Points of View
 EU
membership can be deadlyAs a candidate in the European elections for UKIP I was interviewed by the Guardian in May. I mentioned that the "NHS, schools and policing" were the three things over which the European Union had no influence. That morning I received an email from Andrew Sadler, a consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon at the united Lincolnshire NHS trust. He put me right on the subject, pointing to his evidence to the health select committee in which he made it very clear that at least his area of healthcare was being damaged by "the enormous influx of incompetent dentists from Europe in the last two years". In his evidence to the committee he pulled no punches. Dentists from outside the European Economic Community have to pass the overseas registration examination before being able to practise in the United Kingdom. This examination proves their competence up to the standard of a UK graduate. However, those new dentists from within the EEC do not have to take this examination, and it is clear from seeing patients referred by them that many of them have been trained to a different standard and are not competent to the same standard. Then there was the case reported at much the same time in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, which found that 37% of the knee operations carried out on 224 patients at the Somerset treatment centre run by Weston area NHS trust – which had hired teams of Scandinavian doctors – had unsatisfactory outcomes. Of course in surgery it is easy to see the problems, after all, somebody has to repair them. In medicine, however, always an art as much as science, evidence of similar incompetence is much harder to come by. That is, until there is a case such as that of Dr Daniel Ubani. He accidentally administered 10 times the recommended maximum dose of diamorphine, directly causing the death of David Gray. I began to join up the dots: something very wrong was going on. If you are a doctor or dentist from outside the EU you have to pass the General Dental Council's or the General Medical Council's registration, which is very tough (it has an approximate 20% pass rate). Historically the NHS has benefited from thousands of young doctors coming to the UK from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa and elsewhere in the Commonwealth to complete their training. They were the brightest and the best, paid low wages for the privilege of continuing training in the British system, a system with which their own medical training systems dovetailed perfectly. But due to new EU rules governing employment, NHS trusts have to fill gaps with EU doctors rather than English-speaking Commonwealth doctors. Today they go to the US, and British doctors leave to the Commonwealth, further impoverishing the NHS. However, if you come from the EU, you just start working independently, even though your university course may have been mostly book-work with very few actual patients seen. You are supposed to demonstrate equivalence to vocational training but this is passed on the nod. Primary care trusts are very keen to see the maximum numbers of medical practitioners as access to their targets; quality is not. This is driven by the European recognition of professional qualifications directive of 2005, which stipulates that: Member states may require migrants to have the language knowledge necessary for practicing the profession. This provision must be applied proportionately, which rules out the systematic imposition of language tests before a professional activity can be practised. According to Sam Leinster, from the University of East Anglia, in a study published in the Medical Teacher in 2003: The European council in its directive has set out legally defined 'standards', but these are couched in vague terms which make them difficult to apply and there is marked variation in their interpretation. It is apparent that we cannot yet define the minimally competent doctor in terms that are acceptable to everyone. If a doctor is incompetent they can be reported to the General Medical Council, but this is very imperfect as most of these European doctors are working for corporate bodies and treat the most socially disadvantaged NHS patients who do not know how to complain or even don't know there is a problem. In response to this the health minister Mike O'Brien talked about forcing primary care trusts to vet all doctors they use. This is impractical: locums are needed 24 hours a day, and are provided by private firms. All this suggestion would do is shift responsibility and ramp up costs for the NHS, creating more jobs for bureaucrats and cutting money for front-line services. Apart from anything else, the PCTs will be unable to police the use of GP locums, thus meaning that fewer and fewer doctors will be available out of hours. We need all doctors in the UK to be trained and be experienced to UK standards. However, that would be in breach of EU equality legislation. There is nothing that O'Brien or anybody else can do about this while we remain in the EU. People die. And our politicians are impotent. Gawain Towler  A
