Category Archives: Law

November 9, 2016 · 12:48

Matt Damon’s Quote

You could wonder what Matt Damon has been up to, there will always be reason to do this, not because he is an exceptional actor, even a celebrity on Mars. No, the reason here is his connection to documentaries. He was the narrator on ‘Inside Job‘, which got a well-deserved Oscar in 2011. I personally feel that this is the best documentary on the financial crises ever created. So let’s get started. Today, we see a number of news items reach the twilight of dawn.

The first one (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/panama-papers-22-people-face-tax-evasion-investigations-in-uk), gives us ‘Panama Papers: 22 people face tax evasion investigations in UK‘, with the added text “Philip Hammond also said a further 43 wealthy individuals were under review while their links to the offshore files were investigated further. He made the comments in a written answer to the House of Commons explaining what had happened since the offshore tax files emerged“. Now we might go all huffy and puffy on these tax evaders, yet when you consider the news from August (at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/ex-tesco-finance-chief-mcilwee-probe-closed-by-u-k-regulator), where we see “The U.K. accounting regulator closed an investigation into Tesco Plc’s former Chief Financial Officer, Laurie McIlwee, saying there wasn’t a “realistic prospect” that misconduct would be found in the case“, with the added “The Financial Reporting Council closed its case into McIlwee Wednesday, according to a statement from the regulator. It is still investigating the grocer’s auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and other individuals involved in Tesco’s accounts“.

This has been going on since 2014, they have not been able to find anything after two years and now you are going after ‘simple’ tax evaders?

My initial message (with all due respect) to the Chancellor of the Exchequer is “Mr Philip Hammond, are you out of your bloody mind?” You are still trying to get anything real on PwC, or were you ordered to let it die down?

When a company suddenly loses billions in value (also due to their own stupidity) and you cannot find anyone to prosecute and go to jail for overstating profits by £263 million ($345 million), whilst we also know that for that year PwC gave Tesco a 10 million pound invoice for auditing (annual) with an additional 3 million pounds for consultancy that year (Source: the Guardian). You cannot find anything and now you are going after people, where you cannot state whether they broke the law and you will rely on illegally obtained papers. How stupid is this?

How about you making the following change as per immediate!

a. Until the Tesco case has been satisfied, PwC and its senior employees cannot undersign any accountancy venue, or corporate balance for any UK corporation for 2016, 2017 and 2018 until the matter is solved.
b. In case wrongdoing by PwC employees is proven beyond reasonable doubt, PwC will not be allowed to operate within the UK.

How about them apples?

So far we have seen massive leeway by the press and the SFO has not achieved anything at all regarding Tesco. So it is time to adjust regulations and legal premises, until that point comes PwC will have to operate on non-British companies. Now, we can all understand that when we see the quote “McIlwee resigned as Tesco’s CFO in April 2014, prior to the discovery of the accounting errors, amid reports of disagreements with then-Chief Executive Officer Philip Clarke” seems to imply that McIlwee was not privy to, and not guilty of any wrongdoings, yet the fact that the SFO got nowhere in two years means that there is something massively wrong. When we know that so many millions were overstated, we seem to have a decently clear case of fraud, yet no one goes to jail. In addition, we also know that PwC was in on it (at least to some degree) and in addition, the subsequent Deloitte investigation showed more than initially was found means that there is no scenario where PwC can be absent from guilt in the first or second degree.

The SFO gave that Carl Rogberg, Christopher Bush and John Scouler were charged (source: BBC), they pleaded not guilty and at present the court dates are set for September 2017. It is my opinion that until all that is settled, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has no business whatsoever to dig into cases based on illegally obtained papers, whilst his branch as well as the SFO has no flipping ability at present to close a 2 year old case for at least another year (if ever). And as reported by the Times in September (at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tesco-auditor-slips-back-into-retailers-aisles-0gm9xt8md) that “Tesco has appointed PwC as an independent adviser, despite replacing it as auditor with Deloitte“, which gives my emotional and slightly inappropriate response “Are you fucking kidding me?”

So, whilst the PwC issues were kept very low key by nearly all the press, whilst there is no condemnation on a daily basis by the press and even less success by the SFO, we should agree that PwC has no business being in the UK to begin with, especially as “Last week the FRC cleared Laurie McIlwee, Tesco’s former chief financial officer, of wrongdoing over the scandal, but added that its investigation into PwC and other unnamed individuals continued“, we could go by once bitten twice shy, or we could go by the fact that as the SFO is either unable or unwilling to prosecute PwC, why would we even consider their presence? In case some are considering a specific rebuttal, to them I would respond with the April article (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/14/brexit-could-lead-to-loss-of-100000-financial-services-jobs-report-warns), where they stated ‘PwC report estimates 70,000-100,000 fewer jobs in 2020 compared with estimated number if Britain stays in EU‘, so let’s start with theirs and let smaller accountancy firms continue and allow for growth. In addition, when we accept the news by the BBC in Feb 2015 (at http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31147276), where we see “We believe that PricewaterhouseCoopers’s activities represent nothing short of the promotion of tax avoidance on an industrial scale,” said Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)“, so in that light, we could just send PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) packing, giving light that the facilitator of tax evasion have been dismissed from the country and as such the UK will see a decline in Tax evasion, no need for illegally held papers, no long and expensive investigation and the thorn in the UK economies side is equally removed. It will not mean that tax evasion is a thing of the past, but if PwC is send packing now, the other three might do a 180 degree on that clientele, which would at that point make the tax evasion issue moot, or at least deprive it from many options, which would amount to the same in the end.

So, you like apples?

If I am accused from persecuting PwC, then I would plead that I am not entirely innocent in that regard. I would bring the defence that the SFO has not gotten anywhere in 2 years and they are supposed to have the ability to find those culprits. Yet, as John Crace pointed out in the Guardian on April 5^th that “Only last year, the public accounts committee reported that the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was promoting tax avoidance on an industrial scale. To make things worse, it was first in the frame to benefit from administering the windup of Tata’s steel operations in the UK. So where was David Cameron? At PwC’s offices in Birmingham. Some might call it a brave choice“, in that light, there is an additional reason to give PwC their walking papers.

In all this the exchequer has one final issue to deal with, you see, accountant at large, including (read: especially) those at PwC are really clever with what they do, meaning that there could be no broken laws to begin with, making the actions from certain parties from 2014 until 2018 even more questionable, with a strong need to truly scrutinise the rules that accountancy firms applied and how they were applied. As I see it, there is nothing worse than to paint a lovely target on a person only to learn that the laws fell short and none were ever broken. If you question that, then consider the following two options.

The SFO has, as it embraced corruption onto a new level decided not to dig into PwC on the levels needed to secure evidence for the prosecution regarding Tesco.
The SFO has found that even as it is clear that PwC assisted in these levels of Fraud and Misreporting, yet when the books and memos were investigated for these transgressions, there was more than a reasonable doubt that PwC was not fully aware, in addition, there are no papers filed by PwC to implicate them in any way in fraud or misrepresentation. As well as the established fact that no laws were broken at present.

When you look at the two options, which one is more likely than not the situation regarding PwC?

In my book, the fact that a person is not guilty, does not mean that they are innocent. I remain of mind that shutting PwC down in the UK is not the worst idea at present, yet is that point of view valid when we consider premise 2, which is actually the most likely scenario? When we consider that the spirit of the law has been violated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, at that point we still have the issue that no literal laws were broken. Here we could set forth that the government (read: parliament) created the foundations and the setting where industrialised tax evasion and fraud became legalised options. Even as we saw that there was a clear case for fraud, the law has been altered to the degree that the facilitators cannot be held accountable, as such, an issue was created and until that is resolved, and PwC cannot be prosecuted (which is wrong in many ways from the point of a simple taxpaying labourer).

So, we now have the issue of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, which should be seen as grammatical opposites, not just in grammar, it is that they are also opposites of the soul (read: soul of the law). When one obeys the letter of the law but not the spirit, one is obeying the literal interpretation of the words (the “letter”) of the law, but not necessarily the intent of those who wrote the law. Which is what black letter lawyers (and accountants) tend to do, because a nation of laws is about a nation with rules of playing the game. In our case, in Common Law, until a case is set as a precedent in law, there will be no adjustment and this can go on ‘ad infinitum’ and Intentionally following the letter of the law but not the spirit may be accomplished through exploiting technicalities, loopholes, and ambiguous language (at times a mere comma does the trick too).

Yet, when one obeys the spirit of the law but not the letter, one is doing what the authors of the law intended, though not necessarily adhering to the literal wording, which could get them automatically prosecuted if the District Attorney woke up on a Monday morning with a really foul mood.

So, whilst we might agree with Margaret Hodge, stating “We believe that PricewaterhouseCoopers’s activities represent nothing short of the promotion of tax avoidance on an industrial scale“, the fact that they are not breaking the law, implies that no corrections to the law have been made to correct for this. As such, you only have yourself to blame and admittance of this failure to the public at large is an essential second step. As I see it, making a lot of noise going after people who might have done something like this, whilst papers are absent and whilst all parties know that this is because of illegally obtained papers from the law firm Mossack Fonseca is even less intelligent, as the people behind this have leaked these papers for their own personal interest and ‘late taxation’ was not their goal, so to adhere to the promotion of such crimes is not the best way to get results.

Now that we see claims rising towards Tesco for misrepresentation from their investors for the amount of £100 million, which comes on top of the diminished value, so I feel that no matter what, there should be a negative impact on PwC one way or another, yet within the confines of the law of course. This takes us to ‘The letter versus the spirit of the law: A lay perspective on culpability‘ by Stephen M. Garcia, Patricia Chen and Matthew T. Gordon (paper here). The part that gives us the cakes are found in study 5 on page 486. “Study 5 sought to examine another instance in which the letter of the law is not broken but the spirit of the law may have been violated“, which is where I for the most stand with PwC in the Tesco matter as stated “We also wanted to control for various counter-explanations that underlie culpability such as violations of social and moral norms“, with references to Bicchieri & Chavez, 2010 as well as Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008. Yet in the first there is Tonry, 2010, where he argues that “the foundations for disparity causing policy choices lie in the cultural and social forces that combined historically to shape U.S. society“, which is interesting as this implies that the policymaker and not PwC is the actual culprit and my rage was misguided. Yet, is that actually true? The spirit of the law is not equipped, or better stated should not be equipped to manage the input of self-interest, because the spirit of the will assume the setting for all people and as such will force the text and derail the letter of the law (as I see it). Tonry goes on into the racial destabilising side, yet in my view the racial part is not the real instance, I believe that the division is that we see two groups One is the (white) social enabled group who is set to the game with preparation (read: legal advice) to break the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law as long as self-interests are served. This setting will at that same time destabilise the (black) group, a group that is suffocating on the lack and lapse of social options and opportunities, where without proper and affordable advice the letter and the spirit of the law will be adhered to, yet at a massive cost through loss of opportunity. This now makes PwC a facilitator for the wealthy to avoid breaking the letter of the law and to optionally, when unavoidable adhere to the spirit of the law. From one point, can the facilitator be held to account? I believe so, yet the area is slightly too grey for my comfort. It is the policymaker that requires to shift the grey area, so that breaking the law is a more clear setting and as such the SFO could actually create a situation where conviction (let alone prosecution) becomes a reality.

I still believe that PwC has done great wrongs, yet as far as we can establish, not in the letter of the law. I find them guilty of knowingly set the stage for managed ‘breaking’ of the law. The spirit is as much a factor as the letter, either should be seen as breaking the law. Yet there is diminishment as the policymaker is seemingly also guilty, yet the reasoning for that flaw can never be easily determined, so we can tell it was wrong, yet to what degree is not a given, but an essential issue to address. When we look at the policymakers, we need to ascertain the application that the paper discusses. “This framework broaches a new language to understand complex situations such as those that are not technically illegal but seem wrong“, we can see that this applies to multiple incidents. In those cases it needs to be clear that these levels of protection do not make the cake edible. It makes for a sour venue where those with legal advice can abort too many payments whilst the underprivileged groups end up without support, protection and options. I am speculating here that this is the (read: speculated intentional) creation of the haves and have not, which is a policy drip down effect when you implement a prismatic system, which policymakers from business and sociological fields seemed to have resorted to as they (tried to) implement laws, on the premise of a non-legal mind. Which is what is pushing the issues. The political field needed the business view of opportunity and the resulting laws are toothless against larger corporations who end up getting a free pass here with PwC as the facilitating office.

In the end I am more correct than even I thought I was, yet this should not digress from handing out the penalties that are needed to give a clear signal that the party is over. We have learned the hard way from 2004 onwards that unless we make a massive shift, this will continue a few more decades, as such stronger language and harsher penalties are required, because continuing on this path is far too rewarding for all the players that can afford to play this game, which gave me the idea to give PwC their marching orders out of the UK. I don’t believe it is too harsh, especially as they made 35 billion last year alone. So the question to you becomes, do you have any idea how much taxation they paid? I have no idea how much exactly, but we do know that PwC was elemental in avoiding Lehman Brothers to pay an addition £1.2 billion in taxation, due to inconsistencies, we see the quote by Mr Justice Hildyard: “It is of real importance, both in terms of good governance and a fair market, that HMRC should make every effort to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen again“, (at http://www.theweek.co.uk/lehman-brothers/77510/lehman-brothers-creditors-to-avoid-12bn-tax-bill) giving rise that larger changes are needed to bring back fairness to all tax paying people, who have not seen a whole lot of fairness in that regard these last 12 years.

