Big Green Mama's And Big Business

There are things you do not expect in life. One was I did not ever think I would take a look now and again at something titled Big Green Mamas. And no, it is not that kind of site. But stranger things have happened. Anyhow it makes a change from Disused Railway Stations.

The post you may be interested in is below and relates to Procter and Gamble and their legal and PR machinery in action. P&G are a mega international company with ambitions to control the market for personal and household products and brook no complaints or opposition.

It seems that the fact that they damage my skin, cause me to have lung problems as well as other very nasty effects does not allow me to imply that they might not be safe for other people; whatever other people may say to me.

Moreover, if I am searching for products that are safe their makers will not be allowed to claim this because it indirectly implies that P&G stuff is unsafe rubbish and more or less distilled or crystallized sump oil ramped up with toxic propellants, colourants, addictive synthetic chemicals and who knows what.

In my purely personal opinion such allegations are wholly and entirely false and defamatory against a commercial organization motivated only by love, joy and the happiness of all nations.

http://thegreenmamas.blogspot.com/2010/09/join-womens-voices-for-earth-to.html

Please make up your own mind.

The Minstrel Boy To The Royal Wedding Has Gone

Turning on the box at lunch time to see whether the rolling debt crises were becoming worse or better I was greeted by PM Dave rubbing his hands and telling of a joyful Cabinet banging the tables. For a fleeting moment of hope I thought we had been expelled by the EU for whinging and arguing too much.

Alas, it was something else, which according to several sources will enable HMG to bury enough bad news to keep them all happy, at least for a few days. It was the announcement about the Royal nuptials to come. As I avoid much comment, if any, on the Royal Family, I will simply say congratulations and hope it all goes well.

It would be easy to be churlish and use the news as an opportunity to exercise the vocabulary but as The Royals are a soft target I will not. In any case I have had trouble enough in the past. In December 1947 the neighbours complained when I organised a noisy football match in the street. In July 1981 others complained about me mowing the lawn during the high point of the service.

Elsewhere on TV the BBC is flogging a series about the Idea of Civilisation and the nature of ruling classes. Whilst the archaeologists and others are turning up more ancient and many more ruins, some under the seas, others in unexpected places the BBC series is giving us The Greeks. I wonder if the vagaries of Greek finances now are so different from the alleged civilisation of ancient Greece.

The difference may be that they left it in writing and what is more transmitted most of it the The Romans who left both legacies in stone and in writing for later peoples to read, study and sadly try to copy. The British Empire often seems like an uncertain elite aping and attempting to repeat on a larger scale what it thought a classical Romano-Greek civilisation was like.

Meanwhile in Ireland we may well see another version of an earlier bail out and set of financial and governmental relations. Just as the ruling European elite of the late 12th Century decided to put affairs in Ireland to rights, by the methods of the time, Dublin, Waterford and Wexford will soon have Euro offices running the show.

Back then one of the major figures was Raymond le Gros (also Reimund etc.) one of the Fitzgerald family, son of William Fitz Gerald of Carew and Maria de Montgomery. He like his peers had an ambition to seize land and become a great magnate. Fat cats are nothing new. The Carew arms, said to derive from the Montgomery by marriage, are above, only they are lions rather than cats.

Lions have larger appetite than cats so if history is any guide, Ireland may have cause to worry. Poor old Scotland was landed with some of the Montgomery’s when the King became so fed up of their antics in The Welsh Marches that he packed them off north along with many of their more disloyal and violent followers, such as the de Brus family. Then look at what happened.

The debate about what Ireland should do in the present crisis is being argued all around the web by many expert and thoughtful commentators. My view is that Ireland should default, leave the Euro and try to establish a functioning economy on its own terms. Otherwise, it will be again a playground for ambitious European politicians for a century to come.

History does not repeat itself, but human beings do.

Europe, A Brief History

If you have about five minutes to spare have a look at this Youtube clip which shows 1000 years of European History as a changing map.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/11/1000_years_of_e.html

This was seen on the Economic Road Map web site from the USA via Infectious Greed asking the question whether or not we could be due for another major upheaval and rewriting the map of Europe.

I wonder just how much territory will soon be named Gazprom.

Remembrance

Civilians in uniform, the 4th Liverpool Pals, 20th Battalion, The Kings Liverpool Regiment, November 1914.

Football Follies

What on earth is Dave The Suave doing cosying up to the Soccer industry? As a business model alone it is an investment to avoid at all costs unless you are in either money laundering or the provision of personal services.

Could someone please supply him with two lists. One should be of the once great clubs now down and out. The other should be the present clubs in the top leagues whose finances are questionable.

Then perhaps there might be a file of clippings about some of those chaps too many politicians scramble to stand at the side of for photo opportunities. It would not go well with protestations about family values or traditional qualities that he and others burble about in their bids for votes.

At No. 10 Downing Street it seems there is a panic to help England (why England, why not Scotland or Wales or one or other of the Irelands or the Isle of Man or Guernsey?) secure the right to stage the 2018 World Cup. Lundy perhaps?