plague of politicians by Derek BennettKids sitting atsitting at their desks at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, be they scruffy little urchins from the back street slums of what we now call our ‘inner cities, or from village and town schools, would have looked at the maps of the world on their classroom walls and seen that a great swathe of the planet was marked in red to denote the British Empire. No matter how lowly, or how grand their backgrounds, they must have had a certain pride in the power and influence of their country. It was most probably for that reason so many of them went willingly to war in 1914 and again in 1939 to stand up for, and keep, our place as a power in the world. Britain, in those distant times of around a century ago was a fully united Kingdom, our heavy industries from Scotland, the Midlands and in the south thrived, we were a centre for exploration and innovation and our towns and cities were flushed with municipal pride. We all know those days were hard and short lived for many, but it must have been a fantastic time to be alive too for those who cared about this country – and it was all done, and run, by a handful of civil servants and politicians. What of today’s Britain where our global influence has diminished, our Empire is nothing more than a distant memory and a bit of red ink on some ancient fading map? Most of our heavy industry has gone, we produce a fraction of what we did in those days, we import our cars, our trains and our ships are made on foreign dockyards. Although still a member of the Commonwealth, sadly we were forced to betray those real friends when we joined the Common Market. These days most people work in none productive jobs in offices, shops, stores and supermarkets, our only remaining real wealth creators are in the financial sectors and even they are under threat from a doubly whammy of the banking crisis and proposed EU financial regulations. What a sad state our beleaguered nation has become. Yet despite this plummeting in fortunes, despite the fact we don’t even govern ourselves any more due to the actions of various treasonous British Governments giving our sovereign power away to the EU, we have one growth industry – the political industry which churns out mass produced legislation on an industrial scale. As stated our Empire was run efficiently and profitably with a handful of civil servants, our elected political classes were fewer, many in town halls across the land did their bit unpaid, yet in today’s run-down Britain we now have 29,000 politicians and staff, at a cost of half a billion pounds – for what? These scary figures have been calculated by the Taxpayers Alliance who reported that this growth has taken place over the last thirty years when the numbers were a close to a tenth at just 3000. We have council officers and staff on eye watering and extravagant salaries, MEPs who have none or little power whose only real role is to give the EU a façade of democracy. They vote through so much legislation they can’t keep track, or pace, with what they are voting for. We have neutered MPs who live in a dream in the wonderful setting of the Palace of Westminster, whose power and influence has been stripped from them whilst they and our Government Ministers still consider themselves of great importance, yet are powerless to run the country without contravening EU rules and bureaucracy. There are pointless politicians spouting little but hot air in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, along with their own political entourages. Even our councillors these days are paid. There was a time only a few years ago councillors did their service for the community unpaid and had great pride in the work they did for their towns and cities. Now they are paid and want to be on their council cabinets to give them an air of great importance, despite having to wade through vast swathes of local bureaucracy whilst at the same time doing less then those unpaid souls who served before them. This country is now facing a great and devastating plague, a plague of politicians who soak our money and inflict a mass of bureaucracy upon us and blight our lives with unnecessary laws. To deal with this plague we first have to inoculate ourselves from its source – the EU. Once we are free of it we can then begin to rebuild and cull the political classes who are nothing but a hindrance to our well being as a nation. We will never see our world maps in our schools covered in red ink again, but we can, at least, see them without the EU blue flags of occupation and its noose of gold stars.  Thursday the 13th By Trevor ColmanThursday the 13th of December, 2007 was the day they gave my country away. It was strange. There wasn’t any noticeable change. It was just another cold, damp, winter’s day with everyone well wrapped up against a biting East wind. There were no riots and no-one caused any public disorder. There were no placards or protest marches: no barricades on the roads. It all took place very quietly. The BBC weren’t telling us we were losing our country, neither were the newspapers. In fact, if you don’t follow these things, you’d never have known it was happening. But it happened alright. In Lisbon. Apparently they’d been trying to take control of Britain since 1972. If you check on these things the Prime Minister back then, Edward Heath, lied to us and signed Britain up to something which eventually led to Lisbon and Thursday the 13th. Heath knew, all those years ago, that this would happen but he hid most of the papers on it. Some are still hidden. To know what was planned you needed to find