Five more years of hell as the Tories win the UK election

Five more years of hell as the Tories win the UK election

By Dark Politricks

Did any of you foresee the result of the recent UK general election in which the Tories won an overall majority despite every poll leading up to the election calling it too close to call.

There was a general expectation across the media that there would be another hung parliament and probable coalition government with the Lib Dems as King Makers.

The multitude of polls preceding the election were very wrong, whilst the exit poll was spot on.

This led to ex Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown to embarrassingly have to “eat his cake” on the subsequent BBC’s Question Time due to his comments on election night TV that:

“If these exit polls are right I will eat my hat” – Paddy Ashdown

His party, the Lib Dems were almost wiped out and went down to single figures losing 49 seats and leaving just 8 MP’s in parliament.

Major party figures including Danny Alexander the ex chief secretary to the Treasury, lost their seats in the decimation of the party.

Along with 2 other party leaders, one of which changed his mind after a day (Mr Farage), the Lib Dems leader Nick Clegg immediately resigned leaving the future of the party in doubt along with Labours.

The Labour party also had a bad night, almost being wiped out in Scotland, and losing 26 seats. However Labour still managed a 30% share of the popular vote despite pundits calling the election “too close to call” right up until the votes came rolling in for the Tories across England.

The Lib Dems were never going to be forgiven by their core voters for joining the right-wing Tories instead of their natural cohorts, the left leaning Labour party, in a coalition. Many Tory back benchers were very unhappy at the unequal number of Lib Dem ministerial posts that were given out to their junior partners in the collation that was, as we were kept reminded, in “national interest”.

Whilst they may have helped prevent some Tory excesses and helped push the amount you can earn before paying income tax up above £10k, they showed their lack of respect for the voters, mostly young and left leaning, when they broke a much publicised pre-election promise never to raise University tuition fees. This promise was broken almost as soon as Nick Clegg got made Deputy PM and access to ministerial chauffeurs and apartments.

The Lib Dems sign pledge with top students never to raise tuition fees

Tax breaks for the rich, a raise in VAT which is a tax raise that affects the poorest the most, a massive failure to reverse the huge police state Labour had built up and a decimation of the benefit system to save money instead of taxing the banksters who had caused the financial crisis were all unforgivable as well.

We were kept being told that the deficit was shrinking whilst in fact it grew along with the national debt. The last Government was not a success story at all.

Maybe Nick Clegg saw joining the Tories as his only chance to get some modicum of power whilst he could. He must have known the writing was on the wall when he basically stuck two fingers up at his constituents and joined the Tories. Letting the banksters get off scot-free, supporting the Tories war on Libya and speaking out for Israel instead of condeming it when it attacked Gaza which was quite common to hear when they were the third-party with no expectation of favours for power. However the change in stance and policy to fit in with the Tories were just some of the things that annoyed grass root Lib Dem voters.

He thought the electorate were willing to vote for constant coalition with a referendum on a change in voting but the country wasn’t ready for the watered down choice they had to make. Maybe if they had made their point after the recent election more people would have been willing to vote for a change.

You just need to look at how the popular vote in the recent election matched seats to see how many people would be pissed about the current voting system.

The Green party and UKIP together won around 16% of the popular vote (5,038,712 votes) yet only returned one MP each to Westminster.

Yet on the other hand the SNP won far less when it came to the popular vote, Scotland has a population of 5.2 million and only 1,454,436 people voted for the SNP, yet they took all but 3 Scottish seats, 56, a massive gain of 50!

They almost managed to take every single seat in Scotland but instead chose to leave one each for the major 3 parties taking the remaining 50 seats. The SNP are sending a nationalist mob down South who want to see an end to the union and more Scottish powers devolved. This includes the articulate and always enjoyable to watch debate, former leader of the party, Alex Salmond as an MP.

People who had never thought about electoral reform are now calling for it.

Those people who say we only just had a referendum on changing our first past the post system seem to forget that the choice on the cards for voters was not a proper proportional system but instead a form of alternative voting. This is where you would mark an alternative candidate who would take your vote if no-one managed an overall majority.

It does seem odd that Scotland’s 1.5 million voters can send 56 MPS to Westminster yet England can vote over 5 million to achieve just 2 MP’s.

From the BBC News site.

UK vote share after 650 of 650 seats

Political Party	% of Popular Vote
Conservative Party	36.9%
Labour Party	30.4%
United Kingdom Independence Party	12.6%
Liberal Democrats	7.9%
Scottish Nationalist Party	4.7%
Green Party	3.8%

So now without the Lib Dem’s “Steadying Hand“, as one of their election adverts put it. There to prevent Labour spending all the cash again and there to prevent the Tories from being too mean, we are now left with an overall Conservative majority.

That means that there is no-one to stop them hammering away at the poor whilst letting their rich benefactors and friends all off with tax cuts and a far too complicated tax system that provides enough loop holes for most of the Tory front bench to keep multi million pound trust funds overseas and away from the UK tax man.

Did you know that the UK has the longest tax code in the world?

Surely this is a money bomb for accountants and the rich looking for loop holes.

The Hong Kong tax code, widely held by tax lawyers to be the most efficient in the world, is a mere 276 pages long.

The British tax code which has tripled in size since Blair got into government in 1997 is currently in excess of 17,000 pages!

If our government really wanted to claw back some money from waste they would surely shorten this gargantuan piece of legislature.

As anyone knows the longer and more complicated a piece of legislation the more loopholes and get out of jail cards are to be found within its pages.

Instead they will carry on using their right-wing supporter rags of papers, the Sun and The Daily Mail, to attack benefits claimants and the poor. Obviously forgetting the fact that benefit claimants had nothing to do with the banking crash or the dramatic rise in the national debt and deficit under the previous two administrations.

Why is it we have still not seen any bankers jailed from the illegal behaviour from banks like HSBC who laundered drug cartel money, terrorist funds and more?

Instead they get $1.9 billion fines in-case the banking system is “destabilised“.

I don’t understand why their banking licence could have been kept whilst still jailing the bankers in control of the slush funds and drug cartel accounts as an example. London must continue to be the bankster capital of the world it seems. This won’t change under any Tory administration.

What will change under the new Government?

Well let’s watch embarrassingly as our country, who actually came up with the European Convention on Human Rights, pulls out of the Human Rights Act. This is despite the fact that it was written by Conservatives after World War II to show the newly freed countries that some things related to a countries ethics and morals should be set in stone and not relative to a countries current situation.

This will be something that will not only be a massive blow to civil rights in this country unless replaced by an English Bill of Rights that actually means something and is kept to, not invalidated bit by bit over the years as the US Bill of Rights has  been.

People don’t seem to realise that the Human Rights Act although abused by a small minority of terror suspects in jail or on control orders trying to prevent extradition to countries where they will be tortured – including the USA – is there to protect them as well.

You may read the odd cherry picked Daily Mail horror story about the new Abu Hamza we can’t extradite to a country X or Y where they maybe tortured or executed. Why, because we have morals and see ourselves as a civilised country not a 7th century Islamic State where heads roll as often as the weapons we sell them are unboxed.

