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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


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Posted -  11/01/2009  :  06:04
New Year, new topic. If you want to see the old one do a forum search for same title but 2008.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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gearce
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941 Posts
Posted - 16/05/2010 : 06:22
Thanks


LANG MEY YER LUM REEK

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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 21/05/2010 : 07:56
My mate Martha asked me for a paper for her students at Carleton. Here's what I sent to her.

 

WHAT WENT WRONG

Blair and Brown.

You can't separate the war from the answer because it is part of the same syndrome. In political terms, Brown Blair and Mandelson achieved a miracle when they got in in 1997 with that vast majority. Even they never expected such a margin and in truth that was down to the fact that the Tories were at such a low ebb, riddled with sleaze, internal division and lack of any credible policies, they made it easy for Labour.

Once in power Blair finessed Brown into letting him have first crack as PM while Brown got Treasury. Blair did this by promising he'd hand over at some non-specific date but reneged. Mandelson wasn't trusted by either and was never a candidate for top office.

The seeds of decay had been sown long before the 1997 election. Blair in particular headed a clique in the party which was convinced that old style left of centre Labour was unelectable because the bulk of the voters they needed for power no longer lay in the mass of the workers but in the middle classes, particularly the shire vote so they deliberately watered down the old Labour precepts (Clause IV a good example) distanced themselves from the unions (Their main pay masters) and dropped old Labour figures from positions of power in the party. They never managed to get complete control of the National Executive Committee (NEC) but used other ways of reducing their influence. At one point Blair appointed a Party Chairman while the NEC thought that their chairman was automatically the chair of the Party. To bolster finances Blair, Mandelson et al started wooing big donors and were very successful. Nobody knows what promises of preferential treatment were offered as bait but what is certain is that when in power the Labour administration gave big industry and the City an easy ride.

In power B&B decided that the best thing to do was to keep Tory economic policies until they had the confidence to modify them. The basic tenet was conservative Chicago School based policies of lower taxes, smaller state and sound money. One of the problems here apart from the basic flaws in Friedman type economics was that because of their nature they couldn't shrink state control, they were insecure and tried to micro-manage everything, even down to how to rear children. Central control, big state government under a quasi presidential system allied with market led fiscal policies was never going to work.

In order to get the control he needed Blair relied more and more on presentation, spin and downright fudging of statements from the centre, in most cases completely ignoring Parliament. Major policy announcements were made to suit media deadlines and the first the back benchers heard was when they turned the TV or the radio on. Most back-benchers were spineless  and went with the flow. The ones that protested were marginalised. So, once Blair had the power he virtually ignored Parliament unless it suited him. Decisions were made from the new centre of power, the sofas in his office in 10 Downing Street, the cabinet was used as a rubber stamp for policies already decided, often in un-minuted meetings. (The biggest IT scheme in the world, the computerisation of the NHS was decided in a twenty minute private meeting and is now widely regarded as a disaster)

As for the electorate, they were completely ignored as well, they had served their purpose. The policies that New Labour followed not only widened the gap between the rich and the poor but the rate of increase accelerated as well. The relationship between Blair and large corporations meant that there was always a tendency to protect privatisation already achieved by the Tories (Railways a scandal) and introduce it by the back door into education, the NHS and even government itself with 'out-sourcing' polices a la McKinsey style management (amazing how many politicians did a spell with them in early days). Party subs had always been collected at the grass roots by local parties who forwarded the money to London. Blair altered this and instituted a central 'Reader's Digest' style management based in Central Office. This removed the basic raison d'etre of the local parties between elections and they withered. The biggest example of ignoring the electorate was the massive anti-war march which was completely ignored but the same attitude was evident in any approach to Downing Street, they even ignored their own advisory bodies.

Brown as Chancellor was lucky, he got into office at the start of the biggest bull market ever seen and thought that the flood of money was down to his policies. He made many mistakes, the disastrous abolition of the lowest tax band which hit the poorest workers, the raid on the pension funds when he removed some of their tax advantages and started them off on an even steeper decline. The reneging on manifesto promises to restore the link between state pensions and earnings instead of the link with inflation imposed by the Tories, this meant that pensions, in real terms, started to decline. He thought the City could do no wrong, they were the goose that was laying the golden egg and despite warnings did nothing to restrain the worst excesses. The mergers he allowed created the mega-banks which, when the crunch came, were too big to be allowed to fail.

