Merry Christmas

Bookies are expecting to pay out on a White Christmas as more snow is forecasted for Scotland and the North East - at least something good comes of the bad weather.

For those who read my blog, I would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and hope that 2010 is a fantastic and successful new year.

For me, in February, I will become a dad for the first time at the ripe old age of 50. I already know this will be a momentous year for my family. No matter what else is in store for me, I cannot wait.

However, it is at these moments when I realise life is not the same for everyone. After the missed opportunity for future generations at Copenhagen, I fear for African nations and the people who look on in disbelief as we spend billions to save our way of life while they starve. I think of the brave soldiers in Afghanistan who may get turkey but they will not be with their families and loved ones this Christmas.

As we tuck in and relax amongst our friends and family this Christmas, please spare a thought for all those who are not as well off as us. And let's hope that 2010 is a year of real hope and progress for them.

Have a great Christmas.

It's Just So Unfair

Life can be so unnecessarily hard sometimes. I mean it comes to something when you can't get a few grand of dry cleaning paid for by someone else or a bit of gardening or flat cleaning.

I should imagine there are a few angry people around tonight, feeling let down and cheated. It's not about the humiliation of having to pay money back, it's the principle of it. Heck, the Green Book of expenses codes could not be more clear - claim what you damn well like as it is down to your own idea of what is right. £116,000 is a snip when you think about the value for money we get from politicians. What is so wonderful is that the very people who make the stupid rules by which we have to live, don't like it when they are subjected to it. Try asking the Government to pay your dry cleaning bill or getting tax relief on your handyman. I got a call from HMRC today for being late with just one payment - they threatened legal action if it happened again. I am not kidding - all I did was select the BACS payment to go to the old sort code and account number at HMRC instead of the new one. I am sure Hazel Blears et al have not had similar calls despite their 'oversights'.

Anyway, one thing that has been unanimously applauded up and down the country is that pornography should be tax free. I should think many a lonely sales rep will want to present a few expense claims to HMRC and ask for 'relief'' on what their employer will not reimburse them for. As Jaqui's husband proved, they are essential for doing a good job and stimulating the grey cells.

You have to be some kind of person to be an MP or a Max Mosely. Life occurs to you in a very different slant to normal people. What is abhorrent to most sane, clean living, law abiding, tax paying people is perfectly natural to these people. Then take the Lehmans crew. A mere six European former executives are suing their former employer for £70m of unpaid salaries and bonuses.

The coffee machine is working over time but the aroma is not powerful enough. Hello, the bank is broke thanks to you guys - it was the largest corporate failure in history, thousands unemployed and taxpayers have stepped in to pick up the pieces. And you want money? That takes some front. One of them had only just started work there.

You have to laugh.

Meanwhile in the 'other' world where there are few gardens to charge for keeping, no dry cleaners and precious few meals let alone free ones, there are a few billion people sitting looking on bemused. How can sane people think the way we do? How can we justify going to war to defend this way of life? While millions starve and cry for help, we allow greedy people to take court action to extort money from people - £millions. The last 12 years of false profits and poor governing will be the biggest wasted opportunity in history. All those incredible £trillions could have solved the problems in Africa and the Third World in short order.

You have to cry.

This warped way of life is going too far. One minute banks are broken by their senseless activities, the next they pick up the very things that broke them before and trade them again for vast profits. Toxic debt one minute, perfumed profit the next. Profit from transactions that do nothing for anybody but the people who trade them. In Africa, it would be the same as creating grain from dry sand. They would be that rich if they could do it. They could eat.

One thing that has come out of the last two years is that for all our posturing as a civilised society, we are just a bunch of greedy, moral-less self interested and egotistical jerks - every last one of us. Africa can have what they want so long as we have our 42" inch TV, takeaway curry and a dream of a Porsche. They dream of survival.

For the bemused millions struggling to live, they must look upon us all as gorillas in a zoo. All muscle, hair, wind, chest beating and bullying - we are always right, we always get our own way and we get all the best things. And if we don't, we just fight.

One thing is for sure, we have the monopoly on bananas.

You Lose, We Win

Well it didn't take long, did it? As you mull over your breakfast and worry about your finances and future, be comforted by the fact that life is getting back to normal.