Judges will soon have to science the shit out of these tax laws, making them actually fair to all, not just large corporations, who seem to be judged on ‘the Principle of least accountability’.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics

Tagged as Bicchieri & Chavez 2010, Carl Rogberg, Chancellor of the Exchequer is, Chief Executive Officer Philip Clarke, Christopher Bush, David Cameron, Deloitte, HMRC, Inside Job, John Crace, John Scouler, Laurie McIlwee, Lehman brothers, Margaret Hodge, Matthew T. Gordon, Mazar Amir & Ariely 2008, Mossack Fonseca, Mosseck Fonseca, Mr Justice Hildyard, Panama papers, Patricia Chen, Philip Clarke, Philip Hammond, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, Serious Fraud Office, SFO, Stephen M. Garcia, the Guardian, The Times, Tonry 2010

November 8, 2016 · 16:39

The editor in question

It started to be such a fine morning. I got up at 5:45, got onto the business for the day. Which started by sending a fax to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi regarding the pressure points of the Dow Jones. It was then that I realised that Mario Draghi has been in office for exactly 5 years. In addition, there is still my anger with Paul Michael Dacre regarding last Friday’s front page, with the mention “The judges who blocked Brexit: One founded a EUROPEAN law group, another charged the taxpayer millions for advice and the third is an openly gay ex-Olympic fencer”. It makes me want to ignore the law and slap the man silly on Trafalgar Square with a 25 inch pink coloured rubber dildo! This side of me wants to make it clear that I do not completely oppose the subtitle ‘journalists are free to complain about Brexit ruling, as Labour confirms it will not block article 50‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/06/labour-will-not-block-article-50-jeremy-corbyn-allies-confirm), however, when I read the trivialised version of demonising three judges, who have served the nation and were instrumental in pushing (read: evolving) Common Law forward, we need to remind readers, politicians and most others, that it was the daily mail that stated “Leveson law ‘is worst threat to free speech in the modern era'”, for him I have the message: “No, Pharisee Mountebank Dacre, we wanted to hold people like you and Murdoch accountable for the things you write!“, which pretty much sums up my anger and in that regard, I tend to blame the person at the top.

I do agree with the Prime Minister when I read “the prime minister said she believed the high court had every right to deliver its verdict but argued that journalists were similarly free to complain about it“, she is right, there should be freedom of the press, that was never in question, yet the reference ‘an openly gay ex-Olympic fencer‘ is to be regarded as sexual discriminatory as my view goes. Let’s face it, the Daily Mail is no Jimmy Carr sketch, although, that reference should also come with the warning that Jimmy Carr has a lot more class than the Daily Mail ever had or likely will have.

Let’s face it, those who read my blog know that I have been pro Brexit, although the well-known Marky Mark of the British Bank (read: Mark Carney, Governor of the bank of England) pulled me back on the fence, almost changing my direction regarding Brexit. His address to the House of Lords was that good and gave the clarity all Britons needed before the votes. You see, my move towards Brexit was driven to some extent towards the idiotic spending spree by Mario Draghi. The fact that many nations were losing their national identity was also a factor, but for me that was not the largest one (which is the larger issue for Frexit, if we accept the view of Marine Le Pen). You think I am digressing, but I am not. Yet, we will take a few steps back for the next part.

At [5] we see “in these proceedings is only dealing with the purest question of law” as well as “whether the executive government can use the Crow’s prerogative to give notice of withdrawal“. These are the issues that needed addressing, mainly because the UK remains a monarchy, even as the bulk (51%) wanted to withdraw from the EU, it still needs to be done legally correct. The added issue for the three man wearing wigs that would usually be found caressing the skull of Lady Gaga is that this situation has never happened before, so Common Law needed to focus on Constitutional Law as well as the national (read: domestic) effect of EU law.

In the final paragraph we get “For the reasons we have set out, we hold that the Secretary of State does not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 of the TEU for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union“, this gets us to that place where the ‘parlour minties’ live, meaning that an Act of Parliament (i.e. passing through both the House of Commons and House of Lords) is needed to actually (and legally correct) invoke Article 50. MPs would to a certain degree vote according to the referendum result, but several will seek to influence the type of exit agreement from the EU to be sought (read: an implied alteration for what they perceive to be the common good). Moreover, the Bremainians will now seek that time to sway as many MP’s as they can to prevent Brexit. This is a perfectly valid political path, because it also treads the path that some need for their opportunity to serve the ‘masters’ that were never elected, some of them not even British. So as we see this document regarding R (Miller) -V- Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (PDF here), we can now look at the response from the paper of PM Dacre:

1 ‘The judges who blocked Brexit‘, they did not, they ruled based on the Law that exiting the EEC will require a decision by parliament.

2 ‘One founded a EUROPEAN law group‘, this is a ‘nice’ statement. The truth is that the ELI is “an independent non-profit organisation established to initiate, conduct and facilitate research, make recommendations and provide practical guidance in the field of European legal development with a goal of enhancing the European legal integration“, so basically, Wiki pages are more eloquent in stating the identity of a European Law Group, designed to enhance legal integration than the Daily Mail is, or ever was!

3 ‘another charged the taxpayer millions for advice‘, well, the legal profession has pricing, so if that taxpayer hired a judge for a summary and consultancy of 1600 hours, then an amount well over 2 million would be due (making the statement ‘millions’ true), yet if taxation was paid, no crime was committed and proper advice was given, what value does the statement have? Especially when we see the statement that PM Dacre, by his own admission “had used the private detective Steve Whittamore, who was jailed in 2005 for illegally accessing information, but claimed that the rest of the British press had done so too” (Source: BBC News), so who needs more scrutiny?

4 ‘the third is an openly gay ex-Olympic fencer‘, so the fourth judge is not just legally able, he is also an Olympian, which might be a nice extra, yet showing a judge to be a superhuman athlete seems to be counterproductive on many fields, there is only the issue with the fact that he is depicted as gay. How does this give any indication of either academic or athletic ability?

So, 4 parts of a statement, one part inaccurate, two parts irrelevant and one part utterly incomplete and substandard.

Let’s take a look at another headline from the Daily Mail “ANZ bank chief Mike Smith paid $9.7 MILLION for just three months’ work – or 123 TIMES the average Australian wage” (at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3914880/Former-ANZ-bank-chief-executive-Mike-Smith-received-9-7m-three-months-work.html), which now gives us the question regarding that ‘expensive judge’, what were the tax costs for this person and were all taxations paid? I reckon when it comes to ‘costing the taxpayer’ the Daily Mail needs to revisit what certain values and definitions encompass. Yet when we take a look at the Guardian, we see “The Mail editor has claimed £460,000 in subsidies since 2011” (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/31/paul-dacre-eu-subsidies-hypocrisy-daily-mail-euro-lies), in addition we see in a 2014 article “Paul Dacre’s pay and bonus package soared by 25% during 2014, taking the total remuneration of Britain’s best-paid newspaper editor to £2.4m” (at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/22/paul-dacre-earnings-up-annual-report-reveals-daily-mail), whilst his peers got marginally more, including Lord Rothermere, and the CEO of DMGT, that poor man (read: Martin Morgan) got cut down for an amount close to a million, no, Dacre went up by a lot. Now, this might all be fine and ‘correct’, yet when we see the ‘accusation’ on judges and taxpayer, whilst the man getting £460,000 in subsidies and personally getting a car allowance of £10,000 with added fuel benefit of £6,500. So can we agree that the shoddy description from the Daily Mail should be getting a better editorial in light of the news (read: in 2014 it was news), regarding its own chief editor.

In addition, the fact that the Daily Mail has a financial interest in opposing Brexit was also (as far as I know) never revealed by the Daily Mail in any way. So, as I see it Pharisee Mountebank Dacre is a worthy name of mention when regard the hypocrisy I personally categorise it to be. Of course accusation should in addition towards the Guardian by insulting Paul Dacre for being called the ‘Nigel Farage of Newspapers‘, so far Nigel Farage seems to be so much better and more a man than the Chief Editor of the Daily mail is regarded to be at present.

When we get back to target D (Mario Draghi) we see that the Daily Mail is less ‘insinuating’, it merely hides behind the words of Reuters. Isn’t it interesting that a person, whom I believe could be regarded as criminally negligent, is given wave after wave of consideration, even now, less than a day ago, so many, so eager to support another stimulus package, all written out as verbose as possible in the Wall Street Journal. In that I voice that Mario Draghi could be seen as criminally negligent, especially when the next Stimulus ends up not bringing home the bacon at which point he is still not seen as accountable.

When I see “Most European economists disagree with the conclusions of a recent report by the German Council of Economic Experts, which argued that the ECB’s easy monetary policies were no longer appropriate” (at http://www.wsj.com/articles/european-economists-back-ecb-stimulus-1478514545). So consider the following quote “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results“, it comes from Albert Einstein and it could aid Mario Draghi in his insanity plea. America has been funding labour through tax breaks leaving it currently 20 trillion in National debt. Mario Draghi is spending trillions, not stimulating anything, which is the massive reason why Brexit got pushed. Why does the British population in the end has to pay for some Italian, spending trillions with the (as I personally see it), lack of actual economic growth, fictive lowered unemployment numbers by paying for their cost of labour and in the end of that cycle, just more and more debt.

So how will this be solved? I think it is time to take another look at the Leveson report and consider the full implementation of it. Even if it merely gets us better and more accurately informed, that by itself would already be a great victory, if it cuts down certain editors by a notch, stopping them from doing the unacceptable act of assaulting three judges the way they were, that would just be the icing on the cake. I never opposed freedom of the press, I just want them to be held accountable for what they publish, in this I am seeing a large population that is in support of what I wrote, that because the outrage they created is shown nearly global. So even as Dacre is pulling a Murdoch out of his hat stating that all publicity is positive publicity.

We need to see it for hat it is, a statement that is currently as far from the truth as it could possibly get and it is time to hold the Media accountable, we sit by for too long. It took the events surrounding Milly Dowler to get the ball on the road and the outrageous statement on three judges is no less a reason to re-consider the Leveson report.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media

Tagged as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Brexit, DMGT, Dow Jones, Frexit, German Council of Economic Experts, Governor of the Bank of England, Jimmy Carr, Leveson, Lord Rothermere, Marine Le Pen, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Martin Morgan, Mike Smith, Milly Dowler, Paul Michael Dacre, R (Miller) -V- Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, Steve Whittamore

October 24, 2016 · 19:17

For those doubting Brexit

There have been a few issues with the EU, some are petty and some only seem petty. You see, many are all in arms and all about the issue on how Canada is a good place, and it really really is. Yet, we have to understand that a trade agreement tends to be an agreement where one is better off than the other. That is a simple fact of life. A trade agreement, when completely balanced equally to all parties is a figment of the imagination of the visionary who wanted it, for the simple reason that it was in their interest. Now, that does not make the person evil or greedy, it is merely the reality of any trade agreement. Yet, when the trade agreement is done in secret, there will be additional issues. This is not such a case, but in the case of CETA (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/24/belgium-eu-ultimatum-canada-trade-deal-ceta-wallonia), there is the image that French speaking Belgium (aka Wallonia) will miss out too much in this EU-Canada deal, so they are all about not letting it happen. The article gives us ‘Paul Magnette, the leader of the Wallonia region, says the deal is bad for Europe’s farmers and gives too much power to global corporate interests‘, which would give ample voice to the justification of Wallonia trying to scuttle this deal. It does not make Canada bad or evil, it only gives voice to the European side that Wallonian farmers lose out, from their point of view too much. This shows partially the justification of Brexit; yet in equal measure it shows how the Bremain group feels scared and scarred as well as their justification that together the UK would be stronger. On one side they have a point, on the other side, we see here that if Wallonia gives in, the EU basically sells their future short and away from them. The quote “One European diplomat said that the reassurances “responded to all of Mr Magnette’s concerns”” implies that Magnette is unreasonable as reassurances were given, yet we have all seen how politicians can roll on their backs when the wind turns, so is he wrong? In this case I very much doubt it, as does politico (at http://www.politico.eu/article/meet-monsieur-paul-magnette-the-man-killing-ceta-deal-trade-agreement/). Here we see two mentions. The first is “Wallonia did its homework” as well as “In particular, he protested that CETA would leave European governments vulnerable to court action from unscrupulous multinational companies“, these are issues raised in both the TTIP and the TPP. In the TPP it was New Zealand that showed backbone, whilst Australia folded like a tissue in front of a hair dryer on high, it was not a pretty picture. We have had several issues with the US in the past, yet not with Canada. It is my personal believe that large corporations are dictating the trade agreement language to governments at large, which is cause for concern in two ways.

In the first it means that the governments are not enough about governing and a little too much regarding the status quo of the Fortune 500 they have connections to and in the second it implies that they overall quality of government legislators is dwindling too much and as such national interests are not being met, which now implies that proper taxation laws are about a decade away and nations at large cannot afford to work that way.

In that light the quote in Politico seems pretty decent: ““This treaty affects the lives of 500 million Europeans and 35 million Canadians for years and years,” Magnette told La Première channel Wednesday. “We can take a few weeks, a few months to analyse the problems and overcome them.”” Is that such a bad idea? The fact that a decision is demanded in less than 12 hours gives additional cause for concern. Why the speed?