When Blair eventually realised which way the wind was blowing he graciously stepped aside and allowed Brown to claim his prize which was a poisoned chalice. The best candidate in the world couldn't have dragged the party and the country back and Brown wasn't the best candidate. A son of the manse, he never stopped biting his finger nails to the quick, a small thing but indicative of tremendous inner insecurity which was evidenced by the need for control, mood swings, facial ticks  and a disastrous camera manner. As things got worse so did he and it was painful to watch him in the later days of government.

As the global financial situation became clear there was no policy reaction from the government. The mantra was 'Not me Guv, it's the American mortgage market', this coup[led with assurances that the British economy was the strongest in the world and best able to withstand the shock. As the mega-banks collapsed it became more and more obvious that Brown's public statements were at best mistaken and at worst a cynical smoke-screen. At no point in the run-up to the election did Brown admit the truth, that the system of deregulation was at fault, that the government had been sleep-walking and that our political systems were broken. Even the Parliamentary expenses scandal was mis-managed. It was obvious that deep political currents were on the move, the tectonic plates were shifting and the first people to realise this and start to manage the situation would be in power for the next twenty years.

A straight Tory win in the election would have been a disaster, they would have been out of power after one Parliament. The surprise coalition between the Tories and the Liberals is possibly the best stroke of luck (and that's all it was) that the UK has had in sixty years. I can find very little fault in the clear policies that are emerging. Tribal politics is still there in the background but the situation is so obviously perilous that they are having to keep their heads down. We may have seen the quantum shift that was needed to get us on to a practical course best able to get us in gear with global reality. We are no longer a world power, we are a small island off Europe searching for a role. Joe Kennedy might have been right in 1939 when, as ambassador to the Court of St James, he reported to the White House that Britain had lost an Empire, was seeking a role and couldn't resist continental aggression.

SCG/21/05/10


Stanley Challenger Graham




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tripps
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1404 Posts
Posted - 21/05/2010 : 15:07
"the best stroke of luck "
Good to hear the result described as such. Many commentators seem to imply that it was a carefully crafted outcome rather than just happenstance.. My preferred result would have been the Tories (or anyone but Brown/Mandelson) with a very small majority to keep them in check. I guess we have a similar outcome, so as you say, let's give them a chance. It should be an interesting ride. 


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 21/05/2010 : 17:16
Martha has mailed me and given me an 'A'. I told her to be sure her students knew that in their system I am A RED!. McCarthy would have had me up as an enamy of the state, along with the American Boy Scouts Association. (Yes, they were raided....)


Stanley Challenger Graham




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gearce
Regular Member


941 Posts
Posted - 26/05/2010 : 09:13
A pretty young lass from Moyass
Had a truly magificent ass
Not roundy and pink
As you possibly think
It was brown, had long ears and ate grass.


Find more here


LANG MEY YER LUM REEK

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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 27/05/2010 : 07:50

WHAT'S GOING WRONG NOW?

Digging a bit deeper into the entrails, reading the runes and trying to forecast the future... (Yes, I've been reading too much about Religion and Magic!) I'm getting worried about some long term trends. I'm also aware that my age may have something to with my pessimistic view of some of the things I have noted.

Human beings have always been fascinated by superlatives, why else would we have a 'Guinness Book of Records'? We seem to have an in-built mechanism that always assumes that if a good thing is bigger it has to be better. As long ago as 1972 people like Schumacher were questioning this belief and arguing that Small is Beautiful. I wonder what these thinkers would make of the world we see today?

My misgivings stem from relatively small things, the abolition of small local authorities, mergers in businesses that eventually resulted in the global corporations, the dire effects of the supermarkets on the small retail trades and producers, I don't need to detail all these, you know them as well as I do. The point I want to make is that Small is Beautiful has been overtaken by Bigger is Better. The question I have is whether this is right, is it better or could it contain the seeds of a disaster.