out for yourself. Those who knew, were saying nothing. The BBC and the newspapers were keeping quiet. They still are. And anyway there were lots of other things, we were told, which were much more important. On Thursday the 13th, for example, the big story was about someone who had gone out in a canoe several years ago and vanished. Then he’d turned up again. The media was full of it, certainly more than about what was happening in Lisbon. Looking back over the years there always seems to have been a big story that switched our attention away from what was really going on. And the big story always turned out to be not important at all. Strange isn’t it? Of course, it wasn’t just Heath. Wilson and Thatcher were just as bad, so was John Major, Blair of course and now Brown. But for years we didn’t know they were deceiving us. I mean, it’s so unbelievable that British politicians should lie to us about something so important. But, as it turns out, they did and now, after what happened in Lisbon, we know for sure they still are. Not that I’m particularly patriotic. I’d be the first for the exit when they used to play the national anthem in the cinemas. Somewhere along the line, though, the Britain I know has been disappearing. Most of our industrial and manufacturing base has been scrapped. They’re closing the Post Offices, the Police Stations, hospital wards and the pubs. The fishing and the farming are almost gone, so is good old British common sense. A bloke told me a few years ago that they plan to have a licence for everything. I laughed at him. I’m not laughing now. Let me ask you, did you vote for Danuta Hubner, Joe Borg or Vladmir Spidla? No, neither did I. Neither did anyone. But those three and another twenty four unelected people I’ve never heard of, have taken over Britain. On Thursday the 13th in Lisbon, Gordon Brown and David Milliband gave them the keys to our country. And nobody said a word. Amazing isn’t it? For me there are two things that are the worst part of all this. First, no-one has ever asked me if this is what I wanted. Secondly, it’s the lies. Alright, we’ve been lied to for the past thirty six years, but it’s different now. We know now that they’re lying and they know that we know. The awful thing is they don’t care that we know. Then I tell myself countries don’t just disappear without some sort of disturbance. Soldiers invade or someone drops a bomb or attacks a port. People are killed. War is declared. You notice when people are taking over your country, don’t you? I keep thinking I must be wrong about Thursday the 13th. When I put on the television that evening there was good old Porridge and Rising Damp and the Queen was on the News in a new hat and everything looked just as it always has done. Interest rates are coming down, the Pound is going up, petrol is getting dearer, we’re in for a cold spell. Nothing has changed. But it has. Turn off the television set, walk outside and, wherever you live, you’ll see and hear what is happening. This is no longer our country. Peter Roberts Road pricing Petition And then they came First they came for the hunters, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a fisherman. Then they came for the smokers, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a drinker. Then they came for my identity, and I didn’t speak up, because I felt secure. Then they came for the countryside, and I didn’t speak up, because I live in a town. Then they came for the family, and I didn’t speak up, because I was single. Then they came for the farmers, and I didn’t speak up, because my belly was full. Then they came for the drivers, and I didn’t speak up, because I took the bus. Then they came for the jobs, and I didn’t speak up, because I was on benefit. Then they came for the army, and I didn’t speak up, because there was no threat. Then they came for freedom, and I didn’t speak up, because I was offended. Then they came for my vote, and I didn’t speak up, because It wouldn't make a difference. Then they came for my country, and I didn’t speak up, because it seemed like history. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left just me. With kudos to Pastor Martin Niemöller  Jabba and the huts - A
peek into the future? Coming soon to a Greenfield site near you.
Jabba Prescott has an axe to grind and wants to sharpen it on the
South. If we take a peek into the Nu-Lab future we see a new
metropolis where the inhabitants live tightly packed in tiny little
huts all made out of ticky tack. As with battery hens in a caged
environment they must be kept under close control and monitored
24/7. In childhood they are put onto a DNA database, and raised in
state controlled baby farms. Once the Citizens come of age they
receive their citizenship ID Card and are only then allowed to drive
and travel. They are then charged for the privilege of driving and
monitored by satellites and cameras everywhere they go. Police are
able to arrest Citizens for anything that might offend and
picking your nose gets you an Asbo and an on the spot fine. Drink is
key to keeping the Citizens happy, so the state sanctions binge
drinking and learns quickly that as with speed cameras this can also
be a money spinner in revenue from fines for being drunk in public.
The NHS is rationed and only available to those who are healthy and
fat people and smokers are forced into back street health clinics.
