Government Thieving.

Politicians go into government because they want power. Civil servants do too. Once they are there they can push their agendas and it turns out the agendas mean more power, more control, more tax and more waste. They get the money to pay for their operations by various means. Taxation is the obvious one. Printing money is another. A  third is fraudulent accounting. Then there is privatization which is to say selling off government controlled assets. Maggie Thatcher was the one that started down this road. She was severely criticized by the left  for her pains. Now they do it themselves but in a nasty way. Then we come to the real payoff, the reason why men go into politics - the personal finance initiative. Some people look at these operations and think it is fraud. Politicians take a more relaxed view - and join their recipients after.

Tax
Is a reasonable approach to financing government operations - if they are necessary - but it has been turned into a political weapon. Some call it social engineering others call it malice. Taxing high earners at the rate of 21 shillings in the pound  [ 20 shillings ] was malicious and intentionally so. The rules have been made more and more complicated over the years in order to screw people and created an industry. There is an army of anti-tax accountants busily working out what the rules mean so that they can side step them. A simple system would be cheap and easy to run and mean that a lot of accountants would have to find useful work.

 

Printing Money
Is simple and straightforward. If honest men do it they are called   forgers and treated as major criminals. Governments do it all of the time. They call the result inflation and pretend that it is just a force of nature. They lie. English pound notes carried a promise to pay the bearer the sum of one pound. In practice it meant nothing. The Bank of England might have deigned to swap one note for another. They are part of the racket. They call it Quantitative Easing in order to defraud us. The result is exactly the same.

 

Fraudulent Accounting
Public companies are obliged to produce accounts which presumably mean something to someone but seem to be more concerned with concealing the truth. However they are audited by outside firms who should be acting in the interests of the share holders and who certify that they are true. Believe them if you want. Various accounting firms have been caught out big time by lying. This system is administered by a government that has its own system of accounting which is fraudulent in intent and in practice but it is not illegal or if it is the men who should be telling us the truth have been intimidated or paid off.

 

Privatization
Selling the telephone business off made sense. Government control meant that it was run by civil servants with  a mentality that precluded thinking and efficiency. The new technology and new management meant that we got a better service albeit not cheaper. Creating competition did force BT, the new phone company to reduce prices and increase efficiency. The left complained bitterly about it when they were in opposition but created their own corrupt variant [ the PFI ] when they got power.

Private Finance Initiatives [ PFI ]
Are a variant of privatization and a very bad one. The system involves a government department arranging for a company to run prisons or whatever on terms which are negotiated by civil servants and politicians. The company pays up front for the privilege and the only real interest that the government apparatchiks have is the amount of money they get to waste on their own boondoggles. It is a way of defrauding the public by preventing them  from  knowing how much money the government is wasting. See page 26 of Private Eye 1148 for more and better details.

 

Cameron's Budget Explained 
Cameron is less obnoxious than Brown but just as dangerous. He has no intention of cutting the gross waste that is government spending.

 

Bourn Says Whitehall Is Incompetent
QUOTE
Whitehall needs a fundamental change of culture and practice, Sir John Bourn, the former head of the National Audit Office, has warned. Sir John says his 20-year experience as comptroller and auditor-general has taught him that “fundamental improvements are urgently needed” to address “the gaps in present performance and prospects”.
UNQUOTE
Bourne does not bother to say that he spent 20 years allowing gross waste while taking the freebies/jollies/diversions/entertainment/first class hotels and so on. Now that the retirement cheque has cleared he is making noises.

 

NHS Plc - The Privatization of Our Health Care
QUOTE
The National Health Service used to plan and fund to meet patient needs, providing free and fair access for all. But in this superb book, Allyson Pollock shows how Labour is destroying this great working class achievement.

Labour pushes the IMF, World Bank, European Union agenda of opening up all public services - water, energy, sewerage, telecoms, post and health - to private firms. So health care is becoming a commodity as in the USA, where billing and marketing make up 30% of health care costs. In the USA, fraud by health care companies totalled $418 billion in 1990-95. For example, Columbia/HCA (allegedly helped by the British consultancy firm KPMG) defrauded the government of $1.7 billion.

In 2004, Labour lifted the ceiling on health administration costs, which had already doubled, cutting clinical care budgets so that there are fewer beds in PFI hospitals. Labour excludes doctors, nurses and health professionals from hospital management, while welcoming failed businessmen.