The national debt will continue to grow due to the lack of GDP, plus the interest rate apartheid which sees banks loan money from the Bank of England at half a percent whilst the average man now has to rely on WONGA loans with an APR of 1,500%.

The current national debt stands at £1.36 trillion, almost triple the £0.53 trillion it stood at in 2008, the time of the economic collapse and grows at £5,170 per second.

As stated on the National Debt Clock website:

“Mainstream media headlines today are focused on Britain’s record national debt, which just surpassed £1 trillion, a figure that can only exponentially increase unless the entire mechanism of Government finance is overhauled. The truth however is much worse, factoring in all liabilities including state and public sector pensions, the real national debt is closer to £4.8 trillion, some £78,000 for every person in the UK.“

Our National Debt Problem

UK National Debt Over Recent Years

During 2007, the Labour government borrowed £37.7bn, of which £28.3bn was invested in big projects (the balance of £9.4bn represents the current budget deficit). However during the last government during 2013, the Conservative-led coalition borrowed £91.5bn, with just £23.7bn invested.

So when you hear George Osborne talk about fixing the hole in the roof or reducing the deficit / national debt, take it with a big pinch of salt.

Read this article by the BBC on the different terminology and numbers related to national debt and the deficit.

Instead of recouping and saving billions by doing just some of the following ideas they are mostly going to attack the poorest in society, both here and abroad.

Saving some money…

Save £34 billion by not replacing Trident, the non independent nuclear deterrent.

It really pisses me off when I hear MP’s call our rotating Trident submarines at sea an “independent” nuclear deterrent. This is because they all rely on US GPS satellite systems. Unless we put our own GPS system up into space we would always have to ask the permission of our US allies to fire any nuclear missiles anyway. Therefore it makes the whole system redundant. What if we had to go to war with the USA? Why not save the £34bn and spend it on the NHS instead. Nukes are not going to help in the war against terror and when China and the USA finally duke it out our piddly number of missiles is going to be inconsequential when it comes down to it. Satellites will be one of the first victims of any war between the US and China. Falling from the skies like rain drops in any major conflict as China and the USA race to become the superior technological and information power house before any real bullets or nukes are fired. As China showed the world in 2007 when it downed one of it’s own Satellites with weapons from earth, it is willing and able to take the modern battlefield that one step further and into space by making the US armies massive reliance on information and technology redundant.

Not blindly following US Foreign Policy and going to war

We seem to blindly follow US policy as if it’s our own. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the UK £20bn by 2010 and the final cost when you add in extras such as the cost to society due to the fact that a large proportion of homeless people, those with mental health problems and prisoners are ex service men will increase that by the end of 2015. Add to that the £1.75bn cost of David Cameron’s war in Libya and the cost we are now dealing with due to the failed states we have created across North Africa, people smuggling into Europe, and increased security checks on immigrants due to fears ISIS is using people trafficking to implant sleeper cells in the country and the cost of recent wars reaches £12bn. This does not even include secret wars such as our involvement training fighters in Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

Cracking down on Companies avoiding tax

During 2010-11, the HMRC estimated that companies were avoiding tax worth £4.1bn however some campaigners such as Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, think that the real figure could be £12bn or more. This is not even including the amounts of money “legally” avoided by our huge tax code that gives corporations such as Vodafone the means to avoid £6bn in tax during 2010, an act which spawned the anti-austerity protest group UK Uncut.

Added together legal and illegal tax avoidance could easily be in the £20bn+ figure per fiscal year.

These are just 3 things that could be done to prevent more austerity whilst increasing spending, generating growth by creating jobs and not wasting money on pointless exercises in hubris by going to war to destroy a country only to spend more money trying to re-construct it and deal with the aftermath of failed states such as Libya and the recent people smuggling epidemic.

Has David Cameron even admitted that the hundreds of people dying in the Mediterranean are related to the failed states of Libya and it’s neighbours which we helped create. From Tony Blairs 2004 kiss with Gaddafi in the desert to blockades to prevent immigrants reaching Europe in two easy steps.

Tony Blair makes up with Col Gaddafi in 2004

A cramped boat full of desperate people trying to flee the failed state caused by David Cameron and the Axis of Wars destruction

Will the Tory government do any of these 3 easy ways to save dozens of billions of pounds?

The answer is obviously no.

The divide between the rich and poor will get wider.

The people who keep the lights on in London won’t even be able to afford to live in the city they work in due to the average house costing £350,000. Even in certain rich areas of London like Kensington, up to 70% of houses are classified as “Second Homes”. Even the local paper shops for the rich people of Chelsea are shutting down due to the influx of rich Chinese and Russians buying up our capital city.

Instead the Tories will attack immigrants, benefit claimants, people who cannot get good jobs and rely on job seekers allowance and more diversionary tactics as they continue Maggie Thatcher’s dream of a total privatised country.

We only have 5 more years until we get another chance to vote for a party to represent us. The problem is there doesn’t seem to be a party on the horizon I can see myself putting a cross against anytime soon.

Labour is Tory Lite, and with the resignation of Ed Milliband, a person many could never imagine seeing as PM, much in the same way I can never imagine Boris Johnson as PM, let alone Mayor of London, we have no real party that represents the people anymore.

The Greens did well to get 1 million votes but with our current system of voting, one MP per million votes in England is not going to get us far and they still have an environmental edge that puts many off them despite the fact that if you read their manifesto there would be many aspects to it that you could find yourself agreeing with. Maybe it is just the fact that they are led by a woman and their only MP, Caroline Lucas from Brighton is a woman who puts many working class men off from voting for them.

Personally this election, I did as I said I would and spoilt my ballot paper. This was because there was no-one on it that represented my views. I live in an area where Tories have always ruled and there is no chance of Labour or Lib Dems getting in instead. In one election in my ward Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t even try to contest the seat which allowed the racist BNP to come 2nd!

I hoped enough people would do the same so that even this amount of spoiled papers would have to be recorded along with party numbers and shown in graphs such as the one from the BBC website I put on this page.

From anecdotal evidence from people I spoke to at various events and groups I know quite a few people also spoilt their papers.

The news even carried a story about someone who spent the time and effort to draw a tiny little penis inside the square of an incumbent Tory in Wales. However because the drawing was within the confines of the box it was actually counted as a vote rather than a spoilt ballot!

I would still love to know how many people did write “None of the above” or spoilt their ballot in some way or another.

If you took the effort and time out of your day to go and vote there should be a “None of the above” option by default to measure peoples dissatisfaction with local politicians or political parties. However because there isn’t we should create our own.

Hopefully by the time of the next election a party which doesn’t represent the Axis of War, Austerity, Tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the poor will emerge, a bit like how the Unions created Labour. The only exception is that we don’t want to see our new party being taken away from us slowly and infiltrated by MI5 to ensure when it becomes electable it’s going to be “establishment ready” like MI5 asset Tony Blairs successful attempt to turn Labour from a real Left wing socialist party to Tories with northern accents.

We have plenty of protest groups about but no political consensus or a political body that we can use as an umbrella for them to rest under.