In the recent unpleasantness in the world credit market we saw the results of institutions who were 'Too big to be allowed to fail' playing the market with virtual money and having to be bailed out by the governments (the taxpayers actually) and the consequent effects on public spending with the knock-on effects for the general economy. The ironic thing about this process is that the very institutions and systems that caused the problem have been the first to 'recover'. Actually I'm not too sure that they have, a healthy balance sheet in a parasitic system based on virtual transactions doesn't carry a lot of weight as evidence with me. Their auditors and ratings setters never saw the crunch coming or if they did, kept quiet about it for reasons of 'Market stability' Notice how facile I have become in this economic gobbledegook, this brand of stability seems to have a very precarious foundation to me.

There is another trend that bothers me. As government moves further away from the old fashioned market place based on real work and added value into the realms of virtual money and economies based on the 'service industries' they have less real funding and have to look for economies. One favoured route is to cut back on direct state spending and to 'out-source' key elements of the social infrastructure. Surprise surprise, the major providers are the large corporations or funding from the market for takeovers of state enterprises like transport, health, education and even the business of government itself. How much of the defence budget is channelled through these providers? There is of course a major drawback to this strategy, in addition to the cost of the service provided there is the leakage of profits to the shareholders. It seems obvious that this cannot be a saving but the argument is that the providers are more efficient than government and can provide the same services cheaper. In order to do this they cut back on the expense of providing the social good and in the end this means less staff and a worsening of the service. I'm sure you can identify plenty of evidence for this.

There is an essential pre-requisite for this process, the acceptance that while Bigger may be Better in the corporations, this doesn't apply to governance, small government is beautiful as far as the corporate bosses are concerned. De-regulation, less supervision, the maximum freedom to grow and subsume more and more power. Think repeal of the Glass Steagall act of 1933, and read FDR's inaugural speech again.

So why should I worry? Perhaps the world is unfolding as it should and I am just an old man looking at progress and disliking it because I am a political and economic dinosaur. I recognise this but can't help balancing against that the sum of my life experience.

I look back to other crises I have lived through and reflect that it wasn't tribal politics and Friedman style economics that got us through then, it was cooperation, intelligent governance and deficit financed economics. The very things that have been missing for the last forty years.

We saw what happened when financial institutions couldn't be allowed to fail. The rescue package had to come from the real economy and big government. What happens if the giant corporations we have entrusted with what were always functions of government by out-sourcing fail? Can we find another rescue package? Do we have to bring all those functions back in-house and if so where does the finance come from?

I read an article yesterday about the feeling of optimism amongst the capital holders as they watch governments divesting themselves of social functions in order to scale back government spending. One expert enthused, “There are going to be some wonderful bargains out there!” So are the winners in all this going to be the banks and large corporations again?

Here's my basic problem, my experience tells me that eventually all empires fail and I can't see how the hegemony of the global corporations can be any different. It looks to me like a recipe for eventual disaster just for that one reason. Add to this the other shocks we know are coming, shortages of energy, food and even space for growing populations. What are the chances of mass migrations in search of survival? Are we truly committed to forward thinking in an attempt to forestall the worst effects of what seems inevitable? You'll notice I have left out climate change, not because I don't believe it is happening but because I have no idea what effect it is going to have.

Of course I have a get out of gaol free card, I am in my 75th year and it may be that I will pop my clogs before the worst effects arrive. However, that doesn't stop me worrying about humanity on general and my descendants in particular. How are their lives going to be affected?

I've just noted the number of question marks in this paper, not surprising because I can't see the future clearly, all I can see are small clouds on the horizon no bigger than am man's hand. Perhaps that's the condition of the elderly through the ages. Maybe I am too pessimistic, I hope so but on the evidence I think there may be some substance to my fears.SCG/27/05/10


Stanley Challenger Graham




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gearce
Regular Member


941 Posts
Posted - 31/05/2010 : 08:34
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST - 2010

Didn't think too much of this year's winner ...... In my humble opinion there were better entries


LANG MEY YER LUM REEK

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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 28/06/2010 : 07:52
I listened to Ian Duncan Smith giving his version of Norman Tebbitt's 'on your bike' policy the other day and reflected that instead of taking measures to encourage people to move in search of jobs it would be more productive to address the question of how to get jobs into the areas where they live. The laissez fair policies of the last 100 years have resulted in the concentration of wealth in the SE and puts more and more pressure on the infrastructure. I object strongly to his linking the problem to council housing. There were more economic migrants from private housing in the 1930s and I suspect this is still the case.