Canadian Global Research had this quote “The CETA agreement –presented to public opinion as an innocuous “bilateral” EU-Canada trade deal– constitutes a TTIP in disguise, which would eventually evolve towards the integration of NAFTA and the EU, i.e into what might be described as a giant “North Atlantic Trade and Investment Area”. Those who are involved in the negotiations are fully aware that CETA is a back-door mechanism which would would create the underlying conditions for the formation of a North Atlantic Trading Block, i.e. a US “Imperial Project” controlled by Washington“.

This now implies that this is a new approach to TTIP, a backdoor. The part where we see “US “Imperial Project” controlled by Washington“, gives voice to the part that I have given for close to two years. The United States of America is broke and bankrupt. This is the only path that the US has left to remain in the game for a little while longer, whilst giving 98% of American power to large corporations, which n my humble opinion was never a working or acceptable solution. The fact that pressures are applied to get this done quicker and quicker only gives rise to the fact that this American Democratic administration could end up being the worst in American history and this administration needs a clear ‘win’ to be less regarded as less of a failure. What a legacy President Obama brings, no matter how this goes, it will make progression for the next US administration near impossible, so we can see why the Clinton campaign was against the TTIP to begin with. In addition, the Canadian Tyee (at http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/10/22/CETA-Failure-Reflects-Public-Rejection-Trade-Deals/), gives us “Leaving aside the odd reference to how nice Canada is, this is remarkable language that lays bare the obvious frustration and disappointment for the government, which prioritized the CETA agreement above all trade deals“, in that my personal response becomes: ‘drop the option to large corporations to sue governments‘, first they get tax breaks, now they get to sue for missed alleged profits? When did we get ourselves so retarded that this: “Currently, the US Lone Pine energy company is using ISDS provisions in NAFTA to sue the provincial government of Quebec for $250 million because it suspended shale gas mining pending an environmental study in response to community concerns“? How on earth was the mining of Shale Gas ever allowed before clear environmental studies were made?

Environmental regulations are there for a reason. When the environment is damaged, these companies tend to get really far and away when the invoice is due, trying all kinds of loopholes not to be held accountable. The Australian Newspaper The Age gives us “The high cost of ISDS makes the threat of arbitration a potent tool for the tobacco companies“, meaning that in not so wealthy countries, Tobacco, Soda drinks and alcohol companies can hold a nation over a barrel when they can find an option to apply the ISDS. Australia Spend $50 million to defend its plain packaging requirement in cigarettes. A system that allows for Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), where we see the issue of alleged discriminatory practices is too dangerous. In addition, the proven dangers of tobacco, how many people died and were not compensated? How discriminatory is that?

Yet the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade gives us “Is ISDS a threat to Australia’s sovereignty? No. ISDS does not prevent the Government from changing its policies or regulating in the public interest. It does not freeze existing policy settings. It is not enough that an investor does not agree with a new policy or that a policy adversely affects its profits”, yet this is the opposite of what we see when we the Australian case of Philip Morris. The fact that only 5 days ago, News.com.au (at http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/govt-wont-reveal-tobacco-case-costs/news-story/7a81f7003241d0290685b5ce1d83f6db) gives us “Nick Xenophon wants to know what it cost taxpayers to defend the case, but the department insists it needs to be kept secret“, it gives light to the danger that the ISDS poses, it shows that Paul Magnette, the leader of the Wallonia region seems to be a lot more clued in and a lot more on the ball than those trying to get this dangerous trade pact passed and in addition, the fact that court costs are kept secret means that the taxpayer is not getting properly informed. The ISDS is more than just investors feeling safe, it is a secondary tool to get revenue up when the forecast gets downgraded by (amongst others) environmental needs and governmental freedom to set policy, although some deny that this is happening now (like the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), yet the fact that the cost is kept in secret gives indication that the sum is likely to be running towards the 9 digits, whilst it was about opposition on a health policy. Two cases like this could make most Eastern European EU nations bankrupt overnight, so there is cause for concern and in that Paul Magnette has a clear mindset in requiring more time.

In all this, the one part that is not making sense is that the ISDS could be seen that this is to protect non-visionary investors, investors that aren’t doing their homework, to give an additional option to get their money’s worth. Why on earth are we facilitating for corporate losers? If for example a UK company decides to cut corners and go for places where they learn that they are blocked, why would we give them any allowance for suing the UK government? If this example seems fair fetched, consider Philip Morris Asia Limited (Hong Kong) v. The Commonwealth of Australia. They might have lost, but the costs were really high. And this was whilst plain packaging was already in place. So getting rid of parts, or better the ISDS as a whole, would be a decent idea. Let’s not forget that if these companies were truly wronged, most common law nations have the option of proceeding through Torts.

Giving them additional options seems too far-fetched and in the end only counterproductive. No matter how many tears Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister brings to the table. In that part I wonder, why she had not considered removing the ISDS. Let’s face it, if investment is too dicey or dodgy, those companies should not go there to begin with, would that not be common sense? So why drive the ISDS? Perhaps I am oversimplifying the problem. I know that the ISDS makes sense, yet the Australian Philip Morris case shows the ISDS parts to be flawed and in light of how American and Chinese companies play the game, it is time to face the harsh reality that facilitation is becoming the lesser healthy alternative. In the end if there is profit, these companies will come.

So in the end, this was not about Brexit, but here we see in clarity, that this one market deal is not as great for the people at large as they think it is. For those only iterating that a one market deal is the only way, consider Wallonia, no matter how you slice it, people will lose out and if the court case is strong enough, you could lose a lot. A side that the Bremainers are not giving a clear view to, which is equally disturbing. There are elements on both sides, yet the disturbing one that Paul Magnette is bringing to light is one that too many have ignored. Brexit might end up giving the UK options and protections, that the EU trade agreements are currently trying to remove from the UK.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Politics

Tagged as Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Belgium, Bremain, Brexit, Canada, Canadian Global Research, CETA, Chrystia Freeland, Investor-State Dispute Settlement, ISDS, NAFTA, Nick Xenophon, North Atlantic Trade and Investment Area, Paul Magnette, Philip Morris, Philip Morris Asia Limited, President Obama, provincial government of Quebec, The Tyee, TPP, TTIP, US Lone Pine energy company

October 23, 2016 · 12:45

Gimme some Sugar

In the week where we saw the disgraceful act by Sam Gyimah, a British Conservative, who made sure that the wrongs against gays in the past remain, he filibustered the meeting, so that the Gay population will be stigmatised a little longer. Hiding behind “We have developed a way to do this without giving any perception that the pardon covers perpetrators of sex with a minor or non-consensual sex“, whilst it has been known quite clearly that there is no pardon for acts that are still criminal. We could ask if he has had non-consensual sex lately, because that might give cause for confusion. As I see it, this seems to be nothing more than the shameful act by a homophobic government representative. Yet that is actually not the worst what is happening. You see, George Osborne has had a few decent ideas and one of them was the Sugar Tax. The information that we get to some extent (at https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/21/soft-drinks-industry-lobbies-government-dilute-scrap-sugar-tax), shows the information that “Research has found that drinking more than two sugary or artificially sweetened soft drinks per day greatly increases the risk of diabetes“, which would be worrying enough for most parents on the best of days. In this age of obesity, something needed to be done and the Sugar Tax would be one way of doing it. Is it the best path?

That is a fair enough question, and it could have been debated if the large corporations had actually done something, but they did not. They were in it to maximise profits. One could argue that the soft drinks companies are the new cigarette companies. The information that we get from all kinds of debatable sources is because the media at large refuses to properly inform the people. It is the old story of what I regard to be ‘whoring for advertisement‘ that is part of all that. The initial news (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/george-osbornes-sugar-tax-economic-fears-budget), gave us the goods that when we see the Sugar Tax as “eventful by any standards”, you better realise that there will be plenty of opposition.

But that is not the biggest issue in this. The article that drew my attention gives us the following parts. “Health campaigners in favour of the proposed soft drinks industry levy said they are concerned that neither Theresa May nor Philip Hammond has personally spoken out in support of the tax since coming to office“, the fact that this gets delegated to junior ministers gives rise to the fear that things will get bungled and that implementation will be delayed or just blatantly rejected. This article also has a few issues. One of them is “At a drinks party at the Tory conference sponsored by the industry, a spokesman for the British Soft Drinks Association pleaded with Greg Clark, the business secretary, and MPs on the Conservative Reform Group to drop support for the levy, saying it would harm small businesses and cause job losses at a difficult time for the economy“. The first clear issue is who exactly was this spokesperson?

So, I decided to take another look and my first impression is that this BSDA reads like a joke (I have an evolved sense of humour, often intensely inappropriate). It starts with Health ‘Helping our consumers reduce their calorie and sugar intake‘. It comes with the picture of a woman you want to fuck six ways from Sunday on a daily basis. So we see nameless products with labels like Product Innovation Sugar Reduction and Smaller pack sizes. At this point you wonder what you are in for, in the ‘UK Economy section’ we see how £11 billion was added to the economy. This sounds so nice, but where was it added to the economy? Being THEIR revenue? That is aid to them, but is it truly aid to the UK economy? This site just reeks like corporate marketing in what they call a ‘non-profit coat’ and it is high time some changes are made.

From my point starting by adding to the sugar tax would be a great idea.

You see, the executive council of the British Soft Drinks Association (BSDA) includes Pepsi, Lucozade, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Tropicana and a few others. Many of them not paying heaps of taxation in the UK, Coca Cola avoided £102 million in the UK in 2012 (I have no clear numbers from the years following that) and was mentioned recently as one of the 50 stashing a total of 1.3 trillion off shore. It is time to stop enabling these large corporations, because this is one of the main reasons the NHS can no longer continue the way it did. If there was no large scale tax evasion, the sugar tax would never have come into existence. In addition, stories on what Diet Coke apparently seems to do to the human body and the relentless support from the media through not illuminating it, because of the advertisement they represent. So for the most, many people, perhaps even better stated most people are unaware of certain cause and effect issues seen due to the usage of what we now laughingly refer to as the ‘diet fuzzy drinks’.

So now we get back to the lady on page one. You see, if the members of the BSDA are not doing their part other than hiding behind statistics, changes will be required. So if we need more physical exercise the BDSA can send their fitness/yoga outfitted lady to my address where I can lose 15,000 calories a day through consensual sex (when doing it 3 times a day that is).

Is this thought too inappropriate?

I think the BSDA is a hatchet job in this age of marketing to serve the interest of large corporations and their needs. Their needs being profit and only profit. The issues of the BSDA is just like the acts of Sam Gyimah. They are legal and part of the political life that needs to be frowned upon. The fact that the BSDA a non-profit organisation is bombarding advertisements with added twitter stories from a ‘Tunbridge Wells newsagent‘ whose business will be ruined by sugar tax. If that is truly so, perhaps they should try to sell newspapers. The fact that their business survives on sugary drinks is a bit of an issue, as they tend to be over 150% more expensive then the nearest supermarket. Just a thought!

These levels of marketing require a lot more scrutiny and no one is stepping to the plate to do so. A harsh reality of big business in charge. Yet, there is more, the BSDA reports on one of their pages “‘We are pleased that the latest NDNS data shows a decline of over 8% in teenagers’ sugar intake from soft drinks between 2012 – 2014“, which is a statement that might be true, but where is the data? The second statement is one I have a definite issue with. The quote “Soft drinks companies have taken significant action to help their consumers reduce their sugar intake since the NDNS data was collected over 2 years ago. Independent analysis confirms that sugar intake from soft drinks has been reduced by over 16% in the last four years“, I believe this to be incorrect. You see Coca Cola is as ‘sweet’ as it ever was, so were most other drinks. So here we see the switch from ‘sugar’ to these ‘diet’ drinks and the dangers there have been avoiding visible presentation and scrutiny from the media at large, because they are nowadays too much about circulation and advertisement. Then the page goes one step further and states “we understand there is more to do and only last year we set ourselves a 20% calorie reduction target by 2020“, now it is suddenly about calories? calories are mostly from sugar, meaning that this is about alternative ‘additives’, they might not show up on the calorie list, but there is enough worry to consider that it will show a long term effect on the human body. No one can know for sure, which is a truth in itself, but the fact that there are long term considerations and the fact that the almighty US FDA is suddenly way too quiet and we see certain aspects, we now also see that the FDA is now no more than a valve of corporate discrimination as to what is considered safe, set by who is bringing it to market. Is that not an interesting development? The fact that we see in this place that “A 2010 Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine review of the literature on artificial sweeteners concludes that, “research studies suggest that artificial sweeteners may contribute to weight gain”” (at https://usrtk.org/sweeteners/diet-soda-fraud/), whilst the media is too quiet is equally disturbing. The fact that the BSDA is all about promoting the biggest ‘dealers’ in sugary substances (with the clear exception of the British Sugar at http://www.britishsugar.co.uk/), seems to be pushed slowly into the background of the issue. The issue was the sugar tax!

