Sunday 1 May 2011

The Prince or the Pauper?

The fawning attitude of the BBC and other media moguls to the Royalist  wedding in London is part of a continuing conspiracy amongst the ruling classes to deny democracy in the UK. This has been backed by the closing down of Facebook accounts and Websites of anyone critical of the Monarchy and police raids on over 50 social centres.

This wedding is not a dream, but a nightmare. The tightening of the grip of the powers that be, at the expense of democracy. Westminster politicians, except for a brave few, are too frightened to speak the truth about the elite who run our country. If they are so confident that the monarchy is so popular, why has the alternative never been offered to the British people?

We need an informed debate and a referendum to ask ALL the people of Britain whether they would prefer an elected head of state, rather than this continuing dicatorship by an unelected elite. Do we really want to be governed by a Hooray Henry whose best friend is Posh Spice? Do you really think it is a coincidence that the leaders of the coalition government are all public schoolboys?
We know that a large proportion of the cheering crowds at the wedding were foreign tourists, especially Americans, who got rid of their monarch almost 250 years ago. There were no protests because protests were banned, protest leaders detained and the voice of protest gagged by a subservient media, led by the BBC. Like the majority of people in the UK, I did not watch the wedding, but spent the day delivering local election leaflets, campaigning for a Yes vote to electoral reform and dreaming of the day when Britain will indeed become a democracy. Not an elected dictatorship, led by an unelected monarch.
The Prince or the Pauper? Vote for the paupers of this world and set yourself free!

Monday 4 April 2011

News direct from Japan

From: DrumCircles@ yahoogroups. com [mailto:DrumCircles@ yahoogroups. com] On
Behalf Of Kaoru Sasaki
Sent: 02 April 2011 03:30
To: Yahoo! Int'l List
Subject: [DrumCircles] Another thing you can do for Japan

Hi list,

Thank you for your massages, prayers, drumming, donations,
holding charity events and so on.

More than three weeks have past, and things don't seem to be better,
unfortunately. The fiscal & school year begins on April 1, and
many people who evacuated from Tsunami/nuclear disaster area
have either moved for new places to settle or went back home.

Japan is almost like North Korea and the people are not provided
with truth. Information is very much controlled and you outside
Japan may have better information. You may think we always
have internet, but there are old people who don't use internet,
who have lost their PCs, who have PCs but the internet connection
is not available, and so on, especially at the Tsunami/nuclear- polluted
area.

As you know, Japan is one of the biggest seismic country.
Many earthquakes have been happening, before and especially
after the one on March 11. The big plates are stimulated
by the recent quakes, and many experts expect more to come.

There are 54 nuclear-power- related facilities, and the government
plans to build 14 more. They built the nuclear waste dumping
facility in Rokkasho, in the north, but it is almost full.

The real information is not available from either the government
or the power company, but there is already ongoing radiation leaks
which is polluting everything. We know it is MUCH more than
we are told it is.

You have rights to get more angry about Japan, because there is
no border in air and water. What Japan has done to its people
and to the world is a crime.

Japan has been traditionally VERY hard to change from inside.
Dr. Koide of Kyoto University, an anti-nuclear scholar, asked by
someone how we can stop nuclear power plants in Japan,
replied, "We have been trying for 40 years, and it has been
very difficult." Mediad oesn't function here either, because
many of the journalist who spoke out have been 'burried' in
all kinds of ways.

In many environmental movements, we as activists, often used
'external pressure' and asked our foreign friends for help.

Please contact the Japanese embassies in your area,
write to the Japanese government, Tokyo Electricity,
and so on to call for stopping and eventually abolishment
of Japan's nuclear power plants.

Tokyo Electricity http://www.tepco. co.jp/en/ index-e.html

Would it work? ... I don't know, because they may just
ignore your e-mails.

Tell your friends about the situation in Japan, contact
media or your government if you have connections.

Japan has already polluted the planet enough as of today,
and we have to avoid more nuclear-pollution by more
earthquakes to come.

Big earthquakes are said to come 100%. The problem is
no one knows if it will come today or 5, 10 years later.

We are doing our best to stop nuclear power plants here,
and we need your help. Please help!

Kaoru

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Nuclear Disaster

A UK nuclear industry spokesman said last Friday that the survival of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station after the earthquake was testimony to the safety of nuclear power. He is now probably eating his words as the number of reactors heading towards meltdown increases. The level of radioactivity in Tokyo is now twenty times higher than normal and increasing. The US Army are being kept 50 miles away from the power station, unlike the civilian 12 mile limit. If it wasn't just so appalling, I would be tempted to say the Green Movement told you so.

A big feature of the reporting of this disaster has been the tendency of the BBC to down play the seriousness of the situation in their reporting, compared to other world news media. Sounds like their political masters are calling the shots as usual. We know that the ConDem Government will continue to back nuclear power, as the Tories see big profits for their friends and the Lib Dems seem determined to go back on all the principles they ever used to stand for. The irony is that with proper investment in home insulation and renewable energy as the Green Party suggested at the last election, nuclear power generation would be unnecessary.

Monday 17 January 2011

ConDems Privatise the NHS

The Prime Minister lied to us again today. After claiming during the general election that there would be no large re-organisation of the NHS, he announced one today. Claiming that this did not mean privatisation, he announced that the NHS will be run by GPs, who are, ofcourse, private enterprises.