Students, the young unemployed, the people who cannot afford to live anywhere due to the lack of cheap housing, the anti-war brigade, the pro privacy, anti GCHQ/NSA Pirate groups. UK Uncut, Occupy, anti-austerity groups, religious organisations and charities that manage food banks and support the poor. These are just a few of the protest groups around at the moment.

Groups helping wounded soldiers and soldiers disillusioned with the wars they have been forced to fight. People working 50 hour weeks on minimum wage or not being able to take loans out at decent interest rates due to interest rate apartheid. These are more people who might be looking for a new political home.

Basically anybody who doesn’t want to see the gap between the rich and poor get wider would be a perfect member or voter for such a Peoples Party.

In the meantime let’s just hope we still have a public NHS, a decent benefit system and proper jobs with decent pay in 5 years time rather than another tripling of the National Debt and more lies about reducing our debt that the current Chancellor likes to spiel.

View the original article Did you foresee the Tories winning the UK election at the main site www.darkpolitricks.com.

© 2015 Dark Politricks

Why Do The Icelandic People Hate Gordon Brown So Much?

Why Do The Icelandic People Hate Gordon Brown So Much?

By Dark Politricks

If you follow me on twitter at @darkpolitricks you will know I have just had a few days in Iceland. It was on my bucket list of things to do before I die and I had some cash so why not. I just wish I brought a video camera or better camera as the amount of rants I heard from taxi drivers about Gordon Browns actions during the Icelandic banking collapse could have filled 60+ minutes.

I had to get taxis as standing around in minus 10C waiting for a bus that will most likely drive past you isn’t much fun. However I am glad I did. Not only was every single taxi driver able to speak perfect English but they are on the ball when it comes to politics, international relations and how the world really works.

Every single person I talked to was sick to the teeth of Gordon Browns action to use anti-terrorism laws to freeze Icelandic money in British banks. Not only did this help worsen the economic crisis in Iceland but it made the Icelandic people think they had been betrayed by a friend and ally.

If you don’t know, Iceland kept the Brits alive during World War II by sending over fish for us to eat whilst all our trans Atlantic ships were being destroyed by German U-Boats. A little known fact is that per capita, Iceland lost the most people in the war, more than Russia, more than the Jews and more than the USA and UK combined. They only have a population of 320,000 (now), so a lot less back then, so you can see how many a few thousand people’s deaths would compare to the total population.

Iceland suffered their economic crisis between October 2008 and the 31 August 2011, which was the day where the international bailout support programme led by the IMF officially ended.

The economic crisis revolved around a few Icelandic banks which were offering stupidly high rates of interest which attracted many foreign investors including many UK local authorities. Our dear leader of the time, Gordon Brown, had told them to invest their money in the highest paying interest accounts they could find. The Icelandic banks were offering high rates and were thus used by many.

The problem was that these rates of interest were totally unrealistic and there was no security for screw ups. In the UK we get up to £85,000 protected if the bank goes bust. So the Government bails small account holders out up to that sum. However Iceland failed to do this for foreign investors and it sent Brown and co fuming.

Every taxi driver I spoke to said that anyone with half a brain cell could see these banks high interest schemes would fail in the end and they eventually did. However Gordon Brown was having none of it. The UK along with the Dutch, demanded that Iceland pay back all the monies owed with interest or they would be thrown out the IMF.

Gordon Brown froze any Icelandic money in UK banks and used anti-terrorism laws to do so. This prompted the Iceland’s prime minister Geir Haarde to call it “a completely unfriendly act” and was disgusted that a supposedly friendly nation was calling their country terrorists.

More than 25% of the Icelandic population (over 80,000 people) signed an online petition called “Icelanders are not terrorists”. The UK responded by cancelling its scheduled patrol of the Icelandic airspace in December 2008.

As Iceland has no standing army of its own it relies on other NATO nations to take turns in protecting it. The UK pulled out of this agreement leaving Iceland vulnerable to attack.

Iceland basically stuck two fingers up at these threats, kicked their whole government out when they seemed to bend over to the demands and took matters into their own hands by voting in a coalition government led by the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement.

They even won a court case in the court of the European Free trade Area, when the UK and Holland took Iceland to court over the failure to payback depositors in the failed banks. The court ruled on the 29th January 2013 in favour of the Icelandic banks and saved the country from having to pay back billions to foreign savers.

The EFTA court dismissed an application by the EFTA surveillance authority, which claimed that Iceland had failed to comply with an obligation to ensure compensation of a minimum €20,000 to Icesave depositors in the UK and Netherlands. Over €6.7 billion was owed to UK and Dutch investors and whilst the UK paid back the investors out of their own tax payers money, they then demanded that Iceland was to pay back the money to them.

However logic and reason won the day and when Iceland’s President’s Olafur Grimsson refused to sign an amended law on repayment he forced a national referendum on the issue and 94% of Icelanders rejected the move to payback the cash.

The judges have sided with Iceland in the matter and it was plainly obvious that the rates of interest were unsustainable and a payback to foreign depositors was unfeasible. The Iceland banks are actually paying back some of the money by selling off assets so that people won’t lose out – it is just the unrealistic rates of interest that won’t be given back to savers.

At the time the crisis resulted in massive migration from Iceland yet Iceland’s economy stabilized under the government of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, and GDP actually grew by 1.6% in 2012. However many Icelanders remained unhappy with the state of the economy and government austerity policies. In 2013 they voted back in the same people who were in power during the crisis, the centre-right Independence Party but in coalition with the Progressive Party.

Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland’s systemic banking collapse was the largest suffered by any country in history. The amount of money owed by the 3 Icelandic banks taken into national ownership was equal to more than 11 times Icelandic GDP.

They also threw a load of banksters into prison – can you see a trend here? These people included:

• Baldur Guðlaugsson, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, who was sentenced to two years probation by the District Court of Reykjavík for insider trading.
• Aron Karlsson was sentenced to 2 years in prison by the District Court of Reykjavík for defrauding Arion Bank in real estate dealings.
• Lárus Welding, CEO of Glitnir, and Guðmundur Hjaltason, Managing Director of Corporate Banking of Glitnir, were sentenced to 9 months in prison by the District Court of Reykjavík for a major breach of trust.
• Friðfinnur Ragnar Sigurðsson, Glitnir employee, was sentenced to 1 year in prison by the District Court of Reykjanes for insider trading.
• Styrmi Þór Bragason, President of MP Bank, was sentenced to 1 year in prison by the Supreme Court for breach of trust.

The other thing to note is that whilst Ireland and Greece are now suffering like hell due to their Governments subservience to the banksters and their German EU masters Iceland is recovering well.

Instead of loading future generations up to the eyeballs with huge debt, and suffering serve austerity like many European countries Iceland is well on the way to recovery.

They have had one of the fastest economic recoveries on record. They stuck to their guns and told the banksters to fuck off. This is a lesson others should follow.

GDP of Nordic countries including Iceland from 2000 to 2007

Not only do the Icelandic people do things their way, but they are the leaders in the world for press freedom and Internet freedom.

Everywhere I went, whether it was the airport, the bus from the airport, the hotel, pubs, clubs or restaurants, all had free WI-FI. No logons just Internet access wherever I went, it was great.

