Category: Predator or prey?

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Stupormarkets

Sainsbury the supermarket are in the news boasting Huge Stonking Great Profits today, and their spokesman is stoutly proclaiming that even in these straightened times Sainsbury are creating jobs! Their workers are paying taxes! This is presented as if it were some kind of laudable effort where in reality it illustrates how badly Britain’s doing. Paying taxes Sainsbury as a whole may be but how much of it will be in Britain, going to our Chancellor to be redsitributed here and how much will be shuffled discreetly off to anonymous tax-havens? What good does this do Britain? If the supermarkets are doing well, they’re doing it by putting local companies out of business together with their advertising oulets, local accountants and vehicle servicers, etc. Huge, huge knock on effects all bad for the country. They act like giant wealth siphons on any area where they’re allowed to settle, sucking the wealth out of it and away to foreign parts, never to be seen by this country again. Consumers commute to work in other areas and return to their domicile to spend their earnings, but when they go to a local supermarket those earnings don’t go towards enriching the locality as they otherwise might. Supermarket prosperity is thus very bad news for the rest of us. Oddly, this aspect isn’t highlighted, or even mentioned, in the conventional media, all of which, we must remember, is corporate-owned – just like supermarkets – and is unlikely to be presenting a point of view sympathetic to the interests of the consumer. Instead, we read about the ready availability of cheap food. I don’t think this is cheap. I think we pay a terrible price as wealth earned and bought in by the residents of a community is promptly sucked out of it, not redistributed locally as it could be thus enriching communities. I can’t see any place in a community-oriented culture for supermarkets at all. Probably worth mentioning in this context that the Grand Poobah of Tesco and so all supermarkets by association is Sir Terry Leahy, who was plain old Terry Leahy till he was knighted by Tony Blair. When you understand the damage that supermarkets actually do, when you begin to grasp the deleterious effect they have on communities and see the praise they get from those elected to represent the interests of those communities you realise that neither politicians nor corporations are really on our side in anything at all.

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Springtime For The Mafia

I’m reading in the papers that in the absence of available finance from the banks businesses are getting funding from the Mafia, who are thriving as a consequence. It’s perhaps ironic to note that if you borrow money from the Mafia, they actually have the money to lend you. They practice what amounts to full reserve banking, whereas the legal banking system will have to counterfeit it, practicing as they do fractional reserve banking. It’s further interesting to note that again, the Mafia here can actually lay proper claim to interest, being genuinely deprived of the use of any monies they genuinely lend and so therefore entitled fairly enough to compensation. The legal banks, who make up the money they ‘loan’ out of thin air, obviously aren’t entitled to any ‘interest’ of any kind.
In this instance, then the Mafia woud seem to be more honest, if you will, than the banks are.
This reminds us that just because a procedure’s legal doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily in any way socially beneficial or morally superior even though such procedures often like to masquerade as such. One bunch of malevolents is much the same as another, whether they have a a sign hanging around their necks saying legal or not. Antisocial people are antisocial people, (banks/mafia) whether they have signs on them saying Legal/Illegal or not. Are their interests social, ie, coincident with that of the broader community, or antisocial? If you want your community to survive and prosper, you need to note distinctions.

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BBC News – Banks Criticise Plans For Windfall Tax On Bonuses

 

She added that one million jobs in the UK were supported by the banking industry

BBC News – Banks criticise plans for windfall tax on bonuses

No doubt true enough but how many businesses and so jobs are not being supported by the banks by their refusal to lend to small businesses? It’s true the banks have a duty not to lend into a financially precarious environment but it is they themselves who have bought about this fragility. It can fairly be argued that a business model is out of date when it means that a small group of shareholders have their interests catered for against the broader interest of the entire country.

The banks may well be supporting their own employees but in so doing they are creating and maintaining the unemployment of an increasing number, one certainly far in excess of a paltry one million.

 

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You Can Be Predator Or Prey

When the going gets down and dirty you either get down and dirtier (predator) or you get to be prey. In a twon already laid low by predatory banking, Detroit, we’re seeing more predatory behaviour. This time it’s from the local police, who are raiding entirely innocent people and claiming their property to be involved in crimes. If that sounds like a broad definition I suspect that’s because it’s intended to be. The reality is that someone, anyone, in any way conected to property seems to be excuse enough for it to be seized and then auctioned off, proceeds to go to the local police dept for equipment and so forth

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091112/METRO/911120388/Police-property-seizures-ensnare-even-the-innocent

Times are very hard in Detroit, the city is disentegrating and resources are scarce. Those picked on are sometimes eventually understood to be entirely innocent – but they mat still have to pay to get their property back, at what looks like hefty profit for the police department?

Think it couldn’t happen here? It already is. The Proceeeds Of Crime Act (POCA), introdiced just recently, is along the same lines. You have to ask now, is anyone safe from either robbers or police? Are you safe from these predators, or will you be their prey?

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