
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
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
As a footnote –
the instincts of the majority of
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
…And maybe, airing these lessons on
how to get things done in the
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
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.
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
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
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
Both
the Swiss legal authorities in
Swiss
authorities said yesterday: "The office of the attorney general of
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
Lord
Goldsmith has been scrupulous in not bringing political pressure to bear on
investigators,
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
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
At
the age of 30, it was not obvious that he would later live such a gilded life.
Born in
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.
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
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
Married
to an Englishwoman, Rosemary, with two children, Wafic Said now has houses in
Mayfair,
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
2 NOV 06 – THE SURVEILLANCE
SOCIETY HAS ARRIVED IN THE UK
The
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,
2 OCT 06 – "LET THEM EAT
CAKE". & HEARD THIS WEEK AT A DINNER-PART Y …"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
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
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TIME MAGAZINE 12th June 2006 published more of
their enigmatic stats: |
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9 |
million
British men downloaded pornography from the Internet, last year. |
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1.4 |
million
British women -ditto- |
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Our assumptions |
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Population of the |
60,000,000 |
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Lifespan |
72 |
Years |
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so born PER YEAR |
833,333 |
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50% are male and 50% female |
50% |
50% |
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Men who downloaded images in 2005 |
9,000,000 |
1,400,000 |
Women who
downloaded images in 2005 |
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Males born per year |
416,667 |
416,667 |
Females born per
year |
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AGE |
AGE |
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Interested in sex with access to
Internet from |
14 |
14 |
Interested in
sex with access to Internet from |
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to |
80 |
54 |
to |
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years |
66 |
40 |
years |
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Adult sexual males |
27,500,000 |
16,666,667 |
Adult sexual
females |
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Males with private/home access to the
internet? |
33% |
20% |
Women with
private/home access to the internet? |
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Men with private access |
9,075,000 |
3,333,333 |
Women with
private access |
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Use pornography |
100% |
42% |
Use pornography |
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9 MAR 06 – PESKY PIRATES
THREATEN BLUE MOVIES.
The new rival technologies which
compress full length, studio-master-quality versions of films onto
blue-laser-disks for home players (25 gigabytes of data) are both designing
anti-piracy codes into the disks. The blue laser is a shorter wavelength than
the “old” DVD red laser and can pack more data onto a disk. Two recording
industry giant joint-ventures are creating different systems and both hope to
make the other redundant – and to become the solo world standard manufacturer.
“HD-DVD” (Toshiba, Microsoft & the DVD Forum) uses both sides of the disk
with AACS copyright protection encryption in the playing-machine and on the
film-disks. “Blu-ray” (Phillips, Sony, Panasonic, & Dell) uses one side of
the disk with SPDC and AACS protection. AACS (Advanced Content Access System)
has been developed by a pre-competitive consortium of both teams. SPDC
(Self-Protecting Digital Content) is designed by Cryptography Research of San
Francisco. Neither system will play the other’s disks. The risk of such highly
encrypted codes and software is that they may become corrupted and prevent
honest and legitimate customers from playing films. SPDC will provide a
telephone help-line on the assumption that hackers and pirates will not call
and risk being discovered – whereas genuine customers will call – and be given
the correct codes. (Summarised from New Scientist 11 March 06).
Personally, if I had settled in on a winter’s evening with a glass of wine and a plate of sandwiches, to watch War and Peace on my new Blue Laser machine – and was faced with phoning a help-line and fiddling around with encoded settings – I’d be more likely to put an axe through the whole system and throw in the garbage, than to persist with fixing it. Maybe I’d wait until the second time it failed before utterly destroying it.
24 FEB 06 – $80M CASH
STOLEN FROM THE BANK OF ENGLAND
It is worth noting that even in the
high-days of the Information Society, thieves can penetrate the defences of
Securitas, the Bank of England’s money carrier, and without violence, drive off
with £50M sterling in new and used bank notes; a good old fashioned heist. What the whole if Britain is pondering, is
how can the gang launder that much cash in a society where all banks are
required to report any unusual cash transactions and even second-hand car
dealers have to report sales of old cars for cash. Answers on a post card
please to Mervyn King, Bank of England, City of
24 FEB 06 – SMALL IS
BEAUTIFUL – PORNOGRAPHY FOR THE NANO-TECH GENERATION.