A report by the New York State Attorney General has published the list of bonuses paid to bank executives last year. That's right, I said last year - the year when the taxpayers around the world paid the rather large bill for the bunch of voracious gamblers in the sophisticated world of Hi-Tech Finance which we seem to think we need to help our world be the way it is. So much so that we are willing to continue paying off the debt until 2032.

Put down your cereal spoon for fear of choking on the next mouthful as it gets better.

First up - Citigroup, who were until a year ago the most 'profitable' bank in the world but was the US version of RBS in the scale of their stupidity and greed requiring hundreds of $billions to bail them out by the US Treasury in terms of loans and guarantees. Well, their darling top earners pocketed a meagre $609m last year - and that was shared out amongst just 124 people. Three of the gamblers earned over $10m, 13 of them grabbed $8m or more while 44 people made off with $5m or more.

Merrill Lynch was at it too - the company that performed so badly that it had to be bought by Bank of America and even then had been less than honest about its liabilities and even as it finalised the deal, still paid out bonuses to its gambling executives. They clocked up a near $28bn loss last year but still managed to pay a total of around $860m in bonuses and that was only to the top 149 earners, of which the top 4 were paid a combined $121m, the next 4 around $62m.

There is plenty more - every state aided bank paid out huge bonuses again last year just as if nothing had really happened. The estimated global cost in terms of bail outs is far in excess of $5 trillion and the banking world goes on as if nothing has happened.

In the UK, savers have been compensated to the tune of £21bn after the collapse of the banking system and then there is the enormous bill we have been landed with by the world of finance far beyond that in rescuing the banks who failed so massively.

It's a real world that lacks any kind of similarity to real life.

A career in banking was once seen as the realm of the fuddy-duddy, striped-suited Oxbridge chaps who stalked the City effectively lunching to get inside tracks. Today, modern banking is just a sophisticated and complex system of gambling. The supply of endless money into the system means that comparatively unintelligent people can drive screens that just does the banking version of whirling weighted fruit machines - they cannot seem to lose and the rewards are fabulous. What we have done, in all the far-fetched sums we have collectively stumped all over the world, is to keep the whole thing going in exactly the same way.

There is not a hint of contrition. There has been no real cull of the people who caused this. There has been little or no action by Governments and scant real understanding of the extent of our dependence on the system to sustain our way of life other than the fact they 'had no choice' in bailing the system out to make sure it did not collapse and the world becomes some kind of wilderness of fighting tribesmen haggling for food with beads and goats.

The fact remains that the finance world had created a make-believe game that generated profits from thin air just as part of the solution is to create more money from thin air in 'Quantitative Easing'. The threatened implosion of that system did not trigger a clamour to change it but to merely save it and we came so very close, they would have us know, to a world foreseen by 'visionaries' like David Icke. It now seems that lunatics like Icke were actually the clever ones.

The problem revolves around us. We are now so 'well off' that we must have 42"+ tellies, more pods that you can listen to, phones that send video, the latest gadget, new furniture, holidays, kitchens - the list is endless - and we are all very prepared to spend far beyond our means in order to get it and forfeit anything to do with provision for our retirement. Our jobs are now in far greater jeopardy than they were two years ago, more of us have lost our jobs since 1997 and our average take home income has actually dropped in real terms over the same period.

The fact was that we afforded this 'Utopia' by drawing down on our asset values - we created our own banks to conjure up money out of nothing.

Many will tell you that there is a concept of 'zero sum finance' which means that all the money in the world flows in credits and debits and always adds up to zero. So in that farcical view of the world, some may get richer at the cost of others but the amount of money has not changed and so the world is no worse off. But it is worse off. Just as the Bank of England literally conjured up £175bn out of nothing in order to increase the money supply, each of us created our own cash out of the supposed value in our assets. And then we gave it all away by spending it. We did not buy any really tradable assets as what we bought were effectively disposables or services - we did not invest in fine art, stamps or precious metals. We effectively increased the amount of money in the world and gave it away.

The bill for all that came right back to us because it was not real. As the value of our assets dropped the whole system shredded itself and we had to dip into our pockets for the actual cashflow to pay for our own mortgages again - this time in incremental tax over the long term.

What the whole collapse has taught us is that you can get nothing for nothing. You can create as much money as you like but there is a price to pay for it. And boy has the real person found out.