No wonder many companies who don’t want hassle from the NSA/GCHQ nexus of spy bitches base their servers there. It’s just a shame we are sucking data straight from cables and main routers and until other countries build their own Internet infrastructure the axis of spying will continue to do so.

It is also not coincidence that the owner of Lavabit, who closed his business rather than succumb to threats to spy on his customers, was told by his lawyers that Iceland was one place he could move to and setup his business to escape NSA spying and Security Letters.

You can watch his interview on RT.com below.

The fact that anti-terrorism laws were used and abused by Gordon Brown shows that their true intention was nothing to do with terror but more to do with control over people.

The same laws were used to attack an 82 year man who dared protest the Iraq war during a Labour conference. Walter Wolfgang was dragged out of the conference for daring to heckle Jack Straw and detained under the terrorism act in 2005. They were also repeatedly used by the previous Labour government to detain and question tourists and other photographers “daring” to take photos of London landmarks.

Gordon Brown was only following in the foot steps of Tony Blair, the war mongerer who took us into 4 wars, destroyed many civil liberties and did more to destroy the picture of Labour as the “peoples party” than any other Prime Minister in recent years.

However whilst the UK is languishing in debt, the Greeks are begging on the streets and the Irish are cutting back services and trying to find ways to pay back their own banking debts the Icelandic people are doing just fine.

If you don’t mind the cold, enjoy beautiful women and scenery then Iceland is one place to definitely consider going. Not only is everyone friendly but they all speak English and everyone I met was a good laugh. The fact that booze is so expensive yet the Icelandic people knock it back in gallons from 10pm to 6 am most nights must indicate that people are being paid enough to have a good time.

So whilst I had to apologise for my Governments behaviour constantly, I also let the Icelandic people know we also hated the Labour Government just as much as they do.

The fact that we are still suffering under many of Labours big brother laws, and that the farcical Protection of Freedoms Bill which promised so much when a Lib Dem idea yet turned into a “freedom from wheelclamping” bill just goes to show that none of our current political parties can be trusted when it comes to protecting our civil liberties and hard-won rights.

So just remember the next time the Daily Mail or Sun attacks the EU Human Rights Act or our PM threatens to pull out of it. We invented the thing in the first place after the 2nd world war. On top of that these rights protect you and me as well as the tiny minority of Jihadists the papers like to trot out as examples of the bill’s failure. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is the appropriate saying!

We don’t have a written Bill of Rights like the American’s (not that it seems to be doing much to help them anymore) so we must take what we can.

Until we get our own Bill of Rights and proper protection of free speech, without journalists boyfriends being detained at airports for revealing the massive spying our Government does on us, we should be happy for anyone who sticks up for our liberty.

The Icelandic people saw us as friends. When Gordon Brown froze their money it made it hard for them to import goods and prices shot up in their country. His act did more to harm them than the banking crisis in the first place.

The fact that a court sided with them just shows that he was in the wrong and they were right to ignore his demands.

Well done Iceland.

View the original article Why Icelandic people hate Gordon Brown at darkpolitricks.com.

Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?

Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?

By Dark Politricks

I just saw an advert on Channel 5 USA (a UK channel) in which a PPI Claims company said that if you had taken a loan out within 15 years and had added Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) then you could attempt to claim it back.

Now I had taken a load of loans out in my youth, with PPI, and when the first adverts started appearing the adverts were only saying that you could claim the money back if you had taken a loan out within the past 3 years. I didn’t do anything because my loans were 10 years old.

However it seemed that the time length that you could claim for was extending and extending every few months. It seemed to coincide with the UK finances getting worse and our GDP going down and inflation going up.

First I started seeing adverts for 5 then 7 years and then when I first saw an advert earlier this year for 10 years I was straight on the phone. I shouldn’t have gone through one of the “specialist PPI companies” however it was money I wouldn’t have got back if I hadn’t of attempted it in the first place – so in reality it was literally free cash in my pocket.

From an initial 3 years to 15 years is a long time and I have a feeling that the government is hoping that PPI payouts will help stimulate the economy by putting money back into people’s pockets in a stealthy Keynesian method without any government minister having to  admit to it of course! Austerity, Austerity – that is the only way says our supposed economic wizard George Osborne.

It is Georgey boy who’s claim that our deficit and debt would be reduced through his spending cuts and VAT tax rises would have started working by now. Anyone with half an eye can see they blatantly haven’t done the job.

Their are no private jobs rushing in to fill all the public ones he is gutting. He is forcing people off disability allowance onto job-seekers (a much lower benefit) and making them look for jobs that don’t exist.

He is introducing “bedroom” taxes  for the poor so that people with extra rooms have to give up more of their money or move across  the country to places where one bedroom flats exist. All the while he is cutting public services and yet at the same time he has reduced the top rate of tax for the richest people in the country. What happened to “We are all in this together”?

The politicians know the banks were mainly to blame for our current crisis and the UK is one of the most indebted nations on the planet.

This doesn’t only include Government debt but personal debt as well. All through the later 90’s, and the years of the Labour government, people were re-mortgaging their houses and spending the money or having loans literally thrown at them by the banks. I know for a fact I and many other people I know were.

After the first law suit over PPI was won by someone years ago the banks have had to set aside billions in case they had to pay out more to future customers who were mis sold PPI.

From The International Business Times

PPI has become the biggest mis-selling scandal to hit UK banks and they have repeatedly underestimated the scale of the problem.

Britain’s biggest retail bank, Lloyds Banking Group Plc , has set aside 6.8 billion pounds for PPI compensation. Barclays Plc has set aside 2.6 billion and RBS has provisioned 2.2 billion.

So far the banks have set aside around £20 billion and the payouts so far amount to £8.9 billion.

Payment Protection Insurance was meant to protect borrowers against redundancy and sickness , but it was often sold to customers who didn’t want or need it or who couldn’t claim it even if they took it out. People such as those with certain medical conditions or people who were self employed. Often, like myself, I had PPI added to my loans or credit cards without my knowledge!

The worst thing, in my mind anyway, was that if you had to claim (as I did once) the money from the insurance only lasted for a year. Plus the amount the insurance cost you worked out exactly the same as if you had added an extra years worth of  loan to your original debt. It was a total con!

Because the UK finances are in such a state and recent news reports show customers are holding back from buying goods. I have a sneaky feeling that the government is secretly hoping that the PPI payouts will be a way of putting cash into potential shoppers pockets to stimulate the economy. The added benefit of course is that it’s all at the cost of the banks who caused the mess in the first place.

To me it sounds like a good plan. The banksters are the ones who caused the mess and I am not joking when I said they used tot literally  throw loans at people.

For instance I was given a £5,000 loan when I left college with no job or way of paying it back. Then every year the same bank would give me an extra £5,000 – £7,000 loan and overdrafts up to £3,500 to pay back the outstanding amount and give me some more spending cash! It was truly a time when “debt was good” and people didn’t think about the future.

As a young man who didn’t really think he would have to pay back the money anyway (I had a bit of death wish back then, plus the money management skills of a frog) it seemed like free money and I grabbed whatever the banks would offer me. One of the things I often feel our schools let the population down with is real world lessons in living. How to manage money, how to look after yourself, how money works, how to use logic and reason and think for yourself.