New Scientist reports that Google
research shows that furtive searches for “adult material” constituted 8.5% of
desktop computer searches, 5% of PDA’s, and a whopping 20% of cell-phone’s.
Have you ever compared the size of a cell-phone screen with a desktop’s? Surely
only the youngest adults, with astonishing eyesight and rapid thumbs, can
access and relish such minuscule images. Does their vital equipment match these
tiny screens? Can we from the older generations use this as evidence of the obvious
decline and demise of youth? In defence of teleworkers, it would seem that
91.5% of searches via computers are not seeking pornography – so can we assume
they are getting on with the job?
In further defence of the old fashioned, the same issue of New Scientist reports that normal orgasm with a partner releases 400% (four times more) of the calming and satisfying hormone prolactin than does orgasm through masturbation – and that this was found in laboratory trials. Where do people get these lab jobs and how are they advertised?
18 JAN 06 – BIG BROTHER
SUED.
British writer, Christopher
Hitchens, who supports going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and is considered
to be “right-wing” in European terms, has joined the American Civil Liberties
Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and US editors and writers to sue
President Bush, the chiefs of the NSA, CIA and FBI and others for illicitly
tapping their phone calls and emails, without the required Court overview. The
President claims he was right to spy, to conduct his war on terror. (Source
Guardian 18 JAN 05). What are the bets on the complainants winning their cases?
But in any event it highlights the scurrilous uses that administrations will put
the internet and World Wide Web and advanced telecoms to. We can only say “God
Bless
Other American news is that the
mayor of
The Index of the Japanese Tokyo
stock exchange has “plunged” 5% overnight due to revelations of false
accounting in one of the larger Internet search companies. Thousands of small
investors are struggling to sell – but as ever, as is universally true, they
are denied access while the big investors do their dealing. Prediction - These
small investor losses will be nothing compared to the coming siphoning off of
billions of small savings from the about to be privatised Japanese Post Office
bank. Will the honest Japanese citizens be permitted to take these matters to
court?
9 JAN 06 -
Over the Rainbow. Will you survive it?
New Book - A page turning tale of survival and courage and the foul
murder of an inspired heroine, set in
3 JAN 06 – US
The White House and US agencies are
under fire for bugging phones and emails without the usual restraints and
checks & balances. President Bush claims the illicit spying is for our own
good citing the war on terrorism and excuses the placement of hidden cookies on
the PC’s of all who visit certain government web-sites. He really should read George
Orwell’s 1984, if only to learn what his administration will do next. In the
meantime – remember to run a ‘spyware’ cleaner regularly. There are some
excellent free-software versions on the WWW. (Source Guardian 30 Dec 05)
3 JAN 06 – SPAMMERS CURBED?
3 JAN 06 – MIT DEVELOP
STACKABLE CARS
US designers at MIT have built
prototypes of a lightweight Smart Cities car which “stacks like supermarket
trolleys”. The researchers see the day when we will all use such
interchangeable public vehicles which will be acquired, used and then left for
another driver at journey’s end – as easily as calling a taxi. The 2 seat cars
can manoeuvre forwards, backwards and sideways. They have electric hub motors
and more technology than a moon-lander. (Source Guardian 29 Dec 05). Combine
such cars with electric power from high and low tides – and the carbon threat
will disappear. With the ocean temperatures up 2C it is already too late to
reverse global warming – but we can still prevent global boiling. Minimum
Weight Vehicles may be on the 2006 agenda – And about time too.
3 JAN 06 – ENRON CASE
THREATENS DIRECTORS WITH 25 YEARS.
Congressional investigators cite a
“dizzyingly complex” scheme which ENRON created to enrich its executives and
hoodwink the Internal Revenue. ENRON’s CFO was recruited from Arthur Andersen
Inc, which was also the “independent” auditor. CFO Andrew Fastow has cut a deal
and will assist the prosecution. ENRON boss Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey
Skilling are facing 25 years. While it is awful to contemplate any person being
incarcerated for 25 years,
7 DEC 05 – A diversion
into Intelligent Design
The media has recently given a lot of time and space to the
debate of Darwinism-V-Intelligent Design. At the extremes of the arguments, on
the one hand wild-eyed, Godless, white coated scientists insist that the
universe is accidental and evolution is chaotic, while on the other hand,
rabid, thundering preachers claim every word in the Bible is true and, as the
Bishop of Armagh calculated in 1630-odd, God made the universe sometime in
4000BC – or thereabouts – and seeded the ground with fossils just to confuse us.