So what economy is brought into danger? When we see Coca-Cola Coke 1.75L £1.71 and Any 2 for £2.00 (Source: Tesco), either the margins are astronomical, or Coca Cola is giving away their profits, what do you think is more likely to be the truth? So when we include taxation and Cola becomes 2 for £2.20-£2.40. Considering they are giving the second bottle for only £0.29, are they really in danger? Are any of those soft drink manufacturers in actual danger? No they are not, because in the end, there is a group that will stop getting the second bottle, yet in my pragmatic view, it is more likely that families will now only get this article twice a month instead of weekly. Which would reduce the sugar intake by a massive amount. Also, in light of the BSDA statement that teenagers were reducing intake by 8%, now consider that we see that Coca-Cola Coke 1.75L contains 29.0% sugar. How likely is that the 8% is just a weighted average and that the numbers are not that positive? I am using Coca Cola as an example, yet when we see that regular Pepsi contains 31.0% sugar, it seems clear that I have a case here. Now Pepsi might come with the response that their revenue comes from the Pepsi Max drinks, yet here we see ‘Low Calorie Cola Flavoured Soft Drink with Sweeteners‘ and ‘Contains a Sourced of Phenylalanine‘, with twice the sentence: ‘contains no sugar’. Yet the mention made me search and WebMD has this (at http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/phenylalanine-uses-and-risks). The warning is “Doses higher than 5,000 milligrams a day can cause nerve damage“, which sees like a really dangerous issue (and a massive dose is needed), yet there is no mention at all how much is in Pepsi Max, only that it has 0% sugar (on the website). In addition, the risk mention is “And use caution in taking phenylalanine if you have: High blood pressure, Trouble sleeping, Anxiety or other psychiatric problems, Also, it is unknown whether this supplement is safe in women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.”

That is a lot of risk groups, knowing that high blood pressure is a risk group here and also considering that “Approximately 16 million people in the UK have high blood pressure” (source: NHS UK) gives us that 24% of the population is a risk factor, so in my view, at that at this Conservative Tea Party (where tea is unlikely to be served), it seems to be sound advice that representing Pepsi, Mr Mark Elwell – PepsiCo International, remains quiet as a mouse. It seems to me that his conscience is better served with the Sugar tax in place, but that is just me speculating.

So here we see that those fueling the NHS customer base, are mostly all about not having to pay any bills in this matter. I think that the people forgot the 2004 movie Super-Size Me. Even as this was mostly about McDonalds, the fact that we are supersizing ourselves with that second bottle at a mere £0.29, we are doing the harm to ourselves. It is more than just taxation by rescuing us from ourselves. The Soft Drinks industry has the ability to throw millions in advertisement on a playful and sporty youth, yet they are not representative of this healthy life style, not to the degree it should be and that is the real danger. The fact that the BSDA spin machine is running at full power and that the image at present is that Prime Minister Theresa May is not taking this as serious as she should (by setting this agenda on the collar of a senior Conservative) is equally disturbing. You see, if the sugar tax is watered down or stricken off, she has absolutely no rights to deny the NHS the funds they need and she will have to order the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, The Right Honourable Philip Hammond to find those needed funds. In my view, good luck to that tall order, because there are almost no margins left to play with, the Sugar Tax was the first real step in creating some level of margins (to the smallest extent).

We have to admit that the BSDA has a right to do the things they are doing, they aren’t breaking any laws, yet the linked issues are there and the press overall for one isn’t doing its job to the extent they should be. When we see the end of the initial Guardian article, we see “The charity Action on Sugar has said the tax will have an impact on intake because people respond to price, but the government has said it wants the cost of the tax to be borne by the industry and not consumers“, there is truth in that and there is misleading parts in that. That is, when we widen the statement ‘the tax to be borne by the industry‘. You see, tax law overhaul is the only way to do this, the sugar tax will have an impact to the margin of profit making the industry increase the prices. That seems just mere logical. However, if we can make people reduce the purchase of these drinks, that too would be a positive effect. Any chance in lowering the intake of sugar and artificial sweeteners would be a massive win for the population of Britain. The fact that the government saw raising prices as a solution for the tobacco industry and not for the soft drinks industry is also worrying. You see, there is a direct health risk, so making these lemonades unaffordable would make sense, the fact that this isn’t treated as the dangers they represent, just like the denial we saw in the 80’s on tobacco is cause for distress and reason for debate. The only interesting ‘coincidence‘ is the quote in the Guardian, which is “The link between sugary drinks and obesity has been well documented with evidence suggesting they account for 29% of 11- to 18-year-olds’ daily sugar intake” and this is exactly the amounts of sugar that Coca Cola has in its bottles. Life is full of little coincidences, isn’t it?

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics

Tagged as British Sugar, BSDA, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Coca Cola, FDA, George Osborne, http://www.britishsoftdrinks.com/, Lucozade, Mark Elwell, McDonalds, NDNS data, NHS, Pepsi, PepsiCo International, Phenylalanine, Philip Hammond, Prime Minister, Prime Minister Theresa May, Red Bull, Sam Gyimah, Sugar Tax, Super Size Me, the Guardian, Theresa May, Tropicana, Tunbridge Wells, UK, US, WebMD, Yale Journal of Biology

October 8, 2016 · 14:26

What did I say?

Last night I got a news push from the Washington Post. It took me more than a second to let the news sink in. You see, I have been advocating Common Cyber Sense for a while and apart from the odd General being ignorant beyond belief, I expected for the most that certain players in the SIGINT game would have their ducks in a row. Yet, the opposite seems to be true when we see ‘NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data‘ (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/government-contractor-arrested-for-stealing-top-secret-data/2016/10/05/99eeb62a-8b19-11e6-875e-2c1bfe943b66_story.html), the evidence becomes blatantly obvious that matters in the SIGINT industry are nowhere near as acceptable as we think they are. The quote “Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, who did technology work for Booz Allen Hamilton, was charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, authorities said. According to two U.S. officials familiar with the case, he is suspected of “hoarding” classified materials going back as far as a decade in his house and car, and the recent leak of the hacking tools tipped investigators to what he was doing“, so between the lines we read that it took a mistake after a decade for the investigators to find out? No wonder the NSA is now afraid of the PLA Cyber Division!

In this light, not only do I get to tell you ‘I told you so‘, I need to show you a quote from July 1^st 2013, where I wrote “So if we consider the digital version, and consider that most intelligence organisations use Security Enhanced Unix servers, then just accessing these documents without others knowing this is pretty much a ‘no no’. EVEN if he had access, there would be a log, and as such there is also a mention if that document was copied in any way. It is not impossible to get a hold of this, but with each document, his chance of getting caught grows quicker and quicker“, so I questioned elements of the Edward Snowden case, because my knowledge of Security Enhanced Unix servers, which is actually an NSA ‘invention’, now it seems to become more and more obvious that the NSA has no flipping clue what is going on their servers. They seem to be unaware of what gets moved and more important, if the NSA has any cloud coverage, there is with this new case enough doubt to voice the concern that the NSA has no quality control on its systems or who gets to see data, and with the involvement of a second Booz Allen Hamilton employee, the issue becomes, have they opened up the NSA systems for their opponents (the PLA Cyber division being the most likely candidate) to currently be in possession of a copy of all their data?

If you think I am exaggerating, then realise that two people syphoned off terabytes of data for the term of a decade, and even after Snowden became visible, Harold Thomas Martin III was able to continue this for an additional 3 years, giving ample worry that the NSA needs to be thoroughly sanitised. More important, the unique position the NSA had should now be considered a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. I think it is sad and not irony that the NSA became its own worst enemy.

This is seen not in just the fact that Harold Thomas Martin III moved top secret data home, whilst he was at work a mere FSB or PLA intern could just jimmy the front door and copy all the USB devices. So basically he was potentially giving away data on Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) systems, which would be nice for the PLA Cyber Unit(s), as they did not have the capacity to create this themselves. So whilst they were accused for allegedly trying to get a hold of data on the laptop of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez (2008), they possibly laughed as they were just climbing into a window and taking all day to copy all the sweet classified data in the land (presumption, not a given fact). So he in equal measure pissed off the US, India and Russia. What a lovely day that must have been. In that regard, the Affidavit of Special Agent Jeremy Bucalo almost reads like a ‘love story’. With statements like “knowingly converted to his own use, or the use of another, property of the United States valued in excess of $1,000“. Can we all agree that although essential and correct, the affidavit reads like a joke? I mean that with no disrespect to the FBI, or the Special agent. I meant that in regard to the required personal viewed text: “Harold Thomas Martin III, has knowingly and intentionally endangered the safety and security of the United States, by placing top secret information and its multi-billion dollar value in unmonitored locations“, I do feel that there is a truth in the quote “The FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit is working on a psychological assessment, officials said. “This definitely is different” from other leak cases, one U.S. official said. “That’s why it’s taking us awhile to figure it out.”“. It is my personal view that I agree with this, I agree because I think I speculatively figured out the puzzle. He was a reservist, Reserve Navy and a Lieutenant at 51. So the Navy might not see him as ‘full’ or ‘equal’, this might have been his way, to read these documents at night, knowing that they will never have this level of clearance for such an amount of Top Secret information. With every additional document he would feel more in par with Naval Captains and Admirals, he would feel above all the others and if there was ever a conversation with people who did know, he had the option to leave the slightest hint that he was on that level, perhaps stating that he was also an NSA contractor. He star would suddenly be high with Commanders and higher. It is a personal speculation into the mind of Harold Thomas Martin III.

When we look at 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 – TREASON, SEDITION, AND SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES. We see at paragraph 2381 “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States“, now if we see the following elements ‘giving them aid and comfort within the United States‘ and the other elements are clearly stated as ‘or’ a case of treason could be made. In my view a person like that was guilty of treason the moment Top Secret materials were removed or copied from there assigned location and without proper clearance moved to an unsecure location. As an IT person Harold Thomas Martin III should have known better, there is no case of presumption of innocence. The fact that I made a case that he might have a mental issues does not mitigate it in any way, to do this in excess of a decade and even more insidious to do this for years after Edward Snowden got found out is also matter of concern.

The NSA has a sizeable problem, not just because of these two individuals, but because their servers should have has a massive upgrade years ago, in addition, the fact that contractors got away with all this is in equal measure even more insulting to a failing NSA. I can only hope that GCHQ has its ducks properly in a row, because they have had 3 years to overhaul their system (so tempted to put an exclamation mark here). You see, we have all known that for pretty much all of us, our value is now data. No longer people, or technologies, but data and to see 2 cases at the NSA, what was once so secret that even the KGB remained clueless is now, what we should regard as a debatable place. This should really hurt in the hearts of those who have faithfully served its corridors in the past and even today. In addition, the issues raised around 2005 by the CIA and other agencies regarding the reliability of contractors is now a wide open field, because those opposing it and those blocking data integration are proven correctly.

This now gets us to a linked matter. You see, it is not just the fact that the government is trailing in this field, because that has been an eternal issue. The issue is that these systems, due to the likes of Harold Thomas Martin III and Edward Snowden could be in danger of intrusions by organised crime.

For those thinking that I am nuts (on the road to becoming a Mars bar), to them I need to raise the issue of USB security, an issue raised by Wired Magazine in 2014. The fact that the USB is not just used to get data out, if malware was added to the stick, if it was custom enough, many malware systems might not pick up on it and that means that whomever got into the house, they could have added software, so that on the next run to copy a project, the system might have been opened up to other events. There is no way to prove that this happened, yet the fact remains that this is possible and the additional fact that this was happening for over 10 years is equally disturbing, because it means that the NSA monitoring systems are inadequate to spot unauthorised activities. These elements have at present all been proven, so there.

I think it is time for TRUSIX to convene again and consider another path, a path where USB sticks get a very different formatting and that its embedded encryption require the user, the location and the hardware id to be encrypted within the stick, in addition the stocks need to work with a native encryption mode that does not allow off site usage. Perhaps this is already happening, yet it was possible for Judas tainted Highwayman Harold to walk away with the goods, so something is not working at present. I am amazed that a system like that was not in place for the longest of times. I certainly hope that Director Robert Hannigan at GCHQ has been convening with his technology directors. In addition that there are some from Oxford and some from Cambridge, so that their natural aversion to the other, will bring a more competitive product with higher quality, which would serve all of GCHQ. #JustSaying

The one part where this will have an impact is the election, because this has been happening during an entire Democratic administration, so that will look massively sloppy in the eyes of pretty much every one, too bad Benghazi emails were not left that much under the radar, because that could have helped the Clinton election campaign immensely. Still, there are technology and resource issues. The fact that Booz Allen Hamilton gets mentioned again is unfortunate, yet this should only be a partial focus as they have 22,000 employees, so statistically speaking the number of transgressions is in that regard insignificant. What is significant is how these two got vetted and passed all their clearances. In addition to this there is the issue of operation centres. You see, if there has been data breaches, have there been system breaches? The question derives directly from the fact that data was taken off site and there were no flags or alerts for a decade. So at this point the valid question becomes whether NSOC and NTOC have similar flaws, which now places US Homeland Security in speculated direct data dangers. My consideration in this regard came from earlier mentions in this article. If any US opponent has a clue in this regard, what would be the repercussions, in addition, the question (due to my admitted ignorance) would be, did Edward Snowden have any knowledge of Harold Thomas Martin III, if so, was this revealed in any conversation Snowden would have had with a member of the FSB (there is absolutely no doubt that they had a ‘conversation’ with Edward Snowden whilst he was in sunny Moscow. If so, what data dangers is Homeland Security facing? If data was copied, it is not impossible that data was moved. If that has happened, any data event with any specific flag?

Now the next example is purely fictional!