Young men are worse than woman who are often taught these skills from their mothers so if the schools are not teaching the boys and they are not getting taught at home they are left to the mercy of the loan sharks and banksters. Shuffling money from one account to another to pay off monthly repayments and sticking to the minimum payment to keep them off your back is not exactly “good” money management!

Unlike other people I know who “went missing” for 5+ years and now have mortgages and are debt free. I honestly OR  stupidly (pick your own word) decided to pay off my debts. Even thought this took over 6 years I managed to do it. Therefore when I saw the opportunity to reclaim all the PPI which amounted to around £5,000 I took it.

Some credit cards I didn’t even realise I had PPI on at the time and on other banks I had no details apart from the name of the bank but their customer service department returned a list of 6 loan accounts taken out within 7 years. I used one of these companies on TV but didn’t realise they took a THIRD of the money as recompense for doing the job you could easily do yourself.

Luckily for me they forgot about one loan and I got £2,000 all to myself without deductions but I would recommend anyone who has ever taken a loan out in the last 15 years to check if they can reclaim the PPI on it.

The Government is not helping us and the banksters who caused the mess are still making billions therefore we should not feel sorry for them in the slightest.

Just remember if the EU can order the Cypriot government to just take 10% of any bank savings without your say then who is to say the UK government won’t do the same?

I would expect the time you can claim for any PPI to continue to go up and up until either the banks have dolled out all the money they said they set aside years ago but haven’t given out yet. Or until the UK GDP rises above a single percentage point for more than 3 months in a row!

To anyone thinking of claiming their PPI back I would definitely recommend everyone to do the work themselves. It is not hard.

You can just write t o the banks customer complaints department and ask for all your loan details that had PPI on them, then write a letter back saying you want your PPI money for any of the following reasons:

1. You were not informed that the PPI protection would only last a year.
2. The PPI was added without your consent.
3. You were self employed which meant the PPI wouldn’t cover you.
4. You were depressed or had another medical complaint that would have meant the insurance would not be paid out.
5. You were not informed you wouldn’t get the insurance if you were sacked.
6. The PPI insurance was not fully explained to you at the time. Most of the employees who sold the PPI will be long gone and those that remain won’t remember what  they said when they sold it to you. Therefore this is probably the best one to use as they will not be able to re-call what they said when they sold the loan to you.

A good thing to do is to write off to one of these PPI companies, get a payment pack sent to you and see what sort of questions they ask you to answer. All they do is use the answers and send the paper work off to the same places you could easily do. Therefore use these packs as a guide and write to the same Financial Ombusdman yourself if  the Bank doesn’t pay out after your first letter of complaint.

Remember – this could be your chance of getting out of any recent debt. If they are going back 15 years then I would guess that the majority of adults in this country would have had a credit card or loan within than time. Even if you don’t think you took PPI out it is worth checking in-case the bank added it on without your knowledge.

View the original article “Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?” at www.darkpolitricks.com

Simon Jenkins believes we should be giving the printed money to the people NOT the Banksters!

By Dark Politricks

I saw an interesting interview with Simon Jenkins on This Week last week in which he described how at the moment we are stuck in a liquidity trap and the only solution we have is to print more money in the hope it sorts out the dying victim e.g the UK.

As he said:

“the government would be better off giving the billions of pounds it plans to pump into the UK economy to the public in the form of a Christmas bonus.”

“The columnist damned the government plan to get out of recession, claiming “it’s fraud, it’s a scam, it’s a lie”.

However as the Bank of England enters phases of printing money – or quantitative easing as they call it, Simon Jenkins believes that they are giving the money to the wrong people i.e the banks.

He believes that instead of increasing the deficit by the Bank of England buying bonds from the banks and paying interest and all the other funny business our economy actually behaves like we should instead be giving the money direct to the people to stimulate demand in the dead economy before we suffer a lost 20 years like Japan.

Keynesian, yes, but he believes that although printing money could eventually drive up inflation – which we are doing already by printing money to give to the banks.

We should instead be printing it and giving it directly to the citizens and tax payers of the UK.

The same people who are now paying for the mistakes of the bankers. He believes that by doing so it wouldn’t be adding to the national debt or increasing the deficit as it wasn’t money being borrowed but printed.

By doing this demand in the economy will be created as the people will use the money to buy goods and services which in turn would help businesses who will start to invest and grow for the future.

Whether you like the idea of not what we have at the moment is a case of the government taking tax payers money as well as printing and borrowing it to hand it over to the same banks who caused the financial collapse of 2008 in the hope that they will in turn use it to help businesses.

In fact what these banks are doing are using the money to shore up their empty vaults to meet Basel Capital requirements that they must hold a certain percentage of money in their bank.

The fact that nearly all these banks have no money and it’s just one big stack of cards waiting to fall down as soon as a country defaults and can’t pay back Bank A, who in turn cannot pay back Bank B who in turn asks the government for another bail out is irrelevant.

Anyone who knows how money is created knows that it is created through debt and new money is created every-time someone takes a loan out. That money is then multiplied and leveraged beyond belief even though it doesn’t physically exist apart from digits in a computer database.

If there was no debt there would be no money – simple.

It’s all one big ponzi scheme anyhow as we all know by now which is run by banksters who launder money for Mexican drug cartels, wide boys who fix Libor interest rates, and interchangeable politicians / bankers who move from one job to the other and then back again.

All as if there was nothing wrong with a politician developing banking policy that helps push millions of Brits over the financial cliff and then go off and work in one of the banks they created policy for once they are finally voted out of office.

Simon believes the politicians and those that demand we must be austere wince at the idea of giving money directly to people as it seems somehow vulgar. As if giving billions of our tax pounds direct to the same people who caused the mess so that they can carry on giving themselves huge wages and bonuses isn’t somehow!

So if we are already using a Keynesian economic policy that is being masked as an Austrian one through the use of the words austerity, the cutting of  public services, and all the other spending cuts that the millionaire front bench don’t rely on then why don’t we try to stimulate demand by giving the money to the people rather than the failed banks and businesses?

We could even tailor this arrangement so that it doesn’t seem so “vulgar” by declaring that the money is a once off (or yearly) dividend to all tax payers who helped bail out the banks. Banks we basically own anyway.

The money could be in the form of a special coupon or voucher that was only redeemable in this country (to stop people putting it in offshore bank accounts or saving it in UK bank accounts).

The voucher would be accepted in any UK based shop or business as legal tender and that company would then be able to redeem it for cash if they so wished from the Treasury by taking it to a bank or a special government office.

To stop people just turning up at banks and transferring the coupons to cash there would be a stipulation that only businesses could redeem the vouchers and only as long as they had a receipt showing the goods or services purchased with said voucher. Other ways could be created to prevent fraudulent black markets transference we Brits are so good at.

Also we could have a “double the value” scheme in which if  the holder of the coupon bought goods made in the UK (not in China with a made in UK sticker on it!) then they would get the item, good or service at a discount. This would help stimulate the UK manufacturing industry.

Obviously this would only apply to tax payers and not people on the dole or those who have no intention of ever working.