As a brainwashed lapsed Catholic, once top of the class in Religious Studies,
what do I believe?
The universe does give rise to intelligence, as defined and
typified by our own intelligence, so intelligence has existed, in potential,
from the outset. The laws of physics (and chemistry & mathematics etc),
which we have so far discovered, are capable of intelligent extrapolation and
application; these laws and their interactions we would define as
intelligently, or at least logically, structured. So insofar as intelligence
and logic are defined by us merely mortal humans, I believe the fundamental
structure of the universe does manifest intelligent design. However,
Intelligent Design as preached by the most committed bibliophiles comes
perilously close to a belief in predestination – which is a heresy.
Predestination assumes that God not only made everything as it now is, but avers
that what will happen in the next moment, hour, day, week, year etc. is also
designed by God. It is God’s Will. As such predestination denies mankind’s
free-will, denying our ability and responsibility to choose good or evil or
change ourselves or our environment; it thus denies sin and, if the logic is
followed through, leads inevitably to despair. “Despair” is one of the Cardinal
Sins which condems Catholics to the burning fires of Hell for All Eternity –
whoops. So, to compromise as we enter the new epoch of intelligent cooperation,
my position is that the universe is based on vastly intelligent and
immeasurably powerful principles, but that these interact in extraordinarily
complex ways to manifest, animate and give existence and life to all the
phenomena we observe. In summary, the universe and all things in it, does
evolve, split second by split second, governed by fundamental laws – which can
be interpreted as laws of science or laws of God or both.
And finally, why isn’t the organising principle of the Life
Force, so much in evidence wherever we care to look, defined as one of the
fundamental laws of physics alongside Gravity, Electromagnetism, The Weak
Nuclear Force and the Strong Nuclear Force?
4 NOV 05 – BIG BROTHER in
the workplace – A backward step
Major abuses of Information Society technologies are occurring at
work. Termed ‘dataveillance’, relying on electronic tagging, archived CCTV
film, keyboard spyware, surveillance techniques and voice recordings, some
lunatic managers and paranoid technicians are insisting on employees being
tracked at all times. Satellite tracking is being considered. Employees are kept
under surveillance in their cars, at their desks, whenever they move, whenever
they speak and in the washrooms. Such
intrusion must surely be a clear breach of human rights. The perpetrators
should be locked away in mental hospitals for their own and the public’s
benefit. ‘Battery Hen’ employees have a moral right to rebel and fight back –
it’s time for a techno-war.
4 NOV 05 – Microsoft
invest in VOIP & “Live Office”
In
4 NOV 05 – Alt. Energy
.com
Just when we thought the world had run out of energy, medic and
MIT electrical engineer, Randell Mills, has formed Blacklight Power Inc. to
exploit a limitless, clean and cheap (1.2 cents per kilowatt hour) source of
energy he claims to have discovered called HYDRINOS. By reducing the orbit of the single electron
of a hydrogen atom, the process releases heat energy; in much the same way that
the chain reactions in atom bombs and hydrogen bombs release surplus energy
when the unstable explosive element is converted to a stable element. The major
doubt about the claim is that it contradicts the current rules of quantum
mechanics. Randell Mills relies on his own, heretical, theory “classical
quantum mechanics” (Physics Essays 2003). The debate rages on.
24 OCT 05 – Time is
running out, maybe – The oil fuel crisis
Time Magazine published one of its excellent summaries – of the
oil crisis. Professor Emeritus at
To the Letters Editor - Time Magazine - 25th Oct 05.
I'd like to
add some thoughts to your article 'How to Kick the Oil Habit' by Michael D.
Lemonick. I was director of a small, car prototype workshop where in 1979/80 we
worked on
The Can-Do
society can do all these things. The
Regards - Noel Hodson
19 OCT 05 – GALILEO is
Watching You
The EC is making progress with plans to put 30 telecommunications
and tracking satellites, of 600kg each, in Earth orbits 24,000 kilometres high.
The Galileo network will have higher resolution than the existing
12 OCT 05 – Hands off our
Internet!
This IS the epochal battle for the future. (NB - On
the 4th day of the major earthquake disaster as the Indian
sub-continent rammed
The
10 OCT 05 – GOOGLE and
free libraries.