The only people who have pensions are civil servants and politicians
and there is no longer a retirement age. The state funded news media
has become another organ of government and being off-message in
public by a Citizen is a crime. Everyone is classed as guilty
until they can prove otherwise and the state can take the Citizens
assets without needing a reason or supplying any redress. Detention
without trial and house arrest are a standard part of the judicial
system. Which of the above is A) True, B) A Joke, C) Coming Soon,
or D) Already Here?The Unconscionable Cruelty of Polly T by Free Born John Almost twenty years ago I pitched up in London, found a bedsit and took a job as a minicab driver. Knowing I would otherwise be on my own, one of the controllers invited me for Christmas dinner. He lived on the fourteenth floor of one of three tower blocks that backed onto wasteground in Camberwell. The lifts were broken so I walked up the stairs, stepping round pools of urine, looking carefully for the small piles of human excrement that lurked in shadows beneath shattered light fittings. I knocked at his door, and it opened into a room of lights, decorations, children laughing by a Christmas tree, and the smell of roasting turkey. A couple of years later I used to visit someone who lived in a lower-rise block on the fringes of Brixton. The car park was always full of playing children, even during school hours. I drove a very old ex-gas board long wheel base Land Rover at the time and somehow it developed that I'd leave it unlocked and let the children play in it while I was upstairs. I think it was the little mother who started it, a girl of perhaps eight who always seemed to have her youngest, snot-nosed sibling on her hip while she bawled at her five year old brother to stop whatever he might be doing at the time. She was a friendly child with a beautiful smile. One day she confided in me as though she were telling me about a rare feast that her Mum had let her have a burger with her chips that evening. Normally, it was just chips, from a shop a couple of hundred yards away. I only ever saw her mother from a distance. When she wanted the children to come in, because she wanted to go out with her latest boyfriend, she would come to the balcony and shout down, If you don't get up here right now, I'll come down and kick your head in! After a few weeks, there would be a dozen or more children playing in the Land Rover. The oldest and most senior taking it in turns to pretend to drive, younger ones camping in the covered back. The more adventurous would climb up the sides and over the roof. One day, as I came down the stairs, I was met by a delegation. Someone had broken an indicator light cover while scaling the south face of the vehicle. The culprit was there, shamefaced, in the middle, with half a dozen concerned friends along for moral support. These were good kids. Then I started driving them all, very slowly, round the car park. There'd be kids on the roof, on the bonnet, holding on to the sides, in the back and on the bench seat in the front. The rule was, I had to be able to see them all at all times - a leg or arm at least had to be visible in one of the mirrors. They policed this rule assiduously, as I drove at walking pace, yelling at each other to make sure they were visible. One of the mothers came out to see what it was all about, a shy young Irish woman, and she rode in the front with her son on her lap, chatting with the other children as we crawled around the hardstanding. There was poverty there all right, but it wasn't financial. The children were poor - they would all have counted in child poverty statistics, but some were properly fed and some weren't. Some were loved, and some weren't. Some of them would be getting jobs in a few years' time. The little mother would become a real mother. But with others, the passage of puberty would see a setting of the eyes into a flinty middle-distance stare, and they'd start burgling, mugging, dealing or go on the game. What makes the difference? One thing is for sure: it isn't money. All these people were on much the same incomes, the devoted Irish mother and the one who would kick her daughter's head in if she was slow to come upstairs, the cab controller and the people who shat in the stairwell of his block of flats. Milton Friedman died a few days ago. He once said: A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life. At Harry's Place, someone called Norman the carpet commented: Well its nice to get some good news for a change. An appalling person who pedalled (sic) a dreadful ideology. Like many Libertarian bloggers, I actually know what it is like to be broke. I have lived in high rises like the ones described above. I have gone hungry. Travelling in the Yukon twenty five years ago, after a lumber strike had closed down half the seasonal industries, I went three days without food - though my dog didn't - before I found work doing odd jobs in a motel. I treated my own frostbite, because I couldn't afford to see a doctor. One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don't feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It's a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It's a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It's an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel. And though this idea is gibbered out by halfwits like Norman the carpet, it actually derives from Polly Toynbee. Not just Toynbee, of course, but she has made a particular fetish of social exclusion. And she claims that ...growing inequality multiplies all these problems No, it doesn't. What multiplies them is continued state intervention in and control over these people's lives. They shit in stairwells because they don't own the stairwells and they don't feel responsible for keeping them clean. The same people will complain that the council are slow to disinfect them, before they shit in them again. I don't know this because I've held focus groups; I know it because I've lived there and seen it. I have seen someone whose father sent him to school from a tower block in Walworth with the carving knife to stab a boy who was bullying him (which he did) buy a house and take his kids on holidays through sheer hard work, and I've seen middle-class lefties spend decades on the dole. Telling people who are institutionalised into dependency that it's all the fault of unequal income distribution, that they are victims