Surgery performed in private hospitals costs 40% more than in NHS hospitals, because of higher costs and the overriding need to return a profit to the shareholders. Private borrowing is dearer too and the risks are not transferred to the private sector. Labour has arranged public spending data and NHS accounts to hide the huge amounts of public money going straight through the NHS to private companies............
UNQUOTE
The Labour Party is the party of the people, isn't it? Not these days it isn't. It is run by light fingered rogues on the make, communist subversives who are controlled by Jews and other undesirables. See also  The New NHS: A Guide: A Guide to Its Funding, Organization and Accountability by Allyson M. Pollock and Alison Talbot-Smith.

World Bank on Governance & Anti-Corruption
QUOTE
The World Bank views good governance and anti-corruption as central to its poverty alleviation mission. Nowadays, hundreds of governance and anti-corruption activities are taking place throughout the World Bank Group. They focus on internal organizational integrity, minimizing corruption on World Bank-funded projects, and assisting countries in improving governance and controlling corruption.
UNQUOTE
They talk the talk. Do they walk the walk? Stopping loans when things go bad makes a difference. When tyrants are corrupt and stupid there is not much to be done. Mugabe has ruined Zimbabwe. Most of sub-Sahara Africa is going the same way for the same reasons.

Inside the Labour old boys’ network [ 19 March 2007 ]
QUOTE
None of the men were aware that the new female colleague was an undercover Sunday Times reporter investigating the inner workings of the multi-million-pound lobbying industry. The reporter was interested in the way former ministers and aides have become lobbyists, using their connections to former friends and colleagues who are still in government.
UNQUOTE
Politicians have a lust for power which translates into greed all too easily. That is where decent Tories score. Being born into money means not needing to get it while the getting is good. Also  see Top sleaze buster damns Blair legacy but those wonderful people at The Guardian are not amused that their own were caught with their fingers suspiciously close to the till - Ministers accused of helping lobbyists after newspaper sting

 

The end of dollar hegemony
An important piece on financial fraud by the American government. To be fair they are not the only ones. They took over the money system, stopped using gold, substituted paper and printed the stuff so that they could spend it for free, defraud anyone holding honestly come by money and debauch the currency. The Federal Reserve Bank has managed to inflate the dollar down so that it is now worth 2% of its value when they started. Ron Paul is an American politician and explains it all much better than me.

FA Hayek, an Austrian economist wrote The Road to Serfdom. One of his major points is that central planning is inherently inefficient. Remote civil servants can not predict who needs how much of what. Only individuals can do that for themselves. This tells us for example that the National Health Service is going to work badly It is a good argument for small government. He also tells us that socialism invariably leads to more control and becomes communism, fascism or some variant. But this is not quite the point of this little essay.

The Last Enfield
The last rifle to be made at Enfield was a foreign design and a stolen design. They stole the wrong one. Then there was the political meddling, senior officers meddling and shoddy manufacturing as a result. The system will shrug and men will die.

 

Speed Cameras
Are a great way of screwing the punter. That is what they care about. They pretend that there are for safety. They lie.

 

£81 billion pensions black hole   [ 27 February 2006 ]
It is only government pensions so they will just put taxes up. It is probably a result of politicians robbing the kitty. These are the people who claim that they know how to run our lives better than we do and want more money so that they can meddle even more.

 

Blair minister 'helped' move alleged bribe  [ 27 February 2006 ]
Money moved through a least seven cut outs to make it untraceable or for entirely legitimate reasons. Mills claimed that the bung came from an Italian crook who was in prison at the time and couldn't have paid it. Blair and Brown have control over patronage worth billions and they are surrounded by place men. We never did get to hear why Mandelson was not prosecuted over a dodgy mortgage or why he got promoted.
PS, Mills was the man who set up the system of interlocking outfits for Berlusconi. When a dodgy  Italian turns to an Englishman for help in this area you might wonder just how honest he is.

 

Government Bungs Our Money At Its Peculiar Friends  [ 24 October 2020 ]
QUOTE
Revealed: London firm is paid up to £7,000 A DAY by taxpayer to run failing NHS Test and Trace - as Government spending on consultants spirals to £204million during crisis

Alastair Flanagan’s journey to work takes him from a rambling farmhouse near the Chiltern Hills to a state-of-the-art office block overlooking a garden square in London’s Marylebone. The striking building is UK headquarters of the Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s most prestigious — not to mention expensive — management consultancy firms. Flanagan is among its most senior partners. A floppy-haired 60-year-old, originally from southern Africa, he joined the swashbuckling company in 1987 and rose through its be-suited ranks to achieve considerable prosperity...............