What if conditionally an <!important> (or whatever flag the NSA uses in their data sets) was added or removed? If it was used to give weight to certain data observations, like a cleaning pass, the pass would either be useless, or misdirecting. All possible just because Harold Thomas Martin III had to ‘satisfy’ his ego. This is not whether it happened or not, this is about whether it was possible, which would give added voice to the NSA issues in play and the reliability of data. This is a clear issue when we consider that false journalistic stories give way to doubt anything the journalist has written, any issue with a prosecutor and all those cases need reviewing, so do you think it is any different for IT people who have blatantly disregarded data security issues? This is not some Market Researcher who faked response data, this is collected data which would have been intervened with, endangering the people these systems should protect. As stated, this is speculative, but there is a reality in all this, so the NSA will need to sanitise data and sources from the last 10 years. There is no telling what they will dig up. For me it is interesting to see this regarding Snowden, because I had my issues with him and how he just got data away from there. Now there is a chance that the NSA gets to rename their servers to NSA_Siff_01 to NSA_Siff_nn, wouldn’t that be the rudest wake up call for them? I reckon they forgot the old rules, the one being that technology moves at the speed of your fastest employee + 1 and the human ego remain the most dangerous opponent when it involves security procedures.

Leave a comment

Filed under IT, Law, Media, Military, Politics

Tagged as 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115, Booz Allen Hamilton, Carlos Gutierrez, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Edward Snowden, ELF Systems, Extremely Low Frequency, FBI, GCHQ, hacking, Hannigan, Harold Thomas Martin III, Homeland Security, India, NSA, Pla, PLA Cyber Division, Robert Hannigan, Russia, Security Enhanced Unix servers, SIGINT, Treason, TRUSIX, UK, United States, US, USA, Wired Magazine

October 7, 2016 · 16:20

The Mary Poppins of Economy

Yes, today is about Philippe Le Houérou, CEO of the World Bank (as well as Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank). The urban dictionary tells us that the term Mary Poppins means:

A well composed/happy person.
To do something well/flawlessly. From the measuring tape held by Mary Poppins “Practically Perfect in Every Way.”

So if one of them was asked, how did you go on misleading the people on free trade, he could say ‘I Mary Poppins’d it!’, which gets us to the soon to be late President Obama (who as a former President won’t be able to properly time manage his calendar). As we see the quote “the president does not mention Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump by name but makes clear that he disagrees with both candidates’ opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)” (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/barcack-obama-america-future-economist-essay), I have to wonder if the first African American president wasn’t just a puppet for big business. We will soon see him evicted from his rental place at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States. Yet the question becomes, what next?

You see, there is a lot wrong at present. The issue is seen in a BBC article (at http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37580844). I have been stating it for a long time. My issue is not that I am correct, my issue in this is: ‘why fess up now?’, is it merely because there is a new administration coming in, or is it the general fear from Wall Street that Brexit is not the negative act for the UK as proven and fear mongering is no longer working and the upcoming issue that Frexit is becoming a general fear and the second exit will be enough to terminally kick over the Euro and the EEC? You see, the admission as seen in “the effects of globalisation on advanced economies is “often uneven” and “may have led to rising wage inequality”. The bank, which provides loans to developing countries, also says that “adjustment costs”, such as helping people who have lost their jobs, have been higher than expected.” It was the end station for too many people and until the grey faction (almost one third of the population) dies, this situation will not improve. On a global scale retirement funds are unlikely to exist by 2032, when it needs to give support to no less than 850 million people, giving a rise to the overall debts by close to a trillion a month. These administrations have been all about short term and now the time is getting close to the factual realisation that retirement funds will not survive the terms they need to. For those outside of Scandinavia not a good thing. Even as we see the great news in several nations, there is a factual mistrust (in me too), that the status is all it is cranked up to be. When we consider that a massive block of these people are retiring between 2025 and 2037, there is very little doubt that at present, the reality will set in no later than 2041, considering that many people will be in their 80’s at that point. The deal breaker will suddenly flare up and a massive wave of bad news will hit on a global scale. That is a speculation from my side!

This all hits back because the World Bank decided to keep people for the longest term into the dark and President Obama gives us “The world is more prosperous than ever before and yet our societies are marked by uncertainty and unease. So we have a choice – retreat into old, closed-off economies or press forward, acknowledging the inequality that can come with globalisation while committing ourselves to making the global economy work better for all people, not just those at the top.”, which just shows us how screwed up his vision is. ‘More prosperous than ever before‘ is like a joke and a bad one. The overall quality of life, after the downgrades from 2009 have never reset correctly. The amount of people who are after 5 years still waiting to see an actual increase in the quality of life is absolutely disgraceful and it goes far beyond American borders.

The two are related, not just the TPP, the TTIP in equal measure shows a level of syndication that we have seen in the pharmaceutical industry (just one of many) is almost unheard of and this is where it reflects on pensions. You see, the next 3 decades is essential for this industry, which gets us to the retirement group. Because without the TPP, or the TTIP, there will be a gap for those people to truly make a killing and that is what they want. The BBC quotes, might be relevant and correct, but they are not exactly accurate. First the quotes: “Hillary Clinton has found herself surrounded by political challengers questioning the benefits of international trade and globalisation. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination, defined his campaign by arguing that globalisation had hollowed out the US middle class“. You see, these facts are true, but the previous administrations were not about people, they are about the Walton’s and not the TV series from the 70’s. Jim Walton, Alice Walton, S. Robson Walton, Lukas Walton and Christy Walton. They are the people behind Walmart. Their fortune totalling over 122 billion dollar. Individual not as much as Ellison or Gates, but combined making both Gates and Ellison not add up to much and that is quite the achievement. You see, this is the place where people working full time still ended up below the poverty line. So, it wasn’t about the middle class. Walmart required globalisation to get cheap stuff from China (and a few other places), where people were happy to work for $2 a day to please all those Americans. Now, don’t think of me as some Karl Marx type, I believe in Capitalism, yet is also believe in fair play and not giving an inch to the greed driven. If these people are growing their fortune by 1.5 billion a year (each), getting the workers a better deal is not entirely out of bounds. Now, I have no list as to how they made the $1.5B, so there would be a fair debate here, but overall the issue remains, the people lost a lot and were not given any fair dues. Walmart might be one of the most visible ones, it is, by no means the only one.

So, as we were informed by the World Bank, a mere 5 hours ago, yesterday’s title ‘Why is globalisation under attack?‘ (at http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37554634), leaves us with a different taste. You see, the quote “But many people, including politicians, are now voicing their anger as they see jobs being taken by machines, old industries disappearing and waves of migration disturbing the established order“, my initial response would be ‘No Mark, you silly git, we have been voicing this for some time now!‘, you see, you are mixing issues up and not having any idea what painting you are describing. It’s almost like hearing a person state. Did you see that painting with those people with rifles? So until you are realising it is the Night Watch by Rembrandt. People will be wondering what it is about. So let’s cut up the quote by Mark Broad and look at the parts individually.

‘Jobs being taken by machines‘, has been an issue for the longest time, it was a worry when I was in middle school, and now I am approaching retirement. Some of it is a worry, for the most it is the time shaping global industries.

‘Old industries disappearing‘, is again mere evolution, old media goes out and Google AdWords comes in. The Age of Mobile is here and has been here rocking the world since 2013.

‘Waves of migration disturbing the established order‘ is expecting the actual fear he is trying to push. Yet, there are two waves. The economic migration and refugees fleeing for their lives. All are trying to get into Europe and our systems were never designed to administrate the relocation of 13 million refugees and none of that is about globalisation to begin with. In addition, the quote by Donald Trump given “We talk about free trade. It’s not free trade; it’s stupid trade. China dumps everything that they have over here“, which is exactly what his Walton friends wanted to begin with and that too is not the issue. What is the issue is the article that we got the next day. The quote ‘some have lost out from free trade‘ and we can easily replace ‘some‘ with ‘those not on a Fortune 500 list‘ or ‘those who are not big business‘, so when we get back to the parts that President Obama was miss-representing with “a foundation was laid for a better future. He suggests that the US should prepare for negative shocks to the economy before they occur and not have to fight for emergency measures in a time of need” he is obviously showing a lack of humour, because the fact that the TPP and the TTIP is all about big business, also means that the small fish will still go hungry and the rejection of these accords mean that unless the US gets a grip on their budgets, there is every likelihood that the US as a has been will knock on the doors of the new superpowers (China and India) whether they can have a seat at the table, with the not so unlikely chance that these two might prefer Russia over America. It leaves Europe in a stale position with not too many options for now. In the end the Commonwealth could sit at that table, but we need to see massive changes and the World Bank is not the party to be listening to. In this I would be in opposition to ‘C. Herring, George (2008), From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776‘, which was correct until the final meltdown and in addition the 20 trillion national debt was not taken into consideration either (which makes sense). In addition, we can at present say goodbye to Tony Blair’s statement of the EEC becoming a superpower, mainly because it is as broke as anything else. With Brexit that option diminished and with Frexit on the horizon, the EEC stops being an optional power of any kind. Now that Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is stronger in favour of Frexit and as Frexit is not just the words of Marine Le Pen, we will see that the width of Frexit could be dramatically increasing, moving this from optional to likely. This is a direct consequence of people seeing for over a decade on how globalisation did not bring them anything and France is an evolved nation. So they should have seen massive positive impact, yet the economic news in France has shown nothing on that for the better part of a decade. At present a still shrinking economy without any options to get it kick-started is part of the problem for France, so we see that the Mario Draghi Trillion didn’t help too much for France, so who actually did benefit?

Yet in all this, the other side given by the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/06/imf-and-world-bank-launch-defence-of-open-markets-and-free-trade), where we see the words of Larry Elliott, which I personally find to be out of place. You see, like with BBC Marky Mark, Larry gives us ‘Institutions react to concern that Brexit vote and calls for protectionism in US are part of a backlash against globalisation‘, which is, as I personally see it also a miss Presentation rank, so just like before let’s do some splitting.

‘Brexit vote is part of a backlash against globalisation’, I oppose this as Brexit grew due to a stream of irresponsible acts by the EEC and those in the UK were tired of paying for that whilst the quality of life was going straight into the basement and for the most, too many UK people are still in that basement wondering what sunlight looks like.
‘Calls for protectionism in US is part of a backlash against globalisation’, which is about crunching down on IP and forcing paths for too many IP streams (like medication patents) to the brink of additional tome and now that the gig is up, the greying population will get a hold of generic medication. In this too many pharmaceuticals were about the maximised greed and exclusivity and their timespan is now ending. They could lose over 20% of a market worth trillions, and this is not a market that they want to give up. In all this the US debt is also a factor, because whispered ‘promises’ from boards of directors are not going anywhere and the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500 doesn’t seem to get it, or he does and he is just putting on a show for the next 8 weeks as he is aiming for a 7 figure executive income. In all this, the one solution that should have been instigated (as stated by my 3 years ago) is the one nobody touches from fear that their nice jobs fall away.

The one solution that no one, not even Jim Yong Kim is discussing, is also not illuminated on CNBC, The Guardian, and the BBC or for that matter, the bulk of all media. A proper tax reform 5 years ago could have prevented many issues we see now. It would still be an issue, but the top 1% would have 10% less and the bottom 20% would not be in the poverty they are now in. All because the big fat cats were all about the status quo of the markets, the status quo of their lives and the growth of what they needed to have. When we see some weird level of justification in Obama’s words “That’s why CEOs took home about 20 to 30 times as much as their average worker. The reduction or elimination of this constraining factor is one reason why today’s CEO is now paid over 250 times more“, when the fact clearly shows that within 3 administrations on a CEO level their incomes went up by close to 700%, my initial not so diplomatic response would be ‘You should have done something you dim witted Dumbo!‘, I know that one should not address an American President in that way, but the need for tax reform was blatantly clear in the US in his first year and he did absolutely nothing there. So his continued view of “we need to be even more aggressive in enacting measures to reverse the decades-long rise in inequality. Unions should play a critical role“, where I see the need to state on how he pretty much ignored labour unions (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/labor-union-officials-say-obama-betrayed-them-in-health-care-rollout/2014/01/31/2cda6afc-8789-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html), so his words of exit could validly be reposted by the unions by them stating ‘Just shut up and go‘. That is one side that the Washington Post was making perfectly clear. Perhaps President Obama would like to recant the words by Taylor and Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America with “they were not listening or they simply did not care“, which is quite the issue for Barack Obama, who could at present face the label of becoming ‘the worst president in the history of the United States of America‘, I am not stating this, I am speculating on this, when we see the list of his achievements and the list of actions that are about to get overturned would be instrumental in this. I don’t think that he ever expected this, but on the other hand, this would be good news for the Buchanan family, as James Buchanan would no longer be the worst president (according to the C-Span poll).

All these elements connect as there is too much a view by those who imagine themselves as the holders of ‘wisdom’ that globalisation works, it does, but only for big business, and as long as proper taxation is not done, as long as board members earn incomes 700% above what a CEO used to make, which was already a massive amount, this globalisation will not hold water and nationalisation is the only solution to trim the greed away. In that a company is either not in any nation, or those nations see a chunk of that cash being taxed and spend locally, which actually does give forward momentum to those economies.

So, these Mary Poppins figurines should stop singing “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” when they get their pay check and annual bonus, they should start realising that the reality that brings the new “SuperTaxedAndCalibratedIncomeIsANormNow” might become a top of the pops. In that part as equilibrium resets on a government tax level as well as a living standard, we could see an economy where people have money to spend, they might actually all start the economy together. None of it required the crazy Draghi scheme and debts might actually be gotten under control, because that element too was a consequence of globalisation. Isn’t that interesting to see that no one from the World Bank made mention on any of these elements, which are proven to be factors. So was this a second step against Brexit and perhaps deflating Frexit?

I will let you decide, but feel free to read some of the articles I linked and more important, ask yourself the question why certain elements in all this were left out, elements that were part of all this all along.

Have a great Friday!