Google are working with libraries at the Universities of
Michigan, Harvard, Stanford,
7 OCT 05 – God guides
George Bush.
The UK Guardian newspaper reports on its main banner headline, 7th
Oct 05, that President Bush told Palestinian leaders that God had ordered him
to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and to settle the Israel/Palestine
conflict. My brother was also once an
alcoholic, who thanks Alcoholics Anonymous for rescuing him 19 years ago. He
says it takes three years for a teetotal, once heavy drinker to regain their previous
level of sanity (which may never have been good) and the most common syndromes
triggered by drink are paranoia (enemies hidden everywhere) and grandiosity
(God speaks through me). Let’s hope that God doesn’t tell Bush to wage nuclear
war or liberate the recreated 1918 Avian Flu virus, which as Spanish Flu killed
50 million, from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology or the US Center
for Disease Control.
7 OCT 05 – Youngsters make
their own news
A significant change is happening among 14 – 21 year olds. An ICM
Poll for the Guardian (UK) of 580 14-21 year olds shows that 31% have their own
Blog or Website, writing their own news, 56% read a daily paper among 58% who
say they are interested in current news. The two-way communications power of
the internet is wooing youngsters away from traditional, delivered media into a
medium of debate and conversation. Rupert Murdoch has just paid £332 million to
buy a youth networking site Myspace.com.
7 OCT 05 - $100 laptops
run on LINUX.
MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built a clockwork
(driving a dynamo) powered, use anywhere, computer to be sold for less than
$100 to third world populations. The computer runs on the free open-source
operating system LINUX, which is a rival to Microsoft’s global dominance. Mobile Phones will also be designed for impoverished
regions. As American consultant Andrew Page, coordinator of the EC Telework
Forum, said “Wire the World before it Falls Apart”. It seems the world has
taken Andrew’s advice and another step into the new era.
And finally – on 7th October 05 – you will be
delighted to learn that Music Recording Industry has pulled back from the brink
of disaster. They have been threatened for at least a year by schoolchildren
swapping songs and tracks – a heinous crime meriting courts, goal, fines and
public floggings; but the industry has now adapted and is making even more
money by selling pop music – and this applies to classical as well – via
downloads from the Internet. The paranoid, delusional, probably drunk and
drugged, music executives and their lawyers and hit-men can report back to God
that they’ve solved the potentially fatal business problems posed by the junior
school kids – until the next technological innovation. Maybe the industry could
learn to lead technology instead of always scurrying to catch up. Just hire a few ten year olds.
23 SEPT 05 - Tracking
Offshore Funds.
As Hurricane Rita, a possible force 5 storm heads for
"WHERE DOES IT ALL GO? - YOU WORK AND WORK AND NEVER GET ANYWHERE? - WHERE DOES IT ALL GO?"
We discuss LVT and taxes on capital as potential contributions
to
But, while making the tax system fairer and more logical with
LVT, the UK, all OECD countries and impoverished nations could immediately
replenish community funds, pay all the outstanding bills demanded
by social justice and have surplus treasury funds, if illicit offshore funds
are repatriated. The Guardian reports today (23rd Sept 05 - page 29) that Paul
Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank, is working on a deal for Swiss Banks to
return money pilfered from Nigeria, starting with a £250M hoard; as part of his
new campaign against corruption. There are probably few UK citizens/residents
who have personally salted abroad £250M - but the amount of UK funds diverted
by the super-rich to tax-havens has been estimated to be as much as £2 trillion
(see Christian Aid report below). This is sufficient to repair all our schools,
pay the National Health Service deficits, pay decent pensions and give everyone
a tax holiday. Or it could be distributed as capital to every family (about
£2,000,000,000,000 / 25,000,000 households = £80,000 each). They /we could
use it to buy land or invest in
If the
*******************
18th August 05
Excuse me for again communicating with you about offshore tax and money laundering. As a significant percentage of land is also held offshore - it seems to me to be also relevant to the efficient operation of land taxes. The Information Society can track all this money.
There is more than enough illicit cash and assets to solve world
poverty, now, at a stroke. How to do this is to introduce a new global
currency without warning - e.g. the EUROYENDOLLAR and oblige all wealth to be
converted (or to become valueless) and in the process to explain its source and
pay due taxes. This technique was used after WW2 to catch blackmarketeers and
in the process
Andrew Pendleton reports in Christian Aid News, Autumn 2005:
e.g.
e.g.
