Guess Who? by Sackerson

Okay Wayne, we've got five minutes left, fancy a game of Guess Who? World Leaders Edition.

How do I play, Sir?

I give you a clue, you flip down all the ones that don't fit. Ready?

Yes.

Man with charming smile (flip)...  uses emergency powers to ban political opposition (flipflip)... paints his face (flipflipflip)... got it?

No Sir, there's two left.

Ah, I'd forgotten Trudeau. Okay, how about recklessly distributes firearms to the general public, calls for amateur outsiders to join the fight and be slaughtered, adopts an old ultranationalist slogan as his army's official greeting and uses it in speeches to foreign parliaments...?

I think I got that on the first one, Sir, you don't have to go on. Why does his name end in two Ys?

It should end in Y-O-Y, because we can't understand why he hasn't negotiated a peace settlement yet.

I think I know, Sir. New game?

Okay.

Old crook (flip)... serves the rich and the military-industrial complex (flip)... going gaga (flipflipflip)...

It's okay, son, I think I've got it.

Inflation protection doesn’t, by Sackerson

Inflation steals from the people, and they would still be robbed even if annual inflation-linked increases worked perfectly.

The State Pension from 14 April this year will rise by 3.1%, in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The ‘triple lock’ promise made to pensioners in 2010 said that increases would reflect the highest of three measures: 2.5%, CPI or National Average Earnings (NAEI).

• The Bank of England has a general inflation target of 2% p.a. as measured by CPI https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation , so clearly price inflation is getting a little out of hand. If we were on track at 2% then pensioners would benefit in real terms from the minimum 2.5% element of the triple lock.

• Last year, the Government suspended the NAEI part of the guarantee for 2022-23, which would otherwise have triggered a pension increase of some 8% following a higher rise in wage inflation owing to the pandemic. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/article/pensions-triple-lock/ Darby and Joan would have been drinking champagne and doing an arthritic dance in the street.

• So CPI it is, oldies. Setting aside quibbles about exactly how CPI is calculated, and whether RPI would be a more appropriate yardstick (the switchover of measures came in 2011, affecting social security benefits and public sector pensions), we note that the Government measures CPI in September but does not apply increases to pensions until the following April; a lot can happen between those dates. For example, we now read that the latest CPI figure for the last twelve months is 6.2%, exactly double what we are to get from the Pensions Service. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/23/uk-inflation-highest-level-in-three-decades

Yet even in an ideal world, where inflation was absolutely fairly and accurately calculated once a year and pension increases applied immediately, our bank accounts would still spring a leak.

The full rate of new State Pension will increase to £185.15 per week in April. For a couple each qualifying for that, the total income works out at £19,255:60 p.a. or a shade over £1,600 per month; let’s work with that round figure.

Now let’s assume that our couple spends every penny of their pension, but that prices go up another 6% over the year, jumping suddenly by 0.5% per month simple. Darby and Joan cope okay for April, but outgoings exceed income by £8 in May, £16 in June and so on. At that rate, it’s easy to show that they end the tax year £528 behind the line. Either they will borrow to meet the shortfall (and pay interest – credit cards are charging something like 35%) or, more realistically, they will manage with less and/or lower quality in the way of goods and services.

The following April, under this fantasy arrangement, inflation indexing sets them straight again; but that £528 is never recouped; and they face another year of the same process of gradual immiseration; and it goes on forever.

The Bank of England tries to justify this theft:

‘If inflation is too low, or negative, then some people may put off spending because they expect prices to fall. Although lower prices sounds like a good thing, if everybody reduced their spending then companies could fail and people might lose their jobs.’

Yet the BoE’s own calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator shows that during the century after Waterloo (1815), inflation ran at an average of -0.1% (yes, negative) p.a.

However, the same calculator says that the cost of goods and services worth £10 in 1915 soared to £1,093.82 last year; even an apparently low average inflation rate of 4.5% a year still rots one’s wealth.

Debasing the currency by coin-clipping or forgery used to be high treason: the last woman to be burned at the stake for it was Catherine Murphy, at Newgate Prison in 1789. It is high time we tackled this official fraud, the monetary disease of the twentieth century.

US preparing to attack Russian forces?