Different sizes of voucher would be created just like paper money so that change could be given in other vouchers and there would be a “use by” date of one year to ensure it was spent within a certain time frame. It would basically exist like a dual currency alongside the existing fiat one we call the pound.

You might not like the idea or the theory for many reasons including it’s Keynesian nature but we are already in a double dip recession with no hope of growth on the horizon and a growing national debt due to all the dole money having to be paid out to the public service workers the Tory/Lib Dem coalition have sacked.

If they somehow expected the private sector just to zoom in and suck up all these workers they were poorly mistaken.

Our chancellor George Osborne has failed in what he set out to do – grow the economy and cut the debt so we need some kind of plan.

Giving money to the banks has failed so why not give it to those of us who have basically saved the country anyway?

If 20 million or so people all spending a few billion pounds in the UK economy this year doesn’t help it grow at all then we are truly screwed.

It’s only an idea but one which few people seem willing to consider for some reason.

The Banks are now “Too Big To Save”

By Dark Politricks

I have just watched an interesting BBC documentary by Robert Preston about the banking crisis called “Too Big to Save”.

The premise was basically that our financial system is in such a mess and our country so loaded up with sovereign debt that if another crisis came along, which according to the programme is very likely, the banks are too big to get bailed out as there isn’t enough money left to do so even if the desire was there to do it.

As well as examining the fundamental problems inherit in our banking system he also looked at the history of recent banking and what led up to the recent crisis as well as revealing how little the public really understand about banking and how money is actually created.

Most people still seem to believe that banks only lend out money that they have deposited from savers but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Due to the wonders of fractional reserve banking and international agreements such as Basel that determine the levels of reserves banks require they can basically lend out £90 for every £10 they own.

Also because most money in circulation is now digital banks literally have the ability to create new money from thin air by entering a few keystrokes into a computer.

Whereas there are laws that determine who can legitimately create coinage, e.g the Bank of England, there is nothing in our debt based monetary system preventing banks from creating new digital money by issuing new debt to customers. They do this through simple accounting methods because whenever someone takes out a loan from a bank new money comes into existence and is deposited into someone else’s bank account as new digital money. Once this new money has been deposited in one account the bank can then use the laws of fractional reserve banking to multiply the money supply again by issuing more loans and so on and so on.

This has been taken from the excellent campaign for positive money site which aims to overhaul our current banking system and the site explains it very well.

The ‘Rules of Money’

Under a fractional reserve banking system, there are two ‘rules of money’:

1. When a bank makes a loan, it increases the amount of money in the hands of the public (by increasing the total quantity of digital bank deposits)
2. When a member of the public repays a loan, it reduces the amount of money in the hands of the public (by decreasing the total quantity of digital bank deposits)

Consequently, through excessive lending between 2000 and 2008, banks were able to double the money supply in just 7 years – an increase in the total money supply from £884 billion to £1,674 billion. The chart below shows the increase in the Bank of England’s M4 measure of money supply,  and therefore the total quantity of bank deposits, in each year. Each red bar represents new money created by the commercial banks (click the image to enlarge):

 

All the ‘Money’ in Your Bank Account Represents Someone Else’s Debt

Since all the number money in your account was created by banks making loans, this means that for every pound in your bank account, someone else is in debt by an equal amount.

In fact, due to compound interest, the public’s debts are now greater than all the money that exists in the economy. According to Bank of England figures, if the UK public collectively took all the money in our bank accounts and used it to pay down our debts, we would end up with no money at all and still owe £306billion (plus interest) to the banks!

In other words, we now have a debt-based money supply issued entirely by private, profit-seeking companies. Our money supply has been effectively privatised.

Not only did our banks increase our money supply by overloading the population with easy to obtain and “cheap” debt they started to engage in risky activities that were nothing more than gambling dressed up as “financial innovation”.

Derivatives started off as useful tools to help hedge risk on investments but they soon became a device to make large amounts of money by taking riskier and riskier bets on future market positions.  Sales of complicated financial instruments such as Collateralized loan obligations and Credit default swaps allowed banks to bypass regulations by hiding the risk they were taking so well that only a very small percentage of people actually knew what was really going on. Even the top banking officials and financiers in the documentary had trouble explaining what some of the terms actually meant!

The only difference I can really see between those of us that use Betfair to bet on the horses gambling on the outcome of a race and those bankers and city wide boys in the stock exchange betting on the position of a stock at a particular date is the type of clothing worn and the segment on the nightly news where the results are given.

It really does seem as if a suit and some long winded names for the bets involved are the only difference between a gambler and a banker. There is one more difference however and that is the danger to society when the gamble goes wrong. A regular visitor to gamblers anonymous might lose a weekly wage or his house if he’s really unlucky but the city trader or bankster that loses a bet can literally loses billions and potentially puts millions of people on the street if their gambles don’t pay off.

It seemed from the documentary that Robert Preston understood the types of fraudulent behaviour the big banksters were engaging in and most of his interviewees did as well. The web is full of sites dedicated to exposing the types of financial terrorism the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have engaged in and even certain politicians talk the talk when they have to. What is yet to be seen though is any kind of concrete action directed against these banksters and fraudsters.

The banking system is still posing a systemic risk to the whole economy and little action has been taken by our politicans to rectify the situation. All the talk of splitting the banks up has come to nothing as of yet and not only are the banks still not lending to the small companies that need to be thriving to restart our economy the bankers are still paying themselves stupidly large and unreasonable bonuses.

Any mention of a permanent tax on banker bonuses or financial transaction tax just leads to not so veiled threats by the horrific Angela Knight and other leading UK bankers to pack up their bags and trot off to Singapore or Hong Kong. Not only has the banking sector held the UK economy hostage once it seems intent on keeping us hostage long enough in the hope that we might eventually forget their misdeeds and crimes and let them carry on with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

With ever increasing inflation, tax rises and extortionate petrol prices along with all the austerity measures and cuts in public spending the coming year is going to hit middle and low income familes hard. Whilst the common man and woman are being asked to just bite the bullet and take all the price rises on the chin we are then expected to read stories about million pound bonuses being paid to the same people who have caused our misery.

Unless some of our politicians get their act together and stop bending over to the international bankers then public anger will not only be righteous it will be immense once the pennies run out. If 2011 really is as predicted the “year of rage” then a lot of that rage is going to be directed at the pricks in pin stripes. Fred Goodwin might actually consider himself lucky to only get away with his fat pension and only a few smashed windows and a damaged car.

Bankers in favour of paying global tax

Patrick Jenkins and Tom Braithwaite
Financial Times
Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Some of the world’s most prominent bankers have come out in favour of a global bank wind-down fund, a concession from the industry after weeks of fighting proposals for new taxes in the US and Europe.

Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, told the Financial Times on Friday : “To help solve the too-big-to-fail problem I’m advocating a European rescue and resolution fund for banks. Of course, the capital for this fund would have to come from banks to a large degree.”

Bob Diamond, president of Barclays , also supported the idea of a global levy, which could see banks contribute tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of years.

“I think every G20 country would like to have an insurance scheme that would help cover the cost of any future bank failure,” he told the FT at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “A co-ordinated global system is preferable to an unlevel playing field.”