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics, Religion

Tagged as Alice Walton, BBC, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, Brexit, China, Christy Walton, Donald Trump, EEC, Fortune 500, France, Frexit, George C. Herring, George Herring, Google AdWords, Hillary Clinton, Jim Walton, Jim Yong Kim, Laborers’ International Union of North America, Larry Elliott, Lawrence Ellison, Lukas Walton, Marine Le Pen, Mario Draghi, Mark Broad, Mary Poppins, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Philippe Le Houérou, President Obama, Rembrandt, S. Robson Walton, Taylor O’Sullivan, Terry O’Sullivan, the Guardian, TPP, Trans Pacific Partnership, TTIP, UK, US, USA, Washington Post, World Bank

October 3, 2016 · 14:01

The other reason

Well, several of my friends are having their birthday tomorrow, so as a good friend I will call them sing happy birthday and as they ask in confusion why I was singing, I will remind them that it is world animal day tomorrow, because that’s how I roll. Today is not about the issues perse, but about the way some people go about getting to it. They claim to be all uppity up on morals, yet in a political paintball fight, there is no art, there are just people covered in paint on both sides of the political isle and as the press is steaming their systems on emotions, to maximise the circulation of whatever they are proclaiming. The bulk of the people go along with the rollercoaster ride and ignore the issues that play.

[1] To Tax or not to

In the first we get ‘the biggest crisis yet: Trump campaign reels after tax documents published‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/02/donald-trump-income-tax-returns-published). In this most will see “The campaign offered no specifics about how much Trump may have paid in these taxes, or when“, yet the issue that is in play in all this is “the anonymously leaked tax returns reveal how Trump used aggressive accounting tactics and the failure of several businesses to claim a loss of $916m in his 1995 personal filing“. This gives clear evidence that the documents as published were illegally obtained as well as the quote from another article “Bernie Sanders, once Hillary Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic nomination and now a supporter of her campaign, said the report was evidence of “a corrupt political system in this country”“, the second article was linked to in the first article and was released only a few hours earlier. Yet, in what manner was, as Bernie Sanders stated, a corrupt political system? If the Tax office was the source, than his own party needs to be put under scrutiny. If his statement refers to the tax loops, again, his own party and 2 administrations before this In those times both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did not really make any improvements to the taxation system and the current president is even worse, for the mere reason that he had to deal with a massively hit economy, so overhauling taxation and a 19.5 trillion dollar debt would have been a first instance. The total debt is about to surpass the WW2 debt the US was in, no political party has ever been so bad for a nation and there is no way that improvements are around the corner any day soon. The fact on how these documents were obtained remain a question, even though nobody wants to actually find out where the leak was and whether it was a government worker, is that not interesting too?

So as everyone seems to be condemning Donald Trump for not paying taxes, everyone seems to forget that he did nothing illegal (as far as we can tell at present). The US Tax codes allowed him to do these things, so you only have yourself to blame. If the people had united for a better tax system, it might have happened if the electoral system had made it very clear who can truly redo the tax system, because it will take years to do and neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump are running towards that race any day soon.

[2] Last Exit to Brexit

When we think of the March Hare, we tend to think of Alice in Wonderland, so one quote can be used when we add one little word. The quote is “The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is Theresa May it won’t be raving mad – at least not so mad as it was in March“, I reckon you guessed it, I inserted the word ‘Theresa‘, isn’t it interesting how profoundly correct one sentence was in a book, published in 1865. On that same year, the NY Stock Exchange is opened near Wall Street. You see, this all tracks to two events. The first is ‘What will happen now timescale for article 50 has been revealed?‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/02/article-50-timescale-theresa-may-brexit). Before I give the quote, there is something you need to realise. I stated it almost 4 years ago. In the time when the press was giving us quotes on how Greece could be taken out of the Euro and even out of the EU, all the time people ignored my words, going for those high hearted words on how it was all going to be ok. How deceived the readers were on options for Greece that never even existed. Now we get the current quote “As the man who drafted it has said, the EU’s divorce clause was never meant to be triggered: article 50 was inserted into the Lisbon treaty purely to silence British complaints that there was no official way out of the union“, so basically, the words of self-govern has been a lie too! So how to see this Brexit? A hard one or a soft one? It seems that we are discussing eggs and how they are boiled. So as we are getting close to that date, we see too many voices all making claims on how this single market is the solution. For who? The people, or big business, the same people who make the claims they make and pay no taxation for it, but they still want all their surpluses and bonuses. The next quote is “As Steve Peers, professor of EU law at the University of Essex, points out, article 50 goes on to define three distinct stages of that withdrawal process. First, the council, in the form of its chief Brexit negotiator, Didier Seeuws, and the member states it represents – without the UK – must agree the broad guidelines for negotiations.“, the rest points out a few more things, important to know is that the elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands will have additional consequences. France will see a possible triggering of Frexit. It is a certainty is Marine Le Pen makes it and it is still an option when the others get elected. Only if President Hollande gets re-elected is the danger of Frexit nearly nullified, but the French population is getting more and more on the Frexit pile. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is not in favour, like David Cameron he is about changes to the EU, another one that is likely to fail, yet in the current predicament, the EU will need to choose very carefully as nations all over Europe have had enough. The nations more loudly opposing are those not contributing and seeing their Gravy train taking a new course, one that they are not profiting from. Now, I am not trying to be harsh on them, for that would not be correct in several ways. Yet the entire social situation where 6 nations are paying the bulk for a lot more nations is the issue that hits many nations and after the economic meltdown these places faced with the knowledge that many nations are facing internal struggles makes matters worse for the EU. In the need to be an outdated vision of a social impossibility, they are confronted with nations that see no future in these failings. Matters for Germany will be even worse if the Deutsche Bank melts down too. It is not really likely or realistic, but in all this it is still a consideration to make. The next part we see in Reuters (art http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-amato-idUSKCN1012Q8), the headline ‘Father of EU divorce clause demands tough stance on British exit‘. When I read ““When it comes to the economy they have to lose,” said Giuliano Amato, explaining that only then might the British reconsider abandoning the world’s largest single market“, it seems clear to me that Giuliano Amato can’t have been thinking clearly (or he was grossly misquoted). You see as a professor of Law at the University of Rome La Sapienza he should have learned the following:

The Harm Principle states that laws exist in part to protect people from violence and abuse.
Yet in this, I wonder if the law fell short when it regards the need of protection from economic exploitation through big business.
The Morality Principle states that another reason for laws is to advocate a sense of morality.
I think that as we see the non-prosecution on Wall Street and the tax loops and non-taxability that this side of the law has been receiving epic fail marks for some time now.
The Donation Principle explains the importance of the government using laws to grant certain services and commodities to society and the individuals within it.
There is a need for this, I will not oppose this, yet whilst governments are too deep in debt to resolve their economy, whilst the laws they create do not hold corporations to account and whilst tax write-offs have not been properly dealt with for well over a decade, the laws again falls short.

In addition, the EU laws have been a farce for some time now and as such we need to make larger changes, the UK decided to abdicate from the EU alliance. In all this the EU still overspends by far too much. First there was the Draghi approach to stimulus through a trillion that has nothing concrete to show for it, now there is the Juncker plan, which initially launched in 2014, with a commitment of 630 billion, which has to show that up to now, projects worth 116 billion euros have been approved, yet what is there to show for it and whom have seen the positive results? When we see the quote in ‘thecorner.eu‘, with the mention “These correspond to Grifols (which specialises in the pharmaceutical and hospital sectors); Redexis Gas (natural gas distribution) and to two credit lines from ICO, one of which is for an infrastructure investment fund“, so a Spanish player has a pharmaceutical, natural gas distribution and two credit lines. The quote “The Redexis Gas project requires an investment of 360 million euros and the EIB has committed to financing 160 million. The question which many experts ask is the following: Did Grifols and Redexis Gas need a ‘Juncker Plan’ to finance projects with these kind of characteristics? The overwhelming reply is no“, so we get to support high end solutions that have absolutely no impact of any serious nature on the Spanish population. Who on earth is Juncker catering to? More important, it is my personal impression that this 630 billion is set aside for certain large players, whilst the economy can only truly be started by the smaller players. Now, this could be an absolutely incorrect on my side, but when we see pharmaceuticals with their multi trillion options left right and centre. Is Juncker truly catering to the population of the EU, or just to himself and a chosen few friends? It seems unfair to state it that way, but cannot find another way to make my statement.

Two events, all overly published, yet in one case we see the law failing because it could not restrict, the other case shows a law that tried to work like a Venus flytrap and not let anyone out. The near perfect corporate trap for exploitation. The fact that these issues haven’t seen proper illumination is even more upsetting. We see parts, yet unless we look into the different articles, we are basically being kept in the dark to some degree. It is the degree that matters here. To the majority it needs to be clear that tax overhaul and tax legislation is an essential need in several nations, it is needed with the nations considering the European party and those who want to keep on dancing. In reality only France is the real issue at present, the Netherlands has support that is slightly below 25%, France was very high, but there is no latest polling data on this, so it is possible that it might be averted. In that regard Germany is now the big issue. If the Deutsche Bank collapses (no idea on that chance), it has every likelihood that people will flock towards a no EEC Germany, yet the amount of shifting can at present not be predicted to a decent amount. The impact of the first part is that the next President needs to take a hard look at corporate exploitation. There is no expectation that either side picks up that responsibility, but if it is not done, the debt all over the world will be a lot higher than any gold reserve on this world is able to deal with. In the second, we see a Europe that has no comprehension of what is to come, which makes sense to me, because this has never happened before. Yet the amount of non-preparedness we see, even though Brexit was clearly in the air for a year shows the sentiment that Giuliano Amato voiced a view that the members of the EU commissions seem to have ‘You can check in, but you can never check out!‘, yet this is not a Hotel in California, this is as I stated a Venus Flytrap where the fat cats walk by, the rest is just food for thought at best.

In the end, it is a speculation (mine) that the world, at present, will be better off with the Democrats winning, but not by a large margin, not this time. What is also food for thought, is that this would be the first time, where a man (and former president) gets to be the first lady. They would be the only family having been placed in both White House roles. Which is at present a better reason than any reason the political speakers are giving us, because in 3 administrations, they did nothing more than fumble the ball and left the American people with an outstanding invoice approaching 20 trillion.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics

Tagged as Alice in Wonderland, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, David Cameron, Deficit, Deutsche Bank, Didier Seeuws, Donald Trump, France, Frexit, Germany, Giuliano Amato, Greece, Grifols, Hillary Clinton, Juncker Plan, Lewis Caroll, March Hare, Marine Le Pen, Mario Draghi, NY Stock Exchange, President Hollande, Redexis Gas, Steve Peers, thecorner.eu, Theresa May, University of Rome La Sapienza, Wall Street

September 27, 2016 · 10:58

What the Frack?

I have stated in several occasions that I am at heart a Conservative, I believe in the conservative plan and for the most, the damage Labour has achieved, on a near global base gives me the certainty that I will nearly never see eye to eye with labour. Yet, it is that nearly part that is today the issue. You see, the one part I do agree with is their opposition to Fracking.

I myself grew up in the Netherlands. My grandfather is British and served in WWI , my mother was British, so I am unofficial (for now) British too. I have seen the damage that Fracking has done in the Netherlands. The historic buildings that are now damaged, some beyond repair is just unacceptable. The North of the Netherlands (Groningen) has a unique historical architecture, which is now partially diminished and that is not a good thing. Consider the people who are losing their houses so that a little more gas can be obtained, and the expense that it had to go through to get it. In addition, the Dutch gas company NAM that was the instigator of this approach lost its case last year, which had as a consequence that loss of property value has to be repaired, with over 2000 claims in 2012 alone, the NAM is currently looking at claims totalling into the billions of Euro’s. The good part in this for British Barry Gardiner is that Common Law torts is actually stronger in protecting the home owners’ rights than Dutch law was, so the moment anything goes wrong (it will), the parties that will start fracking will end up paying a lot, possible even a lot more than the value of the gas obtained, so that story could go south fast and a lot faster than any administration would like it to be.

In addition, the UK has one additional issue the Dutch do not have. Fracking in the UK, because of the rocky foundation requires a higher pressure than the Dutch required, giving the UK a slightly larger issue with earthquakes and in addition to that, if the chemicals enter the groundwater in any way (a very likely issue), the damage to people’s health because of water pollution could have the realistic danger to hit water sources that people and farms rely on (being an island surrounded by salt water adds to that danger). That last is not a given, but if it happens, the UK would be in a perilous situation. You see, the Dutch have a collection of waterways and water sources that outdo the UK by a lot, considering they have larger (drink) water provision, with the Dutch at 17% of the size and only 25% of the population, if anything had gone seriously wrong (water wise), the Dutch have alternatives, the same is not clear and should be considered as doubtful for the UK.

In the Netherlands there is an issue, however, we need to clearly look at both sides. The anti-Fracking sites are giving the readers the ‘burning water‘ example, whilst the pro fracking people claimed that this was swamp gas that had found its way into the ground waters. There are issues here, but it was not a given that fracking caused this instance. Still, the county of Groningen has access to 45 billion litres of water, and that is one of the least populated areas of the Netherlands. The Technical University of Delft had this paper that was done for the Drinkwater cooperation in the Netherlands (at http://www.vewin.nl/SiteCollectionDocuments/Dossier_schaliegas/Schaliegas_gevolgen_voor_ons_grondwater.pdf), their site vewin.nl has an English version of the site.