 ClassicFM's news reported yesterday that President Biden had revealed a plan by Russia to mount a 'false flag' attack on itself.

It could signal a new US Government policy of publicising secret military intelligence, which would be a refreshing change, though at the risk of revealing its sources and resources to the enemy.

But it might also be a public relations technique known as 'getting ahead of the story': taking control of the narrative so that we are primed in advance to discount the enemy's version of events.

What form will this attack take, and who will be mounting it? Maybe we will be allowed to know the truth in thirty years' time.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (1): GOP States net beneficiaries of Fed finance, fake Covid research; by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

A column in a West Virginia newspaper today noted the continuing trend over several decades that Red-leaning, conservative states, such as West Virginia, which espouse small government, are in fact beneficiaries of taxes paid by the Blue-leaning states like New York and California. The latter send more money to Washington than they receive in federal services, while the former receive more than they send.

Not coincidentally, those Red states have, on average, lower educational achievement, lower incomes, lower per capita economic activity, and higher measures of social ills such as teen pregnancy and violent crime.

Some appear to realize the dilemma. A close friend who was raised and educated in Ohio, and is now an important person at a large oil company in Texas, still chose to send his son to university back in Ohio.

In other news, legislatures in many states are falling over themselves to pass laws which make Ivermectin readily available to Covid patients, despite large-scale studies showing that the drug does not help, and examinations of the small positive studies showing that all had glaring errors, and some were entirely fraudulent.

In one Brazilian study being touted by proponents of the drug, they bizarrely told people taking the drug to stop taking it if they were infected with Covid, and then counted their hospitalizations and deaths as non-medicated. Another study compared the effect of Remdesivir to Ivermectin and noted that the latter patients did better. The study did not correct for the fact that the former drug is given intravenously to hospitalized patients, and the latter to outpatients.

Nuclear war: ‘we never expected that!’ by Sackerson

Ukraine is part of a wider struggle: the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT on 18 March that the United States wishes to return to a ‘unipolar’ world http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrovs-interview-with-rt-moscow-march-18-2022/ , under which the US would aim to remain the world’s sole superpower, which was Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 ‘doctrine’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine . Former Carter administration adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski’s 1997 ‘Grand Chessboard’ https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf analysis continued the theme of containment, calling for ‘perches’ all around the world to hem in Russia.

This policy seems inconsistent. It has maintained its focus on a State that is no longer officially Communist at the same time that hardline Communist China has been developing her own ‘perches’ in the Pacific, Africa and South America as part, we assume, of a plan to displace the US as Top Nation. John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 judged the West responsible for the crisis in Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 , now says that the US partnership with China was a huge blunder and we should settle with Russia in order to ‘pivot’ and deal with the Middle Kingdom instead https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer . Seeing how the US has fed the Chinese dragon for decades and thereby weakened its own economy, it may be too late.

Nevertheless, the signs are that the unipolar (and monocular) ambition has not been abandoned, even though it is and has long been insanely dangerous. Next October will mark sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which all over a certain age will remember, yet many will not connect this confrontation with the fifteen Russia-targeted US nuclear missiles set up and made operational at Izmir, Turkey in the preceding February; which was a factor in Khrushchev’s decision to assent to Castro’s request to position US-targeted missiles in Cuba. From Izmir to Moscow is about 1,500 miles; from Kyiv, merely 500; no wonder Russia has become so nervous about NATO’s creeping-up game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ Had it not been for the restraining hand of a Russian naval officer in 1962 https://web.archive.org/web/20210710213948/https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm most of us would have died long ago, or never been born.

When two parties get into a fight, at least one has miscalculated. In a timely and startling article on Substack https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic?s=r , Dominic Cummings shows that the West’s assumption that Russia would not dare to escalate from conventional to nuclear war was mistaken:

‘After the 1991 collapse some scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along.

‘Actually the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.’

In 1963, on the night President Kennedy was shot, British tank transporters rumbled past our front door (literally) in North Germany, on their way to what we now know would have been nuclear obliteration. Today, Russia and the US have between them over 11,000 nuclear warheads, some 3,000 of which are ready to be deployed. https://sofrep.com/news/100-seconds-to-midnight-a-glance-at-the-worlds-nuclear-weapons/

Cummings claims that our decision makers do not take the danger seriously. After he was grudgingly allowed three hours to elaborate on our military unpreparedness, the Prime Minister told him ‘What a waste of my time.’