and that their salvation lies in more government money is hideously cruel, for all the fatuous false moral posturing of Toynbee and her carpet-brained acolytes. The only things that achieves are a deepening of the sanctimonious self-satisfaction in which Toynbee and her entourage wallow, and a broadening of the base of the state on which they depend and through which they thrive. The answer lies not in the redistribution of wealth, but in the creation of wealth, by the poorest, for the poorest - for themselves. For that to happen, the state needs to get out of the way, not just by intervening less with help, but also by hindering less with regulations and taxes. Taking money from the poorest, then giving it back to them in housing subsidies, tax credits and income supplements is grotesque - it wastes their few precious resources (unless tax collectors start working for free) and it institutionalises the recipients who could have just been left alone in the first place. Constant regulation and quality improvements simply mean cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder; instead, the focus should be on removing barriers to work and self-employment. But then there'd be nothing for Polly and her friends to do, and nothing to give them that glow of self-righteousness that comes from stooping down from on high to hold the little hands of the poor. And that's the really unforgivable aspect of this: the sense that the unconscionable cruelty of keeping these people trapped is motivated in part by the self-interest of the advocates of statism. |
 Does
AV fully represent the views of the electorate?To be as is, or, alternatively, to be? The First Past the Post System (FPTP) of voting has served this Country well and if it were still working well there would be no need to fix it. The system isn't working well. The recent General Election result, with exactly the same voting returns, could have resulted in a coalition government of Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the whim of the politicians not the electorate. The electorate didn't vote for a coalition of either description and the hung parliament result is a 'happen-chance' of a voting system that no longer represents the democratic view of the electorate. In part this has come about through the activities of the three main parties in shedding principles and trying to occupy a very similar centralist political position. Power is not the same as democracy. Democracy in the UK, as opposed to power, is not being well served by these three traditional parties and to ensure that both the views and the votes of the electorate are properly and fairly represented a reform of the system must now involve a system based on some form of Proportional Representation (PR). PR is the principle behind a number of electoral systems, all of which attempt to ensure that the outcome of the election reflects the proportion of support gained by each competing political party. Too many political parties/journalists talk about PR as if it were one electoral system, it isn't, and fail to mention which PR system they actually support. It has been announced by the ConDem coalition that the electorate will be offered a referendum in 2011 on the UK electoral voting system between FPTP and the Alternative Vote (AV), the latter being a limited form of PR. In June 2009 Nick Clegg, as Leader of the Liberal Democrats, responding in the House of Commons to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's proposed political reforms regarding the AV system; "We can't afford to wait for a cross-party consensus because the Conservatives will never want to change this cosy Westminster stitch-up. People should now be given a say. A choice between the bankrupt system we have now (FPTP); the timid option of Alternative Vote, a baby step in the right direction; and serious proposals for reform like Roy Jenkins' AV+ or better still the Single Transferable Vote.... This is no time for his trademark timidity ... Just get on with it." The Electoral Reform Society were even more scathing as regards AV although it is widely used in many democracies around the world. AV is very much like First Past The Post. It is used to elect representatives for single-member constituencies, but rather than simply marking a solitary 'X' on the ballot paper, the voter has the alternative or choice to also rank the candidates on offer by putting a '1' by their first preference, a '2' by their second preference and so on. If a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes (more people put them as number one than all the rest combined), then they are elected. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over 50 per cent. A disadvantage of AV is that it is possible for a second choice candidate, the first time around, to finish up being elected. To a limited extent AV negates tactical voting. There are two other systems, both based on PR, being more democratic than either FPTP or AV and neither being offered to the electorate for consideration. The Alternative Vote Plus (AV+) and Total Representation (TR). AV+ was invented by the 1998 Independent Commission on the Voting System, referred to as the Jenkins Commission, and was created with the intention of being the alternative to FPTP in Labour's promised referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. The referendum never came and AV+ has, for now, been confined to the parliamentary archives and may well stay there as it involves the electorate casting two votes and may be viewed as too complicated. TR is the most democratic of all the voting systems mentioned above, is easier in application than AV+ for the electorate in that it only involves a single vote. It retains the connection between a Constituency and its elected member and also enables, through the same single vote a PR system to apply to a smaller number of Party MP's who are representative of the views of the electorate who at present have no representation in Parliament. The fourth largest party in the UK, the UK Independence Party polled 918.000 votes in the General Election and has no representation in Westminster. The same party came second nationally, with 2.4 million votes, in the UK Euro 2009 elections where a form of PR voting applies. With Total Representation every vote counts and there is no necessity for tactical voting, which as we have seen this year results in something the electorate did not and could not have