An important conclusion is: “De overkoepelende conclusie van voorliggend rapport is, dat schaliegaswinning in principe veilig zal zijn voor het drinkwater, onder de voorwaarde dat maatregelen worden genomen die de zorgpunten van de sector adequaat wegnemen. Dat vergt in elk geval openheid over de gebruikte chemicaliën en monitoring die start voorafgaand aan het boren en wordt voortgezet tot en met de nazorgperiode (30 jaar na het voorgoed sluiten de putten)“.

The paraphrased translation “The conclusion of this report is that Fracking is in principle not hazardous for drinking water, with the clear condition that safeguards are set in place, with openness of disclosure of all chemicals used and monitoring starting before fracking commences with continued measuring of the chemicals for a period of 30 years after fracking stops“. There is a little paraphrasing here. Yet the foundation that monitoring for 30+ years will have a massive impact on the profitability, with the added situation that the Dutch, due to the soil, required an expected lower pressure. Also, the risk was still there, yet lower due to what I regard of vast water supplies. Elements the UK does not have to the extent the Dutch have, meaning that the risk here will be higher. This is one of the principle reasons I am on the side of Barry Gardiner. The interesting thing is that he is a lot more fearful than the Scottish are, which is also weird because should any water get a case of fracking chemical pollution, one of the main ingredients for making whiskey is gone, ending that market for a very long time. So, buying a 100 cases of Scotch, the day fracking is approved in Scotland, might be a very worthwhile investment indeed.

You see, my aversion to all this is that it requires openly revealing all chemicals used and monitoring. I have never ever seen any profit driven company adhere to these terms. Like the Dutch report shows the Halliburton side of it all and how spiffy their technology is. It is in the end an academic presentation to a set of requirements most large companies will ‘accidently’ ignore and when it goes to court a ‘fine’ will be advocated for that allows them still a degree of profits, whilst the elements in nearly all reports require a level of responsibility and adherence to issues that make profit a near non-issue as there will be no profit. This beckons me to think why any consideration to allow fracking is even considered to begin with. By the way, should any drilling organisation decide to go bankrupt, the aftercare of 30 years would not be possible, meaning that suddenly the government would be required to monitor all this, an expense no one is waiting for.

For the most, there are issues that cannot be guaranteed how deep it will impact the UK, yet the dangers, the risks and the long term consequences, whilst the profit is not even close to a guarantee makes me wonder why the UK Government on both sides of the isle have abstained to unite in banning Fracking on the grounds of risks and uncontrollable costs after the fact. That alone, whilst a trillion in debt should be enough to keep people away from Fracking. Only today, the Dutch NOS now reports that the Dutch NAM is going to appeal last year’s decision regarding the loss of value of houses. A Statement of Appeal, in Dutch named ‘memorie van grieven‘ has been submitted, at 16.5 Kilograms, or in a slightly more metrical definition: 3400 pages. The quote “The Company calls the verdict outdated and vague, saying it creates a huge administrative burden for the NAM“, which I find hilarious. There has been too much damage and clearly proven damage because of fracking, now that the NAM is finding the loss of profit too large, it drowns the court with a document that will take months to read. So as this case will now see another legal iteration that will not start until 2017, the people at NAM will get out fast with as much cash as possible and leave others to clean up the mess (speculation on my side). This is in my view another reason to support the view Barry Gardiner has. If not for the mere logic, then for the common legal sense that any mishap will bring with it.

The last side is the US, when we look at sourcewatch.org, we see the claim that go a lot further. There have been cases where the monitoring labs falsified data and ended up paying $150K fine with 5 years of probation, which was in East Syracuse New York. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has shown and found water safety issues with residential drinking water wells in Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Cases of elevated levels of Arsenic and Selenium (not the healthiest in even minute traces), places where there were elevated amounts of Ammonium and Iodide, which would be devastating to environment and wildlife and in Wyoming they found Benzene at 50 times higher than safe levels advice. What was even more upsetting is that a June 2015 report (at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/u-s-epa-study-finds-only-limited-water-pollution-from-fracking) is reported by the news as ‘EPA Study of Fracking Finds ‘No Widespread, Systemic’ Pollution‘, there is no way to tell who to believe, but the reports stated in the past as well as some of the actions give way to the notion that big business has a hold over the EPA, not the other way around. What is also interesting in the Bloomberg article is ““Now the Obama administration, Congress, and state governments must act on that information to protect our drinking water, and stop perpetuating the oil and gas industry’s myth that fracking is safe,” said Lauren Pagel, Earthwork’s policy director, in an e-mail“, I myself would have gone a step further and make the children of the people behind the EPA report drink the water from these wells and watch how scared those parents would suddenly become. I wonder if we see any proclamations that their children are allergic to water. The crisis in Flint Michigan is another piece of evidence. Important that this is NOT about fracking, but about the mishandling of evidence regarding the quality of water. Water with heavy metals (lead) tends to be really unhealthy and the fact that one member of the EPA was involved only shows that big business finds a way to take the lead, or is that lead to profit.

As I personally see it. Fracking is nothing more than fake money. Some call it printing your own cash, which is one side, but consider that you are printing £100 that note would cost you £30 in paper and £85 in ink? How profitable is printing money then? Especially as the increased price of ink is one that both government ignore and corporations forget to mention. And the image of Balmoral Castle? Well, to cover the losses, that ‘piece de resistance’ could actually got on the market to cover the losses and that is not too far-fetched I reckon. So far there is not one place that can clearly show the benefit without the out of control risks, making this solution a non-option before it even starts.

Fracking? Get the Frack out of here!

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics, Science

Tagged as Balmoral Castle, Barry Gardiner, British Labour Party, Conservatives, Dutch, Earthwork, East Syracuse, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Flint, Fracking, Groningen, Halliburton, Lauren Pagel, Michigan, NAM, Netherlands, NOS, Scotland, sourcewatch.org, Statement of Appeal, Technical University of Delft, Texas, TU Delft, UK, vewin.nl, West Virginia, Wyoming

September 26, 2016 · 13:14

The name of the sponsor

The article that was in the Guardian on Friday, gives us a few issues. You see, I have been looking at several issues in the tech world and I overlooked this one (there is only so much reading that can be done in a 24 hour range and it is a big planet). You see the article ‘Yahoo faces questions after hack of half a billion accounts’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/yahoo-questinos-hack-researchers) gives us the goods from the very beginning. The quote “Yahoo’s admission that the personal data of half a billion users has been stolen by “state-sponsored” hackers leaves pressing questions unanswered, according to security researchers“, is one I would go with ‘and the evidence?‘, which gives us all kinds of related connections. The quote “Jeremiah Grossman, head of security strategy at infosec firm SentinelOne, said: “While we know the information was stolen in late 2014, we don’t have any indication as to when Yahoo first learned about this breach. This is an important detail in the story.”” is only one of a few issues at the heart of the matter. You see, when we look at the issues that are the plague of these start-up firms (Yahoo and Sony), we should think that they are start-up firms or they are massively negligent. In both cases their routers allowed for the transfer of massive amounts of data. As they are the same size in start-up (sorry, sarcasm prevails), we need to wonder how a few hundred million packages fall between the cracks of vision of whatever security element their IT has. We could wait until someone states that there is no security on that level and the race is truly on then!

This whilst additional support as seen stated by Chris Hodson, EMEA chief information security officer at enterprise security firm Zscaler, when we read: ““With no technical details included in Yahoo’s report about how the data was exfiltrated, just that it was, it’s impossible to assess credibility of the ‘state sponsored’ claim“, a statement I agree, but in addition, I also wonder why we aren’t seeing any reference or initial response from the FBI that this was from North Korea. It fits the time frame doesn’t it? First a dry run on Yahoo and the actual heist was Sony. Or perhaps some players are figuring out that North Korea was never an element and that someone clever enough found a flaw and hit both Yahoo and Sony. The quote “both from the date of the hack, almost two years ago, and from the first appearance of the dumped data on the dark web almost two months ago where it was being sold by a user named “Peace of Mind””, the speculation comes to mind: ‘perhaps this person is the second owner and this person is reselling acquired data’, which would make sense in several capitalisic ways. The article also enlightens what I believe to be a callous approach to security: “The breach also highlights a strong problem with “security questions”, the common practice of letting users reset passwords by answering questions about their first house or mother’s maiden name. Yahoo did not encrypt all the security questions it stored, and so some are readable in plaintext. While it may be irritating to have to change a stolen password, it is somewhat worse to have to change a stolen mother’s maiden name.” The insensitive disregard is clear when the security question is not encrypted and mum’s maiden name is given in plain text, adding to the personal data the thieves borrowed (long-term). Now, we know that there are in these situations several questions, and not all are really about privacy sensitive based data (like a favourite pet), but consider the 2013 movie ‘Now You See Me‘ Consider the dialogue in the New Orleans Show scene:

Jack Wilder: How could we, Art? We don’t have your password.
Henley Reeves: We’d need access to information we could never get our hands on.
Daniel Atlas: Yes, security questions, for instance, like, I don’t know, your mother’s maiden name or the name of your first pet.
Merritt McKinney: Where would we get that information, Art? You certainly would never tell us.

A movie gives us the danger to our goods a year before this data is stolen and nobody presses the alarm bell? The only part that would be even funnier if this was a Sony movie, but no, it was Summit Entertainment who brought this gemstone! Now, we know that life is not a movie, yet the fact that this part is stored as plain text, perhaps not the best solution! In addition as IT developers tend to be lazy, how many other firms, especially those who are a lot smaller, how are they storing this data? Also in plain text?

You see, I have seen parts of this issue too often. Too many firms have no real grasp of non-repudiation and go through the motions so that they seem (read: present themselves) to be about security, yet not really security driven. Because if the client doesn’t want it (many are too lazy), they have opted for it and they are in the clear. Yet when we see that the security questions are in plain text, questions should be asked, very serious questions I might add!

There is one more side to all this, the Guardian raises it with: “what happens to the company’s multi-billion dollar merger with Verizon now? Kevin Cunningham, president and founder at identity company SailPoint, argues that the breach should already be priced in“, we then see the issues of thoroughness raised from Verizon, but in all this, the data theft does not makes sense. You see, if my speculation is true and “Peace of Mind” is the first sales iteration, was this ID the only customer? If so, how come that the sale took this long, the timeout between the event in 2014 and the optional sale a few months ago is weird, as accounts change so quickly, the power and value is in quick sales. To put it in perspective, selling the data to 10 people for a total of 5% of the value is safer then awaiting for one person getting 70% of the value 90 days later. This is a movers and shakers world, the 90 day person is a perhaps and these people are about the ‘cash now’. The market stall people! So in this an 800 day customer implies that there might have been ulterior reasons. Which one(s) I can only speculate on, and I prefer not to do that at present. Now, in that side, it is of course possible that this was ‘state-sponsored’ and it was sold on to keep the wolves at bay, but that too is speculation with absolutely no data to back the speculation up.

Verizon might have taken a calculated level of risk in acquiring Yahoo, yet if the data transgression was never divulged, would this be a case of fraud? The US has the “benefit of bargain” rule, so there could be a decent case of represented and actual value. In addition if we allow for Special damages from a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury, with the damage amounts to specificity. If the data theft would have been known, the value of the firm would have been a lot lower.

Unless this was clearly disclosed to Verizon (I actually do not know), Verizon might have a case, which would be disastrous for Yahoo.

If we consider the news from July at NBC (at http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/25/verizon-to-acquire-yahoo.html), the setting is not just “Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL lag far behind and have lost market share“, there is no guarantee that those hit by the hack will remain in their Yahoo setting. Google has made it far too easy for people to switch over. The effort made in the past to transfer towards Google could inspire those people to switch to Google, import their mails and start with little or no loss at all. Which means that it is not impossible that Verizon after the merger remains a one digit digital marketing group, something I feel certain Verizon never counted on.

So where is this going?

There are two sides to this, not only is this about cyber security, or the lack thereof. The fact that Verizon has no unlimited data and those with Yahoo accounts who had them will now see their prices go up by a lot (when is this not about money?). Verizon has a 100GB shared option at $450 a month, which is beyond ridiculous. In Australia, iiNet (an excellent provider) offers 250GB for $60 a month and in the UK British Telecom offers a similar plan for no more than £21 a month (which is about $35), considering that BT is not the cheapest on the block, I have to wonder how Verizon will continue, when people have to switch, because their music apps (radio and so on) drain their data account at 6-8GB per day (a harsh lesson a friend of mine learned). Meaning that Verizon is actually a disservice to open internet and free speech. As I see it, free speech is only free if the listener isn’t charged for listening, or better stated, when certain solutions are locked to be not via Wi-Fi, meaning charged via bandwidth. So the accounts were one side, the amount of data breeches that we are seeing now (on both the Verizon and Yahoo side) imply that not only are they too expensive, they aren’t as secure as they are supposed to be and in addition, cyber laws are blatantly failing its victims. Having your data in plain text at $450 a month seems a little too unacceptable, merely because the odds to keep your fortune in Las Vegas tend to be better than this.