Western war planners think they are dealing with rational actors and know all the play variations, but seem not to understand the romance of death. CD says that as Japan faced defeat in 1945 their General Anami was proposing to see his nation destroyed ‘like a beautiful flower.’ Churchill himself stiffened the spines of his Cabinet in 1940 with a moving speech that had them beating the table with their fists: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’ The old soldier was utterly serious – I remember reading how his wife handed their daughter a large knife against the day the Germans invaded.

So far, awful as they are, the more reliable statistics for the Ukraine conflict https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-20-march-2022 show a policy of limited aggression with the possibility of negotiated peace. We can do without a Fourth Estate fanning the flames of hysteria and a leadership more engaged in winning the next election – probably soon, once the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is abolished https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-fulfil-manifesto-commitment-and-scrap-fixed-term-parliaments-act - than heeding the dreadful warning. https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/the-watersons/christmas-is-now-drawing-near-at-hand-50

So proud and lofty is some sort of sin

Which many take delight and pleasure in

Whose conversation God doth much dislike

And yet He shakes His sword before He strike

Science, and religion as magic, by 'Alexander'

An educated man decides to travel around the world. After going to many places and seeing many things he ends up in a small coastal village where he is invited to eat by the local shaman.

The shaman is a perfect host and after eating they begin to discuss various things about the village and nature.

Inevitably the conversation turns to the ocean.

“Ah, yes.” the shaman begins “The Ocean Goddess is a wonderful being. Through her grace we can sail without fear of wrecking, fish in safety, and sleep without worry of hurricane. For everything from the tides to the currents is within her power. All we have to do to ensure her favor is keep to the proper rituals and make the correct sacrifices.”

This gives the educated man pause.

“Surely” the educated man says slowly, “you must have heard that the moon controls the tide, and that the currents are caused by wind and heat and a dozen other natural things. There is no Goddess that directs these things, only natural processes.”

The face of the shaman tightens into a scowl. He points a single finger at his guest.

You are an evil man,” the shaman hisses. “You would make the ocean into an evil thing. If you got your way the ocean would care nothing for our prayers, our rituals, our sacrifices. Storms would arise without warning, boats would capsize for reasons other than lack of faith.”

“In fact” he continues “it is because of men like you that we still have storms, still lose ships to the tides. If it wasn't for men like you the ocean would never kill anyone. You should be ashamed.”

Not knowing what else to say the educated man leaves the house.

WEEKENDER: Council Tax - Fair or Not? by Wiggia

The annual rise in council tax will this year only add to the forthcoming misery of the majority of households facing enormous rises in energy prices, NI contributions, fuel for their cars and way above the published figures for staples as anyone who goes for a weekly shop can see, never mind rises that will almost certainly be added later in the year.

Council Tax has been a bone of contention for as long as it has been charged.The problem with it is it is loaded on those who do not qualify for benefits, credits, tax handbacks etc., which today is an enormous slice of the population. It’s a dog's dinner of a charge.

I quoted some time ago that the Suffolk financial secretary. in answer to 'who pays?' (this was just after the poll tax was axed and he had recently retired), stated that only 37% of households in the county paid the full rate. That leaves nearly two-thirds who get rebates or do not pay at all. This figure obviously varies across the country but try as I might to get that information today, it has proved impossible. One can understand why: with the new rates due to come into effect in a couple of weeks that sort of information would not go down well alongside all the other costs being heaped on those that actually work for a living.

As with all these taxes it is those marginally above the benefit line who get hit hardest, and also why a fair percentage decide it is not worth working.

This request to Haringey council gives a fair indication as to how far they will go to not reveal the details. After much to-ing and fro-ing they finally revealed how many households pay full tax and how many single person households pay the reduced tax; no figures for, what was asked about, those who pay nothing or much reduced rates.

It is quite despicable that any council can hide matters concerning monies paid by the public in this way. We pay their wages and their pensions yet they deny requests for information about our money and who pays what.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/cy/request/how_many_households_in_haringey?unfold=1

However, there are plenty of published guides on how to obtain rebates. The current £150 rebate ‘help’ with the cost of living is being given to 20 million - yes, that figure is correct - households in bands A-D.