Full article here

FDIC clocks 15 bank failures so far in 2010

Reuters
Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Six more U.S. banks were seized on Friday as regulators continue to close the doors of banks struggling to cope with fallout from the financial crisis.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) said First Regional Bank in Los Angeles, Florida Community Bank, First National Bank of Georgia, American Marine Bank in Washington, Marshall Bank in Minnesota and Community Bank and Trust in Georgia had failed — pushing the tally to 15 banks that have failed this year.

The FDIC expects 2010 to be a peak for bank failures as a result of the financial crisis. Last year, 140 banks failed, compared to 25 in 2008 and three in 2007.

First-Citizens Bank & Trust Co, of Raleigh, North Carolina, will purchase $2.17 billion in total assets and $1.87 billion in total deposits from First Regional Bank, the FDIC said.

Full article here

A New Approach To Regulating Wall Street Could Be More Than Wishful Thinking

Bob Chapman
International Forecaster
Friday, January 29th, 2010

The return of Paul Volcker, bailed out banks out of touch, greedy and arrogant and are due for a change, can there be jail time for Wall Street gangsters? Other countries in a fragile economic state, just as ours is, Bernanke bailed out himself, SEC secret files.

Paul Volcker is back and things are about to change in Washington. A split has occurred between the paper forces of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Mr. Volcker represents Morgan interests. Both sides are Illuminists, but the Morgan side is tired of Goldman’s greed and arrogance. Volcker cannot be called old school or anachronistic. He represents sanity in an insane financial world even though he is an integral and powerful part of the elitist structure. He represents a change in gears and approach. The present administration and the Democratic Party has lost its moorings and is in on a path of political suicide. They have tried to get passed impossible legislation that the American people do not want, and they will abandoning those positions, because they are no longer tenable. The election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was a major defeat for all administration programs. As you will see Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats will start sounding like popular conservatives and populist talk show hosts, as they attempt to win back their center. That is where Paul Volcker fits in. He is back and major changes are about to take place financially and politically.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and others in their greed have lost touch with economic and financial reality and they looted the system. Not that JP Morgan chase was blameless, they did their looting and damage to the system as well, but not in the high handed arrogant way the others did. The recall of Volcker is an attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible. That means the influence of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, et al will be put on the back shelf at least for now, as will be the Goldman influence. It will be slowly and subtly phased out. One of the things we have always believed is that Volcker was never out of touch. He is brilliant, brash, irreverent and successful.

There is a real split that has developed over the past year between the Morgan and Goldman forces. For Goldman it has been a difficult year; they got caught stealing. First in naked shorts, then front-running the market, both of which they are still doing, as the SEC looks the other way, and then selling MBS-CDOs to their best clients and simultaneously shorting them. Such unethical, despicable behavior is criminal. As criminal as Berkshire Hathaway’s $100 million fine for fraud, but no jail time for the crooks, which includes Warren Buffett. As a result of the antics of Goldman and Buffett, Washington needs a new face on Wall Street, not that of a criminal syndicate. Mr. Obama and the Democrats need a cleaner Wall Street, that can be respected, and that can assist the administration of strong markets, higher employment and sustainable economic recovery. An economy that has floundered and made little gain in spite of a major infusion of stimulus, bailouts and $13.7 trillion in monetary injections.

The attempt will be to bring the financial system back to brass tacks. No more arrogant fat cats. A subtle quieter Wall Street. Stability is what is needed and Volcker can bring that if he is allowed too. That would include little or no MBS and CDOs, the regulation of derivatives and hedge funds and the end of massive market manipulation, both by Treasury, Fed and Wall Street players. Congress has to end the “President’s Working Group on Financial Markets,” or at least limit its use to real emergencies. Needless to say, the Fed has to be eliminated and that power returned to our Treasury Department as we close the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. In a new terrible wrinkle the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporate America to buy politicians has to be reversed by Congress ASAP. The SEC and the CFTC have to stop aiding and abetting Wall Street and become protectors of the investors. If that cannot happen they should be replaced by quasi-government entities that will catch the crooks on Wall Street and really punish them. Not with fines but with time in jail. The Glass-Steagall Act should be reintroduced into the system and lobbying and campaign contributions should end. How is that for cleaning house?

Securities firms should not be allowed to be or own banks, and insurance companies. Banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms should only be allowed to control a portion of their markets. No more monopolies and no more too big to fail. All books at corporations should always have to mark-to-market, not mark-to-model and two sets of books should be banned. The BIS and the FASD should be allowed to set guidelines that protect the public as well as participants. What we have now is political force. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginny Mae and FHA should be sold to private interests. The government should not be in the insurance or real estate business. No more politics in lending and banks should be limited to a lending ratio of 10 to 1. If they do not comply they should be shut down. It is bad enough they have the leverage that they have. State banks such as North Dakota’s are a better idea.

This brings us back to the administration and Mr. Volcker. We know they cannot accomplish these changes; only a few would be helpful. It is obvious there will be little or no recovery and solutions have to be found for immediate problems. We see no way the current credit mechanism can reinvigorate what is left of the system. The money machine will be allowed to because the minute it is turned off the game is over. Mr. Volcker is well aware of that. It could be that will be his solution as it was in the early 1980s. The politicians, particularly the Democrats and the administration are outraged at what Wall Street has done, particularly Goldman Sachs. There are many changes coming and we will have to try to anticipate which way things are headed.

We believe the Treasury Department is in desperate demand for investors to buy Treasuries. After many years the world has finally awakened to the fact that the US is broke and has been for a long time. Now fewer and fewer investors consider Treasuries as a safe haven. Who in their right mind would buy a Treasury bill with a negative or zero return? We would guess because the buyer perceives them to be safe, perhaps willing to lose some 7% to 8% to inflation. These sales are averaging $50 billion weekly. As the buyers dry up and in order to avoid Fed purchase and monetization, government is eyeing your retirement investments to be the source of their new annuity scheme. This past week the PPT allowed the market to fall just to scare investors into buying Treasuries. It fell 552 points in three days from 10,725 to 10,172, in an atmosphere where for a long time, via the PPT it has been controlling the market. Something serious is definitely up and we probably are approaching the next wave of trouble. We are not alone. Japan is wobbling; China has gone too far with stimulus and is facing hyperinflation, and the eurozone could be facing a breakup, a reduction in size, and perhaps eventually a total breakup. These problems and all the problems in G-20 countries we need like we need a hole-in-the-head. They have all made the same stupid mistakes. We could be facing a perfect storm, and this time it won’t be different; it will be worse. History tells us it will be worse. This is not bad judgment or incompetence it is a takedown of the world economies and financial structure in order to implement World Government. It has been tried over and over again for centuries for the past more than a thousand years; the attempt to bring back the control that the Roman Empire once had for longer than their 500 year reign. Empires collapse and have over this period in time in part due to greed and power, the power to control people. The theme is not the mismanagement of markets and things fiscal and monetary, but the deliberate takedown of today’s financial structure. In history have you ever heard of financial experts collectively in total buying AAA rated bonds that were Triple B? Can their attorneys not read the fine print? Of course they can. Or have you ever heard of lenders lending 40 to 70 times underlying assets, deposits, when 8 to 10 times is normal? Of course you haven’t, because it is prescription for destruction. Why would lenders simultaneously do such things? Because they were acting in concert to take down the system. There are only a handful of writers who recognize the true meaning of what is happening to our civilization. That is because other writers want to be accepted by their peers and within their society. They do not want to step outside the limits; they do not want to end up in an internment camp. That is why they are seldom correct and why we have the problems we have today. All the economic and financial answers do not add up, don’t work, if you truly understand what is going on behind the scenes.