So now consider the sponsor, the people behind the screens on both the corporate and hacking side. So let’s take a look

Corporate

Here the need for security is essential, yet there is clear indication that those aware of spreadsheets (read: Board of Directors) are in equal measure naive and blatantly unaware that data security is essential and not the $99 version in this case. The cost of secure data is ignored and in many cases blatantly disregarded. The Yahoo case is inferior to the Verizon data transgressions that have been reported in this year alone. It is so nice to read on how the health industry is hit by organised crime, yet the amount of theft from their own systems is a lot less reported on. I find most amusing the text that the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report shows: “Yes. Our vulnerability management solutions identify and fix architectural flaws in POS and other patientfacing systems“, “Yes. Our identity and access management solutions prevent the use of weak passwords, the main cause of data breaches in the healthcare industry” and “Yes. Our intrusion detection and threat-management solutions help detect and mitigate breaches more quickly, limiting the damage caused” (at http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/factsheet/fs_organized-crime-drives-data-theft-in-the-healthcare-industry_en_xg2.pdf), I reckon that a massive overhaul of their own systems has a slightly higher priority at present. In addition there is no information on how secure the Verizon Data Cloud is. It doesn’t matter who provides it (as I see it), and I reckon we see that iteration hit the news the moment we learn that the UK Ministry of Defence Cloud gets tweaked to another server that is not under their control. It is important to realise that I am NOT scaremongering, the issue is that too many players have kept the people and corporations in the dark regarding monitoring options, intrusion detection and countermeasures, with the cloud, any successful intrusion has the real danger that the data hack is more complete and a lot larger in data loss. Moreover, Microsoft and Microsoft employees have one priority, Microsoft! Consider that any Microsoft employee might not be as forthcoming with Cyber transgressions, no matter what agreed upon. After the agreement, any internal memo could sidestep a reportable transgression. It is a reality of corporate life. In this, until the proper military staff members get trained, the Ministry of Defence (read: as well as GCHQ to some extent) will be catching up through near inhumane levels of required training, which gets the Ministry burnout issues soon enough.

Hackers

No matter how small, these attacks (yes plural) required serious hardware and access to tools that are not readily available. So whomever involved, they are either organised crime, or people connected to people with serious cash. This all gets us a different picture. I am not stating that some hackers work for reasons other than ideological. The rent in mum’s basement and hardware needs to be paid for, if not that, than the electricity bill that will be in excess of $130 a month. It might be trivial to mention, yet these little things add up. Hardware, electricity, storage, it gives the rising need of a sponsor for these hackers. There is no way to tell whether this is ideological (to show it can be done), technological (selling the flaws back to the makers of the solution), or criminal (to sell the acquired data to a competitor or exploiter). We can assume or speculate, but in reality, without additional evidence it is merely a waste of words.

So even if we know the name of the sponsor, this hopefully shows that the need to divulging information on data transgression has been way too light. In the past there was a ‘clarity’ that it was onto the firm to give out, but as they seemingly see it as a hazard to their wealth, too many victims are kept in the dark and as such, the financial danger to those victims is rising in an unbalanced way. If you would doubt my words, consider the article at http://www.geek.com/games/sony-psn-hack-is-only-the-4th-largest-data-breach-of-all-time-1390855/, which was set in June 2009. Geek is not the news cycle you might desire, but the summary is fine and confirmable. The hack to the Heartland Payment Systems January 20^th, 2009 might be one of the more serious ones, the 130 million records was more complete and could have a more devastating effect on the US population then most others. From my point of view, a massive shift to proactive data security should have been law no later than 2010, I think that we can safely say that this never happened to the extent required, which is another nice failure of the political parties at large and as such, this could get a lot uglier soon enough. The article also shows a massive Sony failing as there have been 6 large breaches in 2011 alone, so the Sony hack of 2012 shows to be a continuing story of a digital firm who cannot get their act together. That was never in question, in combination with the latest revelations, there is the added pressures that this cannot be allowed to continue and these firms need to start being held criminally negligible for transgressions on their systems. Just like in torts regarding trespass, it should be actionable perse. In addition, the hackers should be held in that same way, with the bounty changed to no less than double digit jail with no option for parole. The mere realisation that there is a high price for these transgressions might be the only way to stop this and in this age should not be a distinguishing factor, so any teenager hoping for an adventure with a nice pay package could end up not getting laid until they turn 30. The last part is unlikely to be a reality ever, but the fact that this is where we should have been going needs to be stated, for the mere reason that a shown failure of nearly a decade is no longer an option to ignore, not when the stakes are getting to be this high.

Leave a comment

Filed under IT, Law, Military, Politics

Tagged as AOL, British Telecom, Chris Hodson, FBI, GCHQ, Heartland Payment Systems, iiNet, Jeremiah Grossman, Kevin Cunningham, Las Vegas, Microsoft, North-Korea, Now You See Me, Peace of Mind, SailPoint, SentinelOne, Sony, UK Ministry of Defence, Verizon, Yahoo, Zscaler

September 20, 2016 · 13:29

The UK NHS is fine

This is the view that some seem to impair on the Britons. When we look at the article (at http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37331350), “Seven-day NHS ‘impossible under current funding levels’“, we see that there is an initial massive problem. I have no reason to doubt any of this, yet consider the issues in play. The Guardian gave us “Jeremy Corbyn has urged his supporters to campaign for jobs and the NHS once the current leadership battle is over. A year and a day after he was first elected as leader, Labour’s leader told a rally in Brighton that whatever the result, he hoped that they would join with him to convince the rest of Britain to join in a quest for a fairer society“, this is just a from one article. Yet, when we look a little further we get the Canary, which gives us “All the time I’ve been in parliament, I’ve been opposed to privatisation of the NHS and I voted against it with colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party over many years because we wanted to see a fully-funded, public, National Health Service. The Tories have sought to privatise it. A Labour government will have to take the whole NHS into public ownership and make sure it remains there. The next Labour government will go further than reversing Tory cuts. We intend to deliver a modern health and social care policy, fully publicly provided, and fully publicly funded, by integrating health and social care into a single system, so that everyone gets the care they need when they need it.” (at http://www.thecanary.co/2016/09/05/jeremy-corbyn-lays-out-his-plan-for-the-nhs-in-under-a-minute/). You see, we all want that, the Conservatives are not against it, the government just cannot afford it such a solution. When you take the government Credit Card and spend over a trillion pounds. Under Labour the debt went from less than 400 million to well over a trillion. Even though 2004 did not hit the UK as hard as other places, Labour should have changed their approach to budgets by a lot, then in 2008 there would have been no option but to radically implement austerity measures. This was never done the way it required to be. The people were told these overly optimistic views, mainly, as I personally see it to let money roll. In December 2007, the 2008 forecast was between 1% and 1.3%, The European Commission in 2008 was “In summary, growth in the UK economy is expected to slow to around 1¾% in 2008. In 2009, with no large carryover effect from 2008, the gradual recovery in domestic demand through the year will bring annual growth to just over 1½%“. Yet, when we see the BBC report (not forecasting) at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8479639.stm, we see that 2008 went per quarter from +0.6% to -1.7% in 2009 it grew from -2.5% to 0.1%. So at no point was any forecast ever met. This is something that has been going on for over a decade. Not just the UK mind you, the EU as a whole is playing that same managed bad news cycle that starts with overinflated positivity whilst those behind this game are delusional beyond belief. Until a massive change is made in the approach business and politicians are taking to blow up the governmental credit card. This relates to Jeremy Corbyn because unless the man was lobotomised in 2001, he should know better. Under Labour governance, the debt went up by a little over 600 billion pounds. Did they not consider the consequences? Overspending year after year, followed by managed bad news is not a solution. It never was and any politicians voicing that it could should be barred from public office for life! (Again, this applies to both sides of the political isle). That simple realisation is all UKIP needed and the mistakes made today and the symbiotic relationship of required spending between business and government needs to come to an end. In this coming decade we need actual solutions, an actual path to restore the pushed imbalance of Wall Street status quo pushed us all towards. So until we all realise that, the NHS is fine, because soon many people will have too many additional problems and the NHS will not show up on their radar. That is my prediction if the current wave of weighted misinformation continues.

So the NHS is fine according to those who needs funds to the directions they desire. You see, here we get confronted with the reality that the Conservatives are dealing with. Do you actually think that the quote “Prime minister declines to guarantee points-based system and extra £100m a week for health service“, the reality of a budget is that money runs out. It did 2 years ago and solutions need to be found. I personally, as a conservative would have preferred that the NHS was higher on the list. Yet, reality got in the way here too. The UK got into Brexit and we all knew that there would be consequences even though realistically the extent would never be a given. In that regard, the issues that Japanese PM Shinzo Abe raised might be regarded as a joke. My reasoning here is that the quote “Countries such as Japan have already warned the UK that a lack of clarity about Brexit and loss of the benefits that access to the single market brings could lead” brought. So this PM is crying on the UK doorstep whilst he should have asked President of the European Union Donald Tusk. No, he wants to know this from the UK, which in my view makes him sound more like a servant of the Washington Oval Office than the PM of Japan he is supposed to be. In addition, is it not interesting that an organisation like the EU has nothing in place regarding the notion a leaving nation will have as an impact of its structure? All this reflects back to the NHS, because as we see more and more political bashing from the people who are now finally realising that their Gravy Train is about to stop and that their cushy incomes based upon virtual works and situations will not continue, now they all come up into the light to push people into continuing disaster that could soon be the former EU.

This all relates to the NHS, because it will impact the NHS. I am not pushing for the entire Junior Doctor Contracts. Whatever the stance is there, the truth is that a pilot strike for better conditions would be the same, the airline would be put under pressure, but the airline would continue. With the NHS it is not that simple and the impact could be harder, yet the people have a right to stand up what they consider to be their right. Yet in all this people are very easy to ignore that the government has been giving into pharmaceutical companies not just the TTIP and in that regard they did not take a tougher stance on those pharmaceutical parts, opening stronger ties with India and the essential need for Generic medical solutions (where applicable), because that also impacts the NHS, lower costs for medications means more for staff, equipment and location. We all accept that the NHS needs solutions and so far there is a lack of actual actions that are leading to longer term solutions.

Yet we need to see that Labour isn’t the only lose screw on the political bench, Tim Farron from the Liberal Democrats are on the same foot. I gave my answer earlier. Unless the UK can get the budgets truly under control and until massive changes are implemented that will allow for better budgeting, the NHS would stop because business people want profit through privatisation and too many people are wasting the true future options of Britons through misrepresentation of forecasts. If you think that this is off? That forecasting is too complex, which can be concurred by many including me to some extent, it is not the case to the extent that we saw for too long a time. I discussed part of this in ‘A noun of non-profit‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2013/05/15/a-noun-of-non-profit/), in addition there is ‘Cooking the books?‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2014/01/22/cooking-the-books/) where I proved some of these points and showed the danger. So basically, the predictions I made in January 2014 are now showing to be correct. So as people are looking at a way for the government to spend more money and show cooked forecasts, consider the next time this is done and the austerities that will then follow., We can no longer continue this irresponsible push for unrealistic solutions that do not lead anywhere and takes us to look away from the solutions that actually need solving. The NHS needs solving and it needs it now.

There is no debate about the NHS and privatisation. Everyone would happily get rid of the idea if there was money to do that. I am not mentioning the aging population, because that has been known for a very long time and we can only partially blame the economic crash, because that hit everyone square in the face. So when I read the LibDems demanding the end of playing politics, whilst they are sitting next to Labour doing just that, we have to wonder where they got their view from. The independent reported only 3 days ago. The article (at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/lib-dems-demand-end-to-playing-politics-with-the-nhs-a7315236.html) gives a few quotes on that matter. “Mr Lamb has also launched a consultation on the introduction of a NHS specific income tax, which would ring fence a possible one pence per pound earned for the NHS budget, and appear on people’s payslips as such“, that is an optional solution. You see, this was introduced within the Netherlands decades ago and it solved plenty of issues. It is hard to talk about taxing this, but consider that the NHS will be short by 6 billion in the near future is at the heart of the issue. Consider that from your pay check, the government takes an additional £2 a week. Now consider the working population of 31 million people meaning that we have an optional 62 million pounds at our disposal, money that is destined exclusively for the NHS. Now, do not think for a moment that this will be temporary. There is the realistic consideration that this will be for all time, giving us two groups of people, those entitled to full health care and those with the minimum package. Now, retired people would get full health care on principle that they paid their dues a long time ago. There is every chance that people will not feel happy regarding this solution, but what options are left. The irresponsible ones seem to think that it will fit in the budget, especially those who haven’t been able to keep one since 1997. In this solution I feel decently comfortable with the solution that is consulted on by Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Norman Lamb. For one, I have seen this work in the Netherlands. In addition his version of “introduction of a NHS specific income tax, which would ring fence a possible one pence per pound earned for the NHS budget” sounds better than my £2 a week on small incomes. On the other hand, if we consider the minimum income of £286.54 per week, my amount sounded a little better, but we cannot deny the minimum £2.86 a week could solve nearly all options over time. It gets even better when we see that the average is £403.36 per week, so we are looking at a possible £120 million per week. I do believe that there should be an upper limit, yet where that ends is something that cannot be answered at this time. What is important is to seriously start taking up the ideas out there and see which one could lead to pressure release on the NHS, because at this point, every day not acted is another nail in the coffin that will be used soon enough to bury a past NHS era.

1 Comment

Filed under Finance, IT, Law, Media, Politics

Tagged as BBC, Donald Tusk, EUROPEAN COMMISSION, generic medication, India, Japan, Jeremy Corbyn, Junior Doctor Contracts, LibDems, Liberal Democrats, National Health Service, Netherlands, NHS, Norman Lamb, President of the European Union, Shinzo Abe, the Guardian, The Independent, Tim Farron, Tories, TTIP, UKIP, USA

Category Archives: Law

Recent Posts

Archives