Sim-O

Donald Trump is gonna run for president of the USA, as far as I can tell. He may not do and just be fucking with our minds. If he does though, Iraq had better watch out…

Trump: George, let me explain something to you. We go into Iraq. We have spent thus far, $1.5 trillion. We could have rebuilt half of the United States. $1.5 trillion. And we’re going to then leave. So, in the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it.
…
Stephanopoulos: It would take hundreds of thousands of troops to secure the oil fields.

Trump: Excuse me. No, it wouldn’t at all.
…
Stephanopoulos: So, we steal an oil field?

Trump: Excuse me. You’re not stealing. Excuse me. You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking– we’re reimbursing ourselves– at least, at a minimum, and I say more. We’re taking back $1.5 trillion to reimburse ourselves.

In the old days, you went to war because someone invaded you. If you won the war, you got reparations. In otherwords, the losing aggressor paid the winner compensation for the inconvenience, damage and effort needed to stave off the invasion. OK, it is a little more complicated than that and the victor usually took the piss, but basically, that’s it.

If the aggressor won, then the loser was occupied, taken control of and general fucked over even more.

What happened in Iraq was the aggressor won but, being generous, hasn’t tried to occupy the Iraq and has tried to get Iraq up and running again, albeit in a cack-handed, bloody way. The US doesn’t deserve any reparations. The people of Iraq didn’t ask the US to go in a fuck them over. Saddam was no direct threat to the US and had no connection to the big bogieman of Al Qaeda (however you want to spell it).

You don’t get reimbursed for expense paid to fuck over another country that a) didn’t ask for shit and b) was going to fuck you over.

This reimbursement Trump is on about is theft. Pure and simple. Just because the people of the US don’t want to give up their 4 litre engined cars and pick-ups.

Donald Trump even puts our own MPs to shame when it comes to claiming expenses.

I’m not the only one that feels a little uneasy (it’s not quite the right word, but can’t seem to get the right one) about this, am I?

“[Prince Andrew] wants to raise the profile of the all-party group and wants us to make the case in parliament and to the business secretary of the business opportunities out in Azerbaijan. He feels it is a Cinderella country that has tremendous opportunities.

“One of the things he talked about was his feeling that a place like Azerbaijan is somewhere of great opportunity, and the more British politicians and businesses engage themselves with their counterparts in Azerbaijan, there will be material benefits.”

I know Prince Andrew is envoy for trade and not something touchy-feely like morals and ethics, but it’s a bit crass to say the least, isn’t it? Nevermind that ‘we’ would be doing business with a torturer and his regime, eh? Just show me the money!

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Business, especially big business has never been about that, and if Andrew started bleating on about human rights everyone would wonder what had gotten into him. After all, he is the Trade Envoy, not the Amabassador For Not Being Beastly To People. That role is somebody elses. Probably.

I can’t be easy for Andrew, having to visit these places, be entertained by horribe characters and in turn entertain them when they visit UK. At least he only visits Azerbaijan in his proffessional capacity. If he visited there in his personal capacity, that might really cast doubt over whether he gives a toss or not.

Andrew has been to the former Soviet republic three times since 2008 in a private capacity

Oh. Well, it’s only three times in just over three years. It could be worse. The media there could give him pet name. Now that would be disatrous for ones’ reputation.

He is often described as “the dear guest” by local media

Oh.

From Stephen Law…

Suppose I am very very rich, and very very selfish. The NHS annoys me intensely. It costs lots in tax revenue to run, and being very rich, I pay proportionately more of my income on it, and of course far more in terms of hard cash, then almost anyone else. I also resent the fact that my business empire is unable to cash in on providing the services that people would buy from my private businesses if the NHS was not there.

BUT, the public loves the NHS, even many Tories are fond of it, and to propose scrapping it would provoke howls of outrage. Plus there’s no evidence I can marshal that the public would get a better service if it were provided by the private sector – rather the opposite in fact.

What would I do? Here’s what I would do.

First, I’d ensure a team of expert PR run the Tory party – people adept at twisting facts, spinning, and indeed telling bare face lies and getting away with it. And I’d have my private health companies etc. fund them generously.

Next, once elected, I’d get them to introduce phase one: the introduction of a market system in which GP’s buy services from NHS hospitals, or anyone else, based on variable price, etc. This can still be called “NHS” because it’s still free at the point of use. This would all be justified by lies about how the evidence shows it’s more efficient, etc.

Read the rest.

So. It’s Valentines Day or whatever the official title is. Did you get you partner anything?

You did? Well done you. You’re either under the thumb of capitalism or your other half.

You either don’t tell your loved one you love them often enough or you need someone else to tell you when to tell the love of your life how you feel.

Have a good day, won’t you?

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

Following on from a previous post today on the subject of nationalisation/privatisation, 21st Century Fix…

[L]et’s change the focus please from public versus private to that of identifying and changing the cultures of the self-serving to customer-serving – wherever they may find themselves.

Stephen Law on the dirty word ‘nationalisation’…

…for some industries, that “competition” [that privatisation brings] looks largely notional. In the case of the railways and power companies, for example. And we all know that the government puts much more into running the railways now than it did when it was nationalized. And it had to step in when Railtrack went bust. The service remains an expensive disaster for consumers. So much for efficiency. etc.