Ofcourse, GPs have no experience of running billion pound enterprises, so inevitably they will hire medical management companies to run their businesses. I predict that within three years, the NHS will effectively be managed by a handful of foreign controlled "healthcare partners" and privatisation will be a "fait accompli".

Another example of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats saying one thing to get elected and doing the exact opposite when in power.

Sunday 16 January 2011

The Banking Con

The bankers who are urging us to "move on" from the bankers' bonus issue are right. It is not the bonuses we should be focusing on, but the artificial profits these bonuses are based upon. We all know that the majority of financial transactions in the City have nothing to do with financing trades in goods and services, but are pure speculation, or gambling if you prefer.

But it is gambling with loaded dice. Through the use of interest rate swaps and other derivatives, massive bank to bank financial transactions can be manipulated by a small banking elite. Bank profits are boosted by massively increasing the cost of banking overall just by the sheer number of transactions and the shepherding of the resulting profit into the investment banking arms of these banks. The winners are the international banking elite who "justify" their bonuses on the back of these manufactured trades. The losers are the banks customers, including investors, who get higher costs and lower returns than they otherwise would. The fact that investors do not complain about these lower returns shows just how profitable banking can be. Eventually these manufactured trades get so complex and the artificial profits so high that the whole system collapses, but hey, by this time these banks are "too big to fail" and gullible governments step in to bail them out.

Having worked at a firm of money brokers, I have seen just how enormous this banking con has become. Governments need to work together to call the bankers bluff by introducing a punitive Tobin tax on speculative transactions, as well as outlawing artificially created trades which benefit no one except the bankers themselves.

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Lib Dem Choices

We recently heard that a Lib Dem MP was likely to choose to vote for the tripling of university tuition fees to "punish" students for daring to demonstrate at his office. Today (8/12/2010) we have Nick Clegg telling us it is all about choices. So let's see what he has chosen to do instead of honouring his pledge on tuition fees.
The Lib Dem choice is to spend billions of pounds on fighting a war in Afghanistan, rather than on educating our children. The Lib Dem choice is to invest billions in nuclear power stations, none of which will be operational before the shortfall in energy predicted by Ofgen in 2015 and which will leave our children with a legacy of nuclear waste as well as debts of £39,000 each. The Lib Dem choice is to spend billions on a replacement for the Trident nuclear missile system, to let the banks pay only a fraction of what their mistakes cost the UK taxpayer and let tax dodgers squirrel away untaxed billions in tax havens.
Most shamefully for me, a former Liberal Democrat candidate, is that all of those decisions represent promises made by Lib Dems at the general election, which have been broken within weeks of getting elected. Nick Clegg was lying then and is lying now. He said that no Westminster party was offering to abolish tuition fees. The Green Party and our leader, Caroline Lucas MP has long called for the abolition of tuition fees, paid for by not doing the things above that Lib Dems said they would not do. In addition millions would be saved just abandoning the bureaucracy of collecting tuition fees.
Sadly, we know that the Lib Dems (unlike Caroline Lucas) are now an irrelevance in Parliament. Whatever they decide to do on the Tuition Fees vote, they are too divided to make a difference to the outcome. However, if they all vote against a rise in tuition fees as they promised at the general election, they might just save what little credibility they have left.

Sunday 28 November 2010

Torture on British Streets

We saw torture on our streets last week. More shockingly, the torture of schoolchildren by British police officers, whose job is to protect and serve, not bully our children. A joyful protest by students last Wednesday was turned into a new attack on democracy in the UK by the police.
Let's be clear kettling is deliberate and unlawful torture. We all have the right to peacefully protest and the police have no right to unlawfully stop peaceful protesters from going home.
What is kettling? In the words of Laurie Penny of the New Statesman, who was caught up in the heat of the kettle, it is to trap people in the open with no water or toilets or space to sit down. “It takes a shockingly short time to reduce ordinary kids to a state of primitive physical need” she says. “Without blankets, food or first aid, it's unspeakably cruel when it's done for six hours on the coldest night of the year, in sub-zero temperatures, to minors, some of whom don't even have a jumper.”
“Children who have fainted, and need medical attention, or the loo are denied their basic rights. The Police decide when old people can get warm, when the diabetics can get their insulin, when the kid having a panic attack can go home to her mum. It's a way of making you feel small and scared and helpless, a way for the state's agents to make you feel that you are nothing without them, making you forget that a state is supposed to survive by mandate of the people, and not the other way around.”
This is torture and we need the legal eagles to take them to court. There will be further protests and next time we may not have brave school children stopping the agents provocateur from turning a peaceful protest into a riot. That, of course, is what the police want. They were hitting peaceful protesters with their batons last Wednesday, just imagine what they could do if they can cause a riot? In recent protests most students have said they did not know the minority who caused trouble. A combination of agents provocateur and police unlawful kettling is going to provide government with the excuse they need to further curtail our civil liberties. With a Government of liars who were elected on false promises, we are going to see big confrontations on our streets in the coming months. As a former Liberal, it is a source of great sadness for me to see the Liberal Democrats being part of removing Liberty from our society and causing children to be tortured on our streets.