This is an event that has around 80 games of football of which about half a dozen will be interesting or watchable for the benefit of TV companies, assorted sponsors and an international elite hoping to extract both prestige and pockets full of money.

Despite austerity the taxpayer directly and indirectly (especially if the BBC is involved) will be making a hefty contribution. As a TV enterprise they will do this despite being able now to watch any of the games either on TV or computer from anywhere in the world at any time.

Whilst a number of spectators will be at the games, mostly thinly attended, they will be a minority who can afford it or who are freeloading at the expense of us all.

Simon Jenkins in the “Guardian” (this is a new one me agreeing with it) objects to the BBC being put under pressure to “pull” a programme scheduled before the voting on the decisions for 2018 that suggests that a lot of dodgy dealing has taken place.

It is thought that the Football Association was urged by 10 Downing Street to try to stop the potential embarrassment of FIFA with the risk of England losing the vote. It would not be good for Dave to turn up there waving the flag only to be a loser.

Possibly the BBC is up to something linking Dave to a body that works in even more mysterious ways than the International Olympics Committee, the body that has demanded and obtained Zil lanes and special traffic controls for its members.

Here is the Big Idea. In the modern TV saturated easy transport world what is the point of The World Cup at all now? Just as cricket in international terms has become more or less a continuing league system why doesn’t some TV company organise a World League with promotion and relegation.

Say 8 teams to a division with one up and one down and make the whole thing a properly run commercial entity without all this secret elite goings on?

Can you hear me Rupert? And can you have a word in Dave’s ear?

Debt, Delusion And Daftness

Who needs enemies with friends like these? Last night, Thursday 11th, I tuned into the C4 Durkin programme on the £4.8 trillion debt I and my family owe to anyone and everyone hoping for a real and full explanation of what it all means and how it has come about.

There was certainly some of that. The £4.8 figure was put across as well as the wide eyed ignorance of Members of Parliament who did not know the difference between Deficit and Debt. Where on earth where all their Nannies?

Did they not tell them that if you spend all the pocket money on sweeties and then borrow to buy more then sooner or later there would be no sweeties to be had?

It is always possible to steal the money. The programme did set out to show that reducing the value of money and so real debt liability by inflation was a form of theft. Also that holding interest rates down to a level that eroded the real value of savings was a way of stealing from the responsible to reward to irresponsible.

But it did not follow this through. There was another opportunity lost when Durkin was using a running bath to demonstrate how debt rose and how the “cuts” were not cuts but simply an inadequate means of limiting debt growth.

As major areas of our debt are the unfunded pension schemes of many public sector workers that are hopelessly in deficit on current arrangements perhaps this was a scary situation too far and too sensitive.

Having made some useful points and introduced a number of real issues the programme then ran off the rails. It was the familiar British weakness of running abroad to seek the answer to the current great question. Call it the Holy Grail Syndrome or the Magic Potion Solution if you like.

It was Hong Kong that was put before us as the answer to all our problems. Eh? The former colony we gained in The Opium Wars? What is Hong Kong now? It is a fiefdom of a highly authoritarian communist regime that has embarked on headlong expansion which incidentally hugely increases the rate of resource depletion on the planet. Sweeties today and not tomorrow, in short.

The mega growth of Hong Kong in the last generation was put down to the wit and wisdom of a former colonial financial secretary, John Cowperthwaite, who during the 1960’s and later insisted on a particular low tax and low public spending regime that is said to be the basis of its current prosperity and wealth.

However, that much of this arose from sweat shop labour during a period when the financial authorities in the West had gone in for a massive debt driven consumer boom, run down their own industries to stoke up financial services and with governments fiddling their own and all their agencies accounts to deny debt was not mentioned.

Nor were the tax haven activities sucking in money and wealth from abroad at the expense of Western taxpayers. Hong Kong is an integral part of the merry go round that has reduced so much of Africa to poverty, evaporated so much real wealth and has funded criminal activities across the world.

We were shown pretty pictures of the bright lights, the shopping and fashion quarters and were the money was being spent. We were not shown the real slums or for that matter the forced labour camps of so much of industrial China. There was no hint of just how unsustainable all this will prove to be in the foreseeable future.

In the UK we have to accept what our real problems are, realise that our problems are not the same as others and deal with them in our terms and for the well being of our own peoples. This is hard work. It is difficult.

It is much more media friendly to be galloping about claiming to have found the answer here or there or in this or that place than saying to people this is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.

If Durkin had given the last part of the programme to rubbing our noses in our own dirt and telling how we, and we alone, were going to have to sort it out then he will have done a service. All he did however, whilst making some points, was leave us all thinking the answer was out there somewhere.

One thing for sure, it isn’t in Hong Kong.

Health Care

Above is a diagram of the USA Health Care System. You will see that it is all much simpler and no doubt more efficient than our own either now or in the foreseeable future. Has anyone the time or patience to do one for England or for other parts of the UK? A months holiday in the padded cell of their choice to the winners.