Tiny Tim has warned us again, like his predecessor Henry Paulson, that if you do not reappoint Helicopter Ben then the market will collapse. This again makes it plain that we live in a corporate fascist thugocracy. This gives even greater importance to auditing the Fed and abolishing it. We need US notes, not Federal Reserve Notes.

The Senate results in Massachusetts have really thrown a monkey wrench into the plans of the Democratic Party. No Cap & Trade, perhaps no medical reform, no immigration reform and not enough votes to pass a new limit of debt of $14.294 trillion. In order to service such giant debt, official short-term Fed rates have to be kept at current levels.

States, provinces, cities, towns, counties and Federal Governments worldwide are in debt for more than they should be and are suspects for bankruptcy. Remember as famous economist Franz Pick once told us that debt paper is guaranteed certificates of future confiscation. Almost all governments have followed the lead of the G-20 trying to stimulate their way out of recession or depression.

Governments within the US are in terrible shape financially. The federal government has unfunded liabilities for pension and medical benefits of some $3 trillion. The November trade deficit was $34.6 billion. The December deficit is $91.9 billion, almost double year-on-year. Quarter-on-quarter the deficit was 17% higher. The deficit for October 30, 2009 was $1.4 trillion and 2010’s deficit will be higher than $1.70 trillion. No sane person would buy government bonds after looking at these numbers. You might say this is the future and we do not like the looks of it.

During this past week the Dow lost 4.1%, S&P 4.3%, the Russell 2000 3.4% and the Nasdaq 100 fell 3.9%. Banks slipped 0.8%; utilities 1.4%; high tech 4.5%; semis 4.6%; Internets 4.2% and biotech’s 2.2%. Bullion sank $36.00 and the HUI fell 8.6%. The dollar gained 1.3% to 78.29.

Two-year T-bills fell 7 bps to 0.75%; the 10’s fell 7 bps to 3.59%; the 15’s fell 5 bps to 4.40% and the one-year ARMs fell 7 bps to 4.32%. The 30-year jumbos fell 6 bps to 5.96%.

Fed credit increased $5.1 billion to a 52-week high of $2.231 trillion. Year-on-year it is up $181.6 billion. Fed foreign holdings of Treasury and Agency debt fell $5 billion to $2.946 trillion. Custody holdings for foreign central banks rose $405 billion or 15.9% yoy.

M2 narrow money supply fell $9.4 billion to $8.452 trillion.

Total money market fund assets fell $46 billion to $3.240 trillion. Year-on-year that is off 16.8%.

In Friday’s FDIC Financial Follies, five more banks went under. All were absorbed by other institutions. Last year 140 failed. It could be as high as 1,000 to 2,000 over the next 1-1/2 years.

Ben “Helicopter” Bernanke has supposedly been bailed out by the White House and the Senate Republican leadership, with Republican flex-spending accounts to buy off Senators. Corporate America owns our country and almost all incumbents have to be thrown out of office in November from both parties. Again, Americans strongly oppose the reappointment of Mr. Bernanke, but that doesn’t mean anything in our corrupt government. Let’s make sure the political spin doesn’t work anymore. Scream at the top of your lungs non-confirmation and the resignation of Geithner.

We found it of great interest that the SEC has disclosed in an e-mail to the Fed that they keep secret financial records related to national security that only two people at the SEC are allowed to access. We heard of such files 30 years ago from our sources in Washington, but were never able to get concrete confirmation. We have been told it is not only for financial records, but regarding individuals as well. We have been a political target of the SEC since 1967. We believe this same safe holds the records pertaining to the manipulation of all markets by the “Working Group on Financial Markets.”

Senior executives from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also got involved. Rainmaker James B. Lee, who serves as a firm vice chairman, and Jes Staley, who runs the investment bank, each placed calls to senators over the weekend urging support for Mr. Bernanke, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Obama and big-government socialists still don’t get it. Instead of restructuring the US economy and recharging the small business jobs machine, they will try to bribe voters with chump-change tax credits and cost-hike mandates on businesses, which will retard job creation. It’s Sen. Brown’s fault!!

President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives intended to help middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student loan payments…the president is calling on Congress to nearly double the child care tax credit for families earning less than $85,000…But the credit would not be refundable, meaning that families would not get extra money back on a tax refund.

Another of the president’s proposals, a cap on federal loan payments for recent college graduates at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, would cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion. The expanded financing to help families care for elderly relatives would cost $102.5 million — a pittance in a federal budget where programs are often measured in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

President Obama has also proposed an innocuous deficit reduction plan that would reduce the budget deficit $25B per year for 10 years, if all those rosy projections come true. They seldom do.

The plan entails freezing $447B of discretionary domestic spending, which is only about 1/6 of the budget. The freeze would NOT include military, foreign aid, national security and mandatory-spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Swiss halt deal with U.S. that IDs Americans with secret UBS bank accounts

David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Americans who hid money from the Internal Revenue Service in secret Swiss bank accounts may escape exposure, at least for now.

An agreement between the U.S. and Swiss governments that was supposed to blow the cover on 4,450 accounts at Switzerland’s largest bank is in danger of collapse.

The Swiss government said Wednesday that it has suspended the disclosure of information to the United States under the agreement and may seek to renegotiate the deal.

The announcement came days after a Swiss court ruled that it would be illegal for Switzerland to comply with the August accord. The court essentially declared that long-standing secrecy protections trumped the agreement. The decision came in a test case involving a UBS account holder who was fighting to stay in the shadows.

Full story here.

Bankers unite against Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in call for world regulation

London Evening Standard
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Bankers stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the Swiss ski resort of Davos to try to prevent a scatter-gun approach to new financial regulation by different countries.

They united against Barack Obama’s threat to break up banks and Gordon Brown’s growing enthusiasm for a Tobin tax on all financial market transactions.

The Standard Chartered chief executive, Peter Sands, warned against over-regulating the private sector and stifling economic recovery. “The stakes are very high,” he said. “If we get it wrong in one dimension, we will end up stifling growth. If we get it wrong in the other dimension we end up with another crisis.

“The idea that banking is getting back to business as usual is a misunderstanding. Banking has fundamentally changed. There is an acceptance that things will have to continue to change.”

Barclays Capital boss Bob Diamond warned that threats from the US President and moves from the Prime Minister such as the bankers’ bonus tax were damaging. “This is a time when isolated actions in the US and UK are not beneficial,” he said. “Without risk we do not have a banking industry. Having banks willing to take risks, particularly cross-border risk is essential to economics.”

Full article here