‘  20 million households to benefit from £3 billion scheme to help with cost of living pressures

• Comes as part of a £9 billion package to help spread the cost of rising energy bills

• 4 out of 5 households will benefit including around 95% of rented properties

• Households encouraged to set up council tax direct debits to ensure payment is made automatically from April ‘

So once again the few will be paying for the many. It could be said that the rebate to help less well-off households is a sensible government measure in times like this, but as usual the government has no money; it is simply giving to an ever increasing relatively poor sector money from the ever smaller full paying sector, and since has when council tax been a conduit for fuel rebates? Council tax is supposedly for local services, which are in serious decline; it has nothing to do with energy pricing. It would have been far more equitable to simply freeze council tax rises this year; with a cost of £3 billion pounds for this scheme they are not that far off going the full Monty anyway.

Maybe with the resentment of many who pay council tax with ever diminishing returns, this is a way of putting a ‘good’ show on for the councils as they have had their grants continually cut.

Councils are landed with paying for social care, something judging by many councils' performance including my own, they really should not be doing. As with so much, councils have little knowledge of business matters and the huge amount of waste shows it: many of the cuts forced on them when the government started cutting the grants were easily accommodated, which begged the question why in the first place? Now it is a different story and the government is simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This is a comment from elsewhere….

"The corporate councils operating for profit like to take 30+% for their private pensions, then another 30-40% for their wages, expenses and dodgy redundancy deals, leaving approximately 30% for 'services'. Some councils are spending more on the interest on the illegal private debts (LOBO loans) than they are spending on 'services'. But they've all received millions-billions during the last 2 years of restrictions, to pay for furlough payments, extra policing, extra child stealing, extra evictions, large payments to schools for testing and jabbing, money that was created out of thin air by "borrowing" from the privately owned Bank of England, extra money in circulation that is creating rampant inflation and damaging millions of lives and businesses even further.

"But the corporate councils still have the power to write off Council Tax debt whenever it is requested and deemed appropriate."

Remember that of the amount left for services the amount for social care is included, which is significant.

The generosity shown by the nation to immigrants legal and illegal, is not unique to us, but has become a not insignificant drain on resources. You only have to look back in history and see the numbers that came into the country say in the early 1900s and compare with today to realise the enormous difference.

Again local councils open their arms and accommodate large numbers who have to be fed, housed and generally looked after using local resources and money. Like social care. this comes largely out of council tax, heaping more on to those who pay but having no effect on those who don’t, a category that has just been enlarged and continues to grow.

Governments for reasons of their own decline to admit there is a problem with immigration generally. The figures on all things migrant are to a point, as in the case of Haringey council, hidden or diluted to suit, but then it is not their money they are using to solve or rather handle the problem, so they can be casually offhand about it.

Council tax also suffered a freeze under this government, but with the brakes off some are now asking for ridiculous rises for non services. It appears that pensions are top of the list in most councils when it comes to priorities.

The tax is fast approaching the silly levels of the last days of the old rating system, in truth it is the same under a different name. The only way any fairness can be brought to tax based on property is to make it one that all householders pay as the poll tax offered. The collapse of the poll tax was not because it put an undue burden on those that would not have paid previously but on a cack-handed apportioning of the levels, but instead of revising the tax they abandoned it under pressure.

There is something very wrong when a family of any number can be paying for services the same as a single person household and using a lot more of them. The poll tax shared the costs among all who used them but sadly those who never pay caused riots which turned the whole thing around, so now we are fast approaching the out-of-control rates pricing at a time of enormous pressure on household budgets from all angles.

The single person discount is in fact a poll tax of sorts, though 25% off the full tax is hardly a fair payment if next door is in the five or more family members paying the equivalent of one member in the house.

                      Those that never paid protesting about maybe having to pay something!

Abandoning the poll tax was in the long term the worst thing the then current Tory party could have done, as now any suggestion of a change is met with howls of ‘poll tax’ and it rather like the NHS has become untouchable despite its obvious inequalities among those that actually pay.

Nothing was more more ridiculous than Rod Stewart making a fuss, though rightly, about the potholes outside his home making his Ferrari imprisoned in his home. Yes, he highlighted the fact that councils no