The bottom line is that the industrial centres of Britain fuelled prosperity for 200 years and as resources ran out and patterns of trade changed  they were allowed to fester, hardly anything was done to help them. Even today the bulk of development money goes to the south of England, in any serious restructuring of our manufacturing and service base something should be done to address this imbalance. Daniel Defoe saw the problem 300 years ago when he called London 'The Great Wen', he had slightly different reasons for his criticism but his basic complaint that London was sucking in too much power still holds.

I know that it's a vain hope but we need to examine the powers of government very closely. They control far too much at the moment. We got into this state of governance during the two world wars and the economic struggle to survive after WW2 and many powers were never relinquished. We have a state today which is as tightly controlled from London as Russia was from Moscow during the height of Communism even though the sanctions used are different. Think of the ways that your life is controlled, monitored and directed by powers over which you have no control. Think of the liberties we have lost during the 'War on Terror'. 

What worries me most about ID's pronouncement on labour mobility is the fact that it betrays the fact that the old Tory mainstream values are alive and well. Add to this the attack on the poor that the VAT rise represents because it is a regressive tax, like a Salt Tax, it hits everyone with no regard to ability to pay and you begin to see exactly the same policies that were being pursued after WW1. 'Sound Money', 'Wage restraint', 'Balanced Budget' and 'Self-responsibility'. In other words, preserve the status quo for the wealthy and the capital fund holders and let the bottom 85% pay. You haven't seen any rescue effort for the general economy on anywhere near the scale of the package given to the banks.

Too depressing to go on but mark my words,  we are all going to pay for these mistaken policies. The politicians should read the history books and realise that the way to increaseactivity in the economy is to pump money in at the lowest level and allow it to circulate through the system getting the benefit of the multipying factor. It will all finish up with the banks in the end but do some good in the process. Ask yourself what would have happened if half the bale-out money had been used in this way on public works to stimulate the economy. In the 1930s this was done but never on a large enough scale. It took a second world war financed with deficit spending to get us moving again. Every historian who has looked at the mistakes of the 1930s agrees that in the end the basic problem was distribution of wealth and the obscene concentration of capital in the top 10% of holders. This problem is getting worse and one way or another will eventually have to be addressed.

Everone agrees that growth through new industries, new ways of adding value, more support of entrepreneurs and the use of government funds for pump-priming is the only way out of our crisis. What are our leaders doing? They are concentrating on balancing the books by cutting spending and consumption and leaving the core value adding industries to fend for themselve. We don't seem to have learned anything. Depressing isn't it.....


Stanley Challenger Graham




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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 19/08/2010 : 08:32

POWER.

I've been thinking again and the problem is that the more you do it the more you realise how little you can be sure of. You can't even guarantee that you are being original, you may be simply demonstrating your ignorance because some more intelligent person has already visited your problem and provided a definitive answer. I shall just have to ignore the possibility that I am making a fool of myself and go forward regardless!

I have a core belief that every circumstance we address can be chased down to an issue of control. I was triggered into one of my trains of thought yesterday when I heard a politician quoting Lord Acton on power. The incongruity of this statement got me to thinking about the famous dictum so I did a bit of digging into the context in which it was originally used. I suspect that very few of the people who use his famous phrase have done this. Here's the original context:

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd[sic] the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it."

The extract is from a letter he wrote to scholar and ecclesiastic Mandell Creighton dated April 1887 and the trigger for it was discussion of the crisis of 1870 in Roman Catholicism over Pope Pius IX's promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Acton was a devout Catholic but nevertheless was vehemently opposed to the assumption of infallibility by the Pope. (Incidentally, the Doctrine of Infallibility is still in force.)

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No wonder he is still being quoted over a hundred years later. It sounds as true now as it did then. Examining this so closely got me to thinking more deeply about it, is this how power works? What exactly did he mean? Perhaps more importantly, what is he not saying?

He is not saying that all use of power is corrupt but that it tends to corrupt. He is particularly suspicious of absolute power and by implication suggests that the level of power has an effect on the potential corruption. I also think he is implying that the greater the power, the more chance there is of the wielder succumbing to corruption. We also have to make a decision of what he means by corruption. We should remember that, being an historian he had a hinterland of evidence for his statement, this was not an off-the-cuff remark.