Up the there in 'Bank World' that hasn't happened. Reality was a close call for them but thankfully a bunch of mugs known as taxpayers and real people worldwide saved their pathetic necks. And now they are playing the whole game again. In the zenith, or nadir, of the crisis, I saw excerpts of the African Nations Congress or similar. Speaker after speaker expressed how incredulous they were at the enormity of something they simply could not understand. They also were at pains to point out that they had not caused this Credit Crunch and so the developed world should not forget them - but we did. There are always losers in the world of 'zero sum finance' and it is those who are unable to play the game. As in any lottery, you have to be able to afford ticket to play - the Third World just watched wide-eyed as the sophisticates of the developed world simply gave away money they did not have to a small number of incredibly wealthy people and then paid for it again. Meanwhile people were dying in front of our eyes and the planet is getting a less healthy place to live.

We must be mad.

Science And The Church - Back to Medieval Times

We are rightfully reminded as we fight them, that the Taliban would have all men grow their beards, make women stay at home and cover up while young girls would not be allowed to attend school. It is, to ours eyes, a backward way of thinking.

Having just got back from Italy this weekend, much of the talk in the papers was about the Pope's comments on the use of condoms on his recent trip to African Nations. In direct contradiction to international policy based on medical evidence, he has directly said that the use of condoms is against the doctrine of the Catholic Church and, further, their use has nothing to do with the prevention of the spread of AIDS.

The Reality Of AIDS

It has taken a long time to get education into the developed world about the practice of safe sex to reduce the spread sexually transmitted diseases. And recently, much of the good work has waned as young people have ignored the advice and there has been a sharp growth in the instances of old favourites like gonorrhea and chlamydia, as well as a new risk in the rise of AIDS. The use of condoms to decrease internal contact and the flow of bodily fluids is common sense rather than just incontrovertible medical evidence, yet people ignore the advice as a lifestyle choice while the Pope tells his subjects to do so in contrary to the medical evidence.

Pro life campaign is something I have a stake in but simple contraception is the best method to avoid the debate - when it comes to the spread of disease, there could be no argument. Yet there is.

The statistics about the epidemic of AIDS in underdeveloped countries in Africa is truly awesome. Unless the spread is arrested, it will become the biggest single killer in many countries very soon. The education process in these countries has been painstaking and expensive but there were signs that the message was getting through and that the disease could be arrested in its onslaught.

Then along came the Pope.

The Church And Science

The Pope or 'Papa' is supposedly God's appointed representative on earth and as such is the Supreme Commanader of the Catholic Church. Many countries in Africa, and particularly those who are colonies of France, have a massive population of Catholics. So when on the one hand a doctor tells them to use a condom helps prevent a terrible disease and on the other their 'Papa' tells them not to as it has nothing to do with it, there will clearly be a dilemma. The French believe that this is not a dilemma as they believe the Pope's words have done irreparable damage in the race to stop the spread of AIDS.

On the same weekend, my wife was reading a book called 'The Company of Liars' by Karen Maitland which is set in 1348 in England. The Plague has a grip of the nation and The Church is using its authority to sort out the problem. The central assertion is that it is a pestilence sent by God and that sinners will be consumed but those with wealth can survive - you just have to go give it to the Church. The issue here is that during that time and right through until the Renaissance took a grip, The Church stifled free thought and the belief in scientific method to discover things. Dogma hit progress and they were called the Dark Ages for good reason. Scaremongering and the Inquisition held sway and creative minds like Nostradamus, Copernicus, Gallileo and many others were branded as heretics for daring to say simple things which were observations as being crimes against God.

The Modern World

There will be those that would say that AIDS is the modern day equivalent of The Plague - the pestilence on a wicked society. That may be true. Yet they found a way to stop the spread of The Plague by not knowing biology but by understanding that cleanliness and sterility could prevent its spread. Today, we know far more about the structure and workings of AIDS and still we cannot find a cure but we certainly know how to stop its spread.

For those who know the risks and then make a lifestyle choice, they are actually knowingly abetting its spread rather like driving a car while drunk they are not just a risk to themselves but to us all. For those who know less about it, it is our duty to educate them and to give them the practical items to help reduce the risks.

Trashing all that education by a few words of a dead dogma could have set the world back several years. History shows that The Church has made huge mistakes before - this is another big one. So as we stand here and condemn the Taliban for their dogma, we should look closer to home to get our house in order too.