chosen. Happen-chance. Democracy deserves better and so does the electorate. Colin McNamee  Source Material – Airbrushing UKIP out of the pictureThose who followed with some glee the story of Baroness Ashton’s rough ride through the EU parliament last week may have not been surprised that in early reports of her appointment, her friends at the BBC had manage to airbrushed the Soviet connection from her track record. Even more disturbing though is the fact that once the story about her CND past and potential Soviet involvement in funding, the BBC was very careful not to reveal who had researched and released the story. Fortunately, David Charter, writing in The Times, was more honest and revealed in the first of several pieces on the story, that the source was Gerard Batten, London’s UKIP MEP and a tireless seeker after truth. Pavel Stroilov, sometime researcher and assistant to Vladimir Bukovksy looked into the roots of those in the EU with links in their past to Communist organisations and former Soviet governments. The process had started with Pavel’s original article in the Spectator on Soviet collusion at the beginning on November in which he discussed several key Labour figures and their relationships with Moscow from documents he found in the Gorbachev archive. The matter was raised in the EU Parliament on Nov 23rd by Gerard Batten MEP. and Nigel Farage MEP who has additional speaking privileges as the leader of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group was able to work it into a general attack on the ‘political pygmies’ Rompuy and Ashton. The cat was out of the bag now but Barroso was busy trying to stuff it back in and summoned Nigel to his offices to demand he retract the allegation. Nigel refused to attend and wrote that Barroso would be better asking Ashton for explanations of her behaviour. As the whole matter was covered by UKIP videos on YouTube the British media was finally forced to follow David Charter’s example and report on the accusations being made. Dan Hannan MEP, who presumably witnessed the whole thing firsthand, was the first to break the silence in the Telegraph on Nov 25th, reporting Nigel being summoned to Barroso and then the others slowly followed suit. When the BBC finally reported anything on the matter on Dec 2nd, it is Ashton’s self-justifications and lame defence against the accusations that they majored on, presumably as they knew her from their days in CND as well. Still, it was better than the Daily Mail, who had magically morphed UKIP MEP David Campbell-Bannerman into Conservative MEP Charles Tannock. (They must be still labouring under the illusion that the Conservative Party is a safe pair of hands for the UK in Europe)? Interestingly as we compiled this piece, the Sunday Times’ Jon Ungoed-Thomas was trying to whitewash the allegations about Ashton using her You.Gov’s husband’s admission he was approached by the KGB in the 1980s. Meanwhile the Mail have finally started investigating the story themselves and uncovered a relationship with the British Communist Party’s Duncan Rees, but no mention of UKIP of course. It’s no wonder that the blogs are cutting out the middle men of the main stream media and going straight to the source. Paul Wiffen  Financial
MeltdownDear Friends: The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived. We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets. Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades. Still, at least a few observations are necessary. The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned? We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed. Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!). Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk." Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct? Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up. It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year. The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days. F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own: Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion. To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression. The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history. The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question? Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people. The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them. I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn. H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have. In liberty, Ron Paul  The Shortage Myth - The Lies at the End of the American Dream By Paul
Craig RobertsLast June a revealing marketing video from the law firm, Cohen and Grigsby appeared on the Internet. The video demonstrated the law firm's techniques for getting around US law governing work visas in order to enable corporate clients to replace their American employees with foreigners who work for less. The law firm's marketing manager, Lawrence Lebowitz, is upfront with interested clients: our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested US worker. If an American somehow survives the weeding out process, have the manager of that specific position step in and go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify them for this position--in most cases there doesn't seem to be a problem. No problem for the employer he means, only for the expensively educated American university graduate who is displaced by a foreigner imported on a work visa justified by a nonexistent shortage of trained and qualified Americans. University of California computer science professor Norm Matloff, who watches this issue closely, said that Cohen and Grigsby's practices are the standard ones used by hordes of attorneys, who are cleaning up by putting Americans out of work. The Cohen and Grigsby video was a short-term sensation as it undermined the business propaganda that no American employee was being displaced by foreigners on H-1b or L-1 work visas. Soon, however, business organizations and their shills were back in gear lying to Congress and the public about the amazing shortage of qualified Americans for literally every technical and professional occupation, especially IT and software engineering. Everywhere we hear the same droning lie from business interests that there are not enough American engineers and scientists. For mysterious reasons Americans prefer to be waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks. As one of