Here I tend to go back to my core belief about control. It seems to me that the acquisition of power inevitably means an increase in the ability to control and that without proper safeguards this can be addictive and eventually damaging. Further, I believe that once the ethos of power is embedded in an individual or process it is progressive because the need for control of the process itself dictates that more power has to be wielded to protect the status quo. This is perhaps the most insidious and dangerous aspect of the problem.

When I heard the politician using Lord Acton yesterday it struck me as ironic that he was voicing the reason why unfettered power should itself be controlled. This raised the question in my mind as to how rigorous his thought processes were. Had he seriously considered the dangers of power? On the whole I doubt it.

Another influence is the fact that I have read 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein in which she examines the use of shock as an aid to psychological control and traces the use of the technique through the years and various manifestations culminating in the use of the theory to manage economic and political change, examples were the manipulation of states by arch controllers like Kissinger and Friedman and the enthusiastic adoption of their methods by successive administrations.

All this strikes a chord with me because we are watching a coalition government ditching publicly announced principle and pursuing a policy of rolling back those aspects of the state which we thought were advances in freedom and control of our lives. This process started under the Blair government using the pretext of the spurious 'war on terror'. The pretext has changed, it is now 'the economic crisis'. It would be boring to pursue this line of thought further in this context but I am forced to consider the fact that what many people see as the single most influential and beneficial political measure of the 20th century was the reform of the welfare state under the 1945 Atlee government. The key factor is that it was all achieved in a period of far greater financial stringency than exists today. It's worth noting that these improvements were made using the shock of WW2 as a trigger. The 'Shock Doctrine' can be a force for good as well as evil, it all depends on the mind-set of the people who wield the power.

And here I suppose we have my real beef. I have no confidence in my political masters. They lack experience and have no knowledge of history. Cameron believed that in 1940 we were junior partners to the US in the war against Hitler. It was only after he voiced this in a speech he made in the US that he got educated. Even then he has it wrong, he evidently doesn't realise that it wasn't until Hitler declared war on the US in 1941 that we became partners. So what does he and his government know about the long march of improvement since the 19th century which moulded the society we enjoy today? How can he be sure that his 'reforms' aren't simply Tory DNA coming to the fore? My mind goes back to the pursuit of 'sound money' during the inter-war years and the damage and misery it caused. How can they be sure they aren't making the same mistake?

I heard a good story on Radio 4 this week. It was during a programme paying tribute to Jimmy Reid the Communist agitator who led the work-in at Clyde Shipbuilders and persuaded Edward Heath to give the yards financial assistance and keep men in work. A reporter for the Glasgow Herald was sent by his editor to interview Jimmy after the news broke that he had rejected Communism and joined the Labour Party. The reporter asked him what he had learned during his philosophical upheaval. Jimmy looked at the man and said “Beware of Certitude”. I like that. Perhaps our masters should take note, read some history and think deeply about Lord Acton. They may learn something.


SCG/19/08/10





Stanley Challenger Graham




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gearce
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941 Posts
Posted - 21/08/2010 : 10:47
TODAY'S CONUNDRUM  - ELECTION RESULTS

ANSWER - LIES LET'S RECOUNT


LANG MEY YER LUM REEK

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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 02/11/2010 : 06:50
I came across this from 2007 as I edited a text. Perhaps worth reading again?

 CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

I was sat in front of the TV last night waiting for a programme to start and found myself swapping between two channels, one carrying a programme about a 16 year old lass who was having voluntary surgery to enhance her breasts and the other about the enormous bonuses being paid to the young Turks of the City of London. Both raised my ire.
In the case of the young lass there were the obligatory shots of her breasts (I know, I may be cynical but is this the only reason these programmes are made?) To my inexperienced eye they were quite small but perfectly formed and all the world to grow in. However, the girl had decided that they were 'too small' and her parents had the means to indulge her. £3,000 was thrown at the problem and the end result was that she looked like a 'glamour model', whatever that is. On a technical note I was interested to see that the whole procedure of implantation was done through an incision in her belly button, no scarring.
I got to thinking about where she had got the definition of 'too small' from. I soon abandoned this line of thought because it seemed quite obvious that she had succumbed to the constant bombardment of the media as to what is the ideal configuration and had been backed up by her mother who had also had the procedure. The thing that interested me was the fact that she had the desire and her parents had enough money to access the necessary medical technology. Problem solved.
At the same time I was skipping across to the other programme about the obscene levels of remuneration amongst the top traders in the City and what they did with their money. You know as well as I do what they were doing, the manufacturers of fine champagne, fast cars, enormous yachts and estate agents are making hay. There is also a thriving industry based on the need for some agent to source the goodies to save the well-heeled customers the time and trouble needed to find the extreme holiday, expensive watch or whatever desire occurred to them.
I think the word that best describes what I was looking at is hedonism.  'Pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially to the pleasures of the senses. Philosophy. The ethical doctrine holding that only what is pleasant or has pleasant consequences is intrinsically good. Psychology. The doctrine holding that behaviour is motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.'