Pendleton estimates poor countries lose US$500 billion each year in evaded taxes - 6 times the global aid budget.
Of the US$500B Raymond Baker, tax expert, estimates US$200 billion is corporate taxes; US$250 billion is wealthy individuals and US$50 billion is corruption.
The
Tax Justice Network estimates US$11.5 trillion (more than 12 times the UK annual Budget - NH) is held offshore (US, UK, EU and Pacific Rim citizens - NH). This US$11.5 trillion - $11,500,000,000,000 - may be the tip of the iceberg as it excludes laundered profits of businesses.
Christian Aid is launching a campaign to repatriate off-shore funds (and surely - to close the offshore banks ?- NH)
SEE
THE FUTURE! Without money!
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2516 - After Global Warming
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The EPICUS Party for Informed Consensus has been announced. It
offers radical policies for E-democracy and radical changes in many other
areas, including a call for the repatriation of all illegal offshore funds back
to their countries of origin. Honest owners would then demonstrate their
legitimacy and claim their funds. The transfer and hiding of these mysterious
assets, “funny money”, thought to be as much as $14 trillion dollars across the
World, has been greatly enabled by the Internet and WWW. In the good old days
only very rich people could arrange a “back-to-back” where they would lose
money in their own country, generating a capital loss for tax purposes, and
simultaneously make the same amount – less the brokers’ fees – in a tax haven.
Metal, Commodities and International Stock Brokers were the usual
money-laundering intermediaries. Big business would supplement back-to-backs
with “staging post companies” in tax havens, through which the businesses would
purchase their own parts or services at low prices – losing money in their own
countries – and then sell it back to themselves at high prices – skimming off
huge non-taxable profits and transferring money to a tax-haven. Today however,
thanks to Telework and the Internet, ordinary high-earning doctors, dentists,
computer experts, small traders, car-dealers, drug-dealers and many others from
the hoi-polloi, are using staging-post-companies to hide their incomes, with
respectable off-shore banks that issue a high rolling credit card allowing
profligate spending anywhere in the world – without all those nasty taxes to
pay. Will EPICUS help to roll back the
tide? (See the EPICUS
Manifesto)
5 SEPT 05 - Hurricane Katrina.
The Scrooge society.
Hurricane Katrina, a force 5 storm, hit the USA Gulf of Mexico
states and New Orleans on Sunday 21st August 05. For a week, the
world watched on TV as people died of thirst and neglect. 30% of the local
police walked out rather than tackle the emergency – they should all be sued
for breaking their contracts and be charged with manslaughter. Seven days later
the first significant government assistance arrived. It is estimated that 10,000
have died (NB – FINAL TOLL Oct 05 is 964 dead), several thousand of those
deaths in the week of neglect. While the media was able to get in and out of
the stricken areas, local, federal and state aid was paralysed.
My initial estimates, gleaned from the media, across the gulf coast
and
In the final analysis, this disaster highlights the unrealities
of the current socio-economic system, which sells us messages of universal
wealth, health, education and happiness, but in fact is still based on an
underclass, oppression, poverty, ignorance, selfishness and greed. There are
massive dislocations between the Real Economy
– which is overflowing with real goods; the Money Economy – which is concentrated in the hands of the top 4%;
and the electronic/energy/media economy, The
Information Society – which singularly failed to inform the population of
the dangers, of their escape routes and of the help available; which immediately
communicated the plight of these hurricane victims to billions of voyeurs,
including me, but was unable to help them – though it was fun, wasn’t it,
watching them die, and brought us some great TV moments. Were the
26 AUG 05 - To google or
not to google.
The media reports a “war” between GOOGLE, the search engine company, and Microsoft which owns search engine MSN (Microsoft network). Google founders Sergey Brin 31 and Larry Page 32 are deemed to be worth $20 billion while Bill Gates is worth $46 billion. As Bill and Melinda Gates are giving away most of their fortune and as Google’s founding motto is “Do no Evil” – a war may be an inappropriate term, more suited to the old order. Perhaps both corporations are succeeding simply by being constant innovators who are better at the jobs they do than others; and they both make hugely complex technology available to the general public – they are inclusive organisations, not exclusive.