When this ongoing disaster is pointed out, private ownership is defended on the grounds that the privatizations was mishandled, or done in the wrong sort of way, or the companies run badly, whatever. When publicly run industries don’t fare well, on the other hand, well that’s just because they are publicly, run, isn’t it, rather than run in the wrong sort of way? That must be true, mustn’t it? Because as we all know, “private good, public bad”.

My question is, why has it become the case that even to raise the suggestion that, say, the railways should renationalized is now unthinkable for most people? Why, when people consider how the problems might be fixed, does that option never even get considered? Is it really because the arguments and evidence for private ownership are so very good? (if so, why are so many other successful railways either state run or primarily state owned?)

Unspeak on the phrase ‘austerity measures’…

Take austerity measures, of the sort that “must” be imposed on countries by their own or other governments. Austerity implies a severe self-discipline of the kind that is laudable, virtuous in its serious asceticism. But who exactly is being austere in this picture? The Financial Times lexicon entry for “austerity measure” is, perhaps pointedly, ambivalent:

An official action taken by a government in order to reduce the amount of money that it spends or the amount that people spend.

Of course, these things are not unrelated, but a government that increases tax rates as part of its “austerity” programme is in the first instance asking people to spend more money – on it. I could be considerably more austere, in the sense of saving money, by refusing to pay my tax bill as well as not buying quite so many crisps. Naturally, though, we can see why a government proposing austerity measures would not want to call them “Give Us More Of Your Money And We’ll Spend It On Fewer Of The Things That You Want Measures”, or, I don’t know, wallet-fucking measures.

For those that don’t know, a ‘backorder’ is when you order something from a company and they don’t have it in stock, they get it in and send it when they have it.

To me that sounds an eminently sensible way to carry on. The customer gets what they want and the company keeps a sale.

Why then, am I encountering more and more companies that ‘don’t do backorders’? I thought in this climate of trying to get money out of people, keeping customer loyalty by not giving them a reason to go elsewhere, ‘doing’ backorders would be a must.

Strange, huh?

Good news for the crumblies, then. The default retirement age (DRA) is to be scrapped.

This is A Good Thing, especially as the age at which the state pension can be claimed is going to be raised to 66, which could’ve left some people without an income for a year.

Some people aren’t happy about it though. Step forward the Institute of Directors.

The Directors reckon it will reduce flexibility for employers and want the plans clarified. As usual, ‘flexibility’ short hand for ‘ability to sack people’.

Why should this bother employers? The ability to sack people is there for employers already. There are procedures that have to be followed. Criteria filled. If someone ticks all the boxes then an employer has no comeback for sacking someone. Age, per se, should not come into it.

There is an arguement floating about that this change in the law is going to screw young people coming into the job market. Old, employed people equals young people with no jobs to get into.

First of all, why should someone move over, just give up or be forced to give up their job because someone else wants or needs it? A young person may need to get a job to get experience and skills and start moving up the corporate ladder (I seem to remember reading that the longer a ‘youth’ takes to get from education to employment the worse off they are with regards to their potential earnings, career progression and stuff like that). An older person has bills to pay, a pension to finish topping up, and other commitments. One persons need is no greater than anothers. No one has an automatic right to a job.

Secondly, the jobs that the older people would be leaving are not necessarily the same type that the young person would be taking. There would be something of a skills/knowledge gap.

There was also something in the news, and I can’t find it now about maybe increasing the period that an employer can dismiss a new employee for no reason from one year to two. Once again, all in the name of ‘flexibilty’.

Flexibility may be what the corporations want, and some would argue need, but what employees need is at least a bit of security. If an employer doesn’t know if someone is unsuitable for the position after a year then they probably shouldn’t be in a position offer employment in the first place.

It would be nice to have these directors think about the people they employ as people now and again, not just another resource they buy in like the stationary.

Alex Gabriel at Political Promise has a sort-of-rant about the trains. I’m not sure how accurate the figures are Alex uses but they sound about right…

If Arriva run the train you need and you’d rather travel with Virgin, tough. Unlike buying most other things, we don’t get to choose the superior brand. The companies aren’t really competing, either, because we have to travel with whichever one has trains at the right time. They might as well have the monopoly that the Conservatives promised they’d take from British Rail, because there’s no real choice of service involved: we board the train irrespective of how good or bad it is, or else we can’t make our journey.

The same applies to public transport in general. Fields, lakes and mountains surround my hometown, and when last I checked it cost £10 for the twenty minute journey to the next town. Long distance bus companies which compete for better prices will take you from Manchester to London for half that, but local companies – like rail firms – can be as exploitative as they like because people who use them have no choice.

They’re not accountable, efficient or cheap, but don’t the train companies at least strengthen the economy with their profits? Well, no. Salford University published a paper which found that in 2002-3, taxpayers paid subsidies of £1.34bn to prop up the rail industry. That’s right – we’re actually paying them to rip us off, and they wouldn’t be profitable if we didn’t.

When British Rail existed, it received £1.07bn of the same subsidies, so ironically train travel is more tax-funded now than then. National Rail even gets £20bn a year from general taxation to keep it going. The Thatcherites said not to fund unprofitable industries with public money, but that’s exactly the situation we’re in – except with all privatisation’s downsides and none of its benefits.

Sometimes there is no market and trying to create one just doesn’t work.