I don't blame the individuals for succumbing to their desires, they are young and human and who knows what I would have done at 25 years old in those circumstances. However, I was not in that position and I have to say that this level of consumption engenders nothing but distaste. The question is why? It's not envy, I am perfectly satisfied with my life and my lot. It goes deeper than that and I found myself reverting to very simplistic economic theory.
One phrase repeated time after time was that the traders (all young men) 'deserved' the right to 'make' these enormous sums of money because they were clever and worked hard. My problem here is that they don't actually 'make' anything. The money that they shuffle round and skim off is based entirely on goods and resources made valuable by the input of capital and labour. Some part of the latest Maserati is financed by a peasant toiling in a rice paddy or a miner coughing his lungs up in China. They produced the food and raw material which eventually enabled a skilled engineer to take a lump of metal and add value by making it into a part of the car. Transfer this thinking to the rest of the goods and resources and you have this enormous chain of effort and skill actually creating the value of the resource or good. My beef is why should these leeches be able to take such an inflated share of the products of honest labour. (1% of the population in the UK controls 33% of the personal wealth, the highest it has been in modern times and growing. The biggest share of this pot is now held by people in the finance industry.)
All right, I'm re-inventing the wheel, this is not original thinking. My problem is that there is an imbalance here in the system and if history teaches us nothing else, imbalance tends to generate instability. I have news for you, if the instability grows to the point of collapse, the people who suffer most won't be the young Turks, it will be the peasant in the paddy field, that's my beef. I know we need a financial industry as an essential segment of management but if it assumes control and bleeds off such enormous wealth to the point of creating instability in the system, how can we regulate this when the levers of power are being held by those who benefit most? Marx and Lenin had a stab at it and while they did have an affect, their system wasn't effective. Christianity has tried, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.' Control of the'commanding heights of the economy' failed as well.
I don't know the answer and it troubles me. That young lass with her enhanced breasts and the lads in their fast cars controlling obscene levels of possessions are perfect examples of the symptoms but no guide to what the answer is to the underlying problem of imbalance. I have this dreadful suspicion that there will be some external reason for a readjustment like global warming or a pandemic which will bring us all to the same level. My only certainty is that I hate the present direction of travel.

19 October 2007


Stanley Challenger Graham




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gearce
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Posted - 07/11/2010 : 06:48
These are screenshots from the same website taken on two different days and times, 4th November at 11.15 am and 7th November at 02.25 pm.






If nobody else visited the website between these times, then surely I should have been visitor 1.000.001 on the 7th.


LANG MEY YER LUM REEK

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Tizer
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5150 Posts
Posted - 07/11/2010 : 12:07
Gearce, it will be a permanent notice, there to make you `feel good' and `feel lucky' so you'll decide it's a good time to buy something from them or fall into their trap. It's standard practice to use such tactics to put people in the right mood for being fleeced.

Stanley, like you I feel strongly about the `money men', the traders who are simply gambling with the nation's money. We need some traders to allow companies' shares and bonds, government bonds etc to be traded on the stock market. but they don't need to be paid Porsche-price salaries to do it. There are now many more than needed and they are there to make money for the Goldman Sachs and similar and for themselves too of course. Completely surplus to requirements yet destabilising the stock markets of the world. We need to change the rules on trading to cool it down and get back to the essentials. There will be a lot of squealing from `the City' of course but we've got to be firm with them.


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Local Historian & Old Fart


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Posted - 08/11/2010 : 06:13
All we can do is keep pushing.....


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Stanley
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36804 Posts
Posted - 05/01/2011 : 05:52
Brought back in view of the current discussion on 'What attracted your attention'


Stanley Challenger Graham




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stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
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