the few who writes about this short-sighted policy of American managers endeavouring to maximize their performance bonuses, I receive much feedback from affected Americans. Many responses come from recent university graduates such as the one who graduated nearly at the top of my class in 2002 with degrees in both electrical and computer engineering and who hasn't been able to find a job. A college roommate of a family member graduated from a good engineering school last year with a degree in software engineering. He had one job interview. Jobless, he is back at home living with his parents and burdened with student loans that bought an education that off-shoring and work visas have made useless to Americans. The hundreds of individual cases that have been brought to my attention are dismissed as anecdotal by my fellow economists. So little do they know. I also receive numerous responses from American engineers and IT workers who have managed to hold on to jobs or to find new ones after long intervals when they have been displaced by foreign hires. Their descriptions of their work environments are fascinating. For example, Dayton, Ohio, was once home to numerous American engineers. Today, writes one surviving American, I feel like an alien in my own country--as if Dayton had been colonized by India. NCR and other local employers have either off-shored most of their IT work or rely heavily on Indian guest workers. The IT department of National City Bank across the street from LexisNexis is entirely Indian. The nearby apartment complexes house large numbers of Indian guest workers filling the engineering needs of many area businesses. I have learned that Reed Elsevier, which owns LexisNexis, has hired a new Indian vice president for off-shoring and that now the jobs of the Indian guest workers may be on the verge of being off-shored to another country. The relentless drive for cheap labour now threatens the foreign guest workers who displaced America's own engineers. One software engineer wrote to me protesting the ignorance of Thomas Friedman for creating a false picture of American engineers being outdated and for denouncing American engineers and other workers as xenophobes for opposing their displacement by foreign guest workers. The engineer also took exception to the wilful ignorance or cynicism of Bruce Bartlett and George Will who he described as bootlicks for pro-outsourcing lobbies. On November 6, 2006, Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, explained to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology the difference between the conventional or false portrait that there is a shortage of US scientists and engineers and the reality on the ground, which is that off-shoring, foreign guest workers, and educational subsidies have produced a surplus of US engineers and scientists that leaves many facing unstable and failed careers. As two examples of the false portrait, Teitelbaum cited the 2005 report, Tapping America's Potential, led by the Business Roundtable and signed onto by 14 other business associations, and the 2006 National Academies report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which was the basis for substantial parts of what eventually evolved into the American COMPETES Act. Teitelbaum posed the question to the US Representatives: Why do you continue to hear energetic re-assertions of the Conventional Portrait of shortages, shortfalls, failures of K-12 science and math teaching, declining interest among US students, and the necessity of importing more foreign scientists and engineers?; Teitelbaum's answer: In my judgment, what you are hearing is simply the expressions of interests by interest groups and their lobbyists. This phenomenon is, of course, very familiar to everyone on the Hill. Interest groups that are well organized and funded have the capacity to make their claims heard by you, either directly or via echoes in the mass press. Meanwhile those who are not well-organized and funded can express their views, but only as individuals. Among the interest groups that benefit from the false portrait are universities, which gain graduate student enrolments and inexpensive postdocs to conduct funded lab research. Employers gain larger profits from lower paid scientists and engineers, and immigration lawyers gain fees by leading employers around the work visa rules. Using the biomedical research sector as an example, Teitelbaum explained to the congressmen how research funding creates an oversupply of scientists that requires ever larger funding to keep employed. Teitelbaum made it clear that it is nonsensical to simultaneously increase the supply of American scientists while forestalling their employment with a shortage myth that is used to import foreigners on work visas. Teitelbaum recommends that American students considering majors in science and engineering first investigate the career prospects of recent graduates. Integrity is so lacking in America that the shortage myth serves the interests of universities, funding agencies, employers, and immigration attorneys at the expense of American students who naively pursue professions in which their prospects are dim. Initially it was blue-collar factory workers who were abandoned by US corporations and politicians. Now it is white-collar employees and Americans trained in science and technology. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimates that there are 30 to 40 million American high end service jobs that ultimately face off-shoring. As I predict, and as BLS payroll jobs data indicate, in 20 years the US will have a third world work force engaged in domestic non-tradable services. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Flights of Fancy? by Peter Troy The Tories, on the basis of the James report, aim to save £35 billion, of which £22 billion will be pumped back into services delivery, while Labour claims to have identified auditable and transparent efficiency gains of over £20 billion in 2007-08 across the public sector. Against projected public expenditure of £400 billion or so, the difference between the parties is actually very little and possibly even less than the headline figure. A significant quantum of the projected James report figures are, in fact, unrealisable, as they relate to spending on activities required by EU law. The result, in any event, is the difference between public expenditure at 42 percent of gross domestic product by 2011 under Labour and at 40 percent under the Tories. Thus it was Peter Riddell who remarked recently in his recent Times column that Sigmund Freud would have found plenty of material in British politics at present to illustrate his adage about the narcissism of small differences. Very similar types of people tend to exaggerate the small differences between themselves and build them up into life-and-death struggles. That, he wrote, is exactly how the parties are now behaving: We have an outpouring of claim and counter-claim about taxes and public spending, implying ruin if the other party wins. There are legitimate questions about how much the waste/efficiency savings from the Tories' James review can be achieved, just as there are about the Government's. But Labour is specialising in hyped-up, almost mendacious assertions about alleged Tory cuts, mass dismissals of teachers, nurses, and so on. The reality is that the differences between the parties' spending plans are pretty small: around 2 percent of national income over the course of a full Parliament. This is less than half the rise since 1997, or during the early 1990s. Similarly, as Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats acknowledged this week, the differences between the parties on the tax take are minimal. The £4 billion cut in taxes promised by the Tories is merely a seventh of the projected rise in tax receipts which will occur under the existing tax structure. What price, therefore, the view from Patrick Minford in the business section of the Daily Telegraph, under the title: The E.U.'s manufacturing policies are costing us a fortune. In a long article, well worth reading, Minford argues that, in addition to the Common Agricultural Policy, which costs us between 0.3 and 1 percent of GDP in excess costs of UK production, payments to inefficient EU farmers, and the burden of high prices on our households, the E.U.'s common manufacturing policy costs us about 3 percent of GDP in similar costs; a lot more than raw food because it is so much bigger both as an industry and as an element in our household budgets. This is not chickenfeed, he writes: 3 percent of GDP is some £30 billion, almost half the cost of the NHS. But that, is only part of the equation. The EU commission in its annual report on competitiveness, estimated that red tape was costing the EU economies some 12 percent of GDP, four times the amount of which Minford complains. Translated into UK terms, that amounts to a loss to the economy in the order of £120 billion, of which a third to a half would be translatable into tax receipts and be available for public spending. At the lower figure of one third, equivalent to £40 billion, this still exceeds the James report figure by a substantial amount, without attracting the opprobrium of expenditure cuts. A genuine political debate, especially when the EU is seeking to implement a constitution which locks-in the continental social model, would address issues such as this. But, of course, Europe is off the agenda for the duration of the election and we are only discussing domestic issues. Small wonder the Scotsman today headlines a story: Honest electoral debate is the first casualty of MPs' war of words. Between them, the major parties have managed to turn the news agenda away from matters of genuine importance on to manufactured hype, leaving the electorate bemused and indifferent. All we have left is an air of unreality. Peace and War By Iris Smith One of the (possibly) more persuasive arguments put forward by UK Europhiles for E.U. membership is that this has cemented peace between previously hostile nations. “To jaw jaw is better than to war war” is a favoured popular mantra. More careful thought, however, exposes the fallacy of blind adherence to this stance. Firstly none of the participants of the 1939-45 conflict, who all suffered severely, had any desire to re-ignite a conflict. They were all determined to repair and rebuild rather than further destroy. Secondly it was the strength of NATO, powerfully bolstered by America rather than the E.U., which brought to an end the subsequent threatening Cold War. More recent conflicts and E.U. divisions and disagreements, together with the spread of global terrorist threats, have highlighted the weakness of placing any real confidence in the E.U. as a reliable bulwark of defence for any of its individual nation states. My personal view of the proposed combined European Army foresees the likelihood of professional British troops struggling under the orders of a frequently disunited E.U. high command – not a very reassuring prospect for the British Isles. The further question as to the likely outcome for the World, had Britain and her Allies not stood firm against the Axis powers in 1939, is seldom asked and never debated but should certainly not be completely disregarded. Additionally, in my view, real peace for all can only be brought about through a just governmental system, with proper accountability to and the willing co-operation of the governed. To ensure lasting, peaceful, acceptable government, law makers must periodically account directly to their electorate, who should have real ability to compel desirable changes through the ballot box. The E.U. remote control oligarchy of elected heads of governments and appointed unelected Commissioners, horse trading behind closed doors on legislation prepared by faceless bureaucrats, is little short of dictatorship. Further, the lip-service democracy provided by permitting elected MEPs periodically to comment on, but neither reject nor change, such legislation is a costly pretence of giving any real choices to the European electorates. My only hope for long-term acceptable democratic government for our Country lies in the growing support for UKIP’s call for an amicable withdrawal from the factional E.U. government now imposed across Europe and a return to UK government by our Westminster elected Parliament, with its long term in-built safeguards of checks and balances – for the protection, rather than the subjugation, of the electorate. Only the restoration of self-government, freed from the E.U. straitjacket, will give to the British people greater strength in fair negotiation with all other nations, offering a far more realistic prospect of lasting peace both at home and abroad. (Iris Smith was an independent councillor for many years before coming into the UKIP fold. She sadly passed away earlier this year) |