His wife, Kate, farms sheep on their rolling acres and is a big cheese in the South Oxford shire Hunt’s pony club. Various family members — they have four privately educated children aged between 22 and 27 — ski, shoot, row, collect vintage cars, play polo and compete at dressage and showjumping. Financing expensive hobbies is a perk of the job when you are a Master of the Universe. And Boston Consulting, or BCG, employs some of the fattest cats in corporate Britain.

Accounts filed at Companies House show that its 966 UK employees earned more than £110 million in the year to March, equating to an average salary of £114,237. Each of its 75 partners trousered £943,687.

Those top earners include the Oxford-educated Flanagan, who according to his CV is an expert in ‘strategy’ and ‘transformation’. And from BCG’s point of view, he does plenty to justify his exorbitant remuneration. Clients pay the firm up to about £10,000 a day to secure his services on a project. But who are these deep-pocketed clients? And what persuades them to pay such very high fees? Well, recently, the people paying for Alastair Flanagan’s expertise have included... me and you...............................

This year, Boston Consulting Group signed a £10 million deal to help the Government set up and run its Covid test-and-trace system. Under that deal, the firm agreed to provide 40 consultants to work on the project.............

It has emerged that the initial £10 million fee was determined by the so-called ‘day rates’ of the BCG staff who worked on it. The firm quoted from £2,400 a day for each of its junior staff to £7,360 a day for their senior colleagues.

This was, it has been claimed with a straight face, a generous ‘discount’ from their normal fees, in recognition of the fact that the taxpayer was footing the bill..............

Even so, taxpayers have effectively been obliged to pay more than £30,000 a week for these elite management consutants [ sic ].

That is the equivalent to an annual salary of more than £1.5 million. In other words, hiring the likes of Alastair Flanagan has cost the British public about ten times the annual salary of the Prime Minister and 50 times that of many healthcare workers, to contribute to our coronavirus response.
UNQUOTE
The Daily Mail puts the boot in. Are they using a writer from the Daily Worker? The peasant masses, the great unwashed, even the muddied oafs like us can't see the funny side of it. Of course the senior civil "servants" that hand out these lucrative contracts know they will get their bribes golden helloes when they retire. NB the Boston Consulting Group has fingers in some very juicy pies and up to the arm pits at that.
PS The Mail does not mention that Goldman-Sachs Bosses recently paid a $2.9 billion bung to stay out of prison.

 

 

GLOW Worms
When the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes his pre-budget statement he tells us about income and outgoings but he chose not to tell us about a number of major liabilities on the grounds that he is too important or something of the sort. However one group litigation order [ GLOW ] got to the European Court of Justice and it seems they are allowed to know and the Treasury is liable for up to £5 billion. They are another four GLOWs in the pipeline. See page 26 of Private Eye 1148 for more and better details. Ditto for the £19 billion of PFI that the Ministry of Defence is fouling up or not as the case may be.

 

Blair, the National Health Service and IT
QUOTE
The Fujitsu manager who recently told a conference that the NHS I.T. programme “isn’t working” and “isn’t going to work”, found himself up before the Public Accounts Committee last week. Suspended from his job as soon as his words hit the pages of Computer Weekly, Andrew Rollerson confirmed that although he remained an enthusiast for NHS I.T., all his comments, including that the whole thing might end up “a camel, and not the racehorse that we might try to produce”, had been accurately reported.

Rollerson went further and declared that “the appropriate mechanism for consultation in order to achieve the objective has not yet been found.” In other words, four years into the programme, the people running it still don’t know what’s required by the NHS trusts having to use the wretched systems.
UNQUOTE ex page 27 of Private Eye 1180
What is the major computerization for? Blair thought it sounded like a good idea. At an honest price it might even have been somewhat useful. Giving control to one patter merchant has made suppliers very rich and produced very little worthwhile. Blair has wasted £12.4 billion on this one. Even if it had worked the price is grossly excessive. One million computers at £12,400 each is a try on. It not even Blair's first time. Remember Foot and Mouth which was a disaster driven by gross mismanagement. It is difficult to know whether this is cock up or conspiracy, incompetence or fraud.

Tax Explained in pictures:-
It comes in:-

It goes out:-

Snouts in the trough - if your face fits.

Here is the same message in colour:-

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.

Email me at Mike Emery. All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep it private, use my PGP Key.  Home Page

Updated  on Thursday, 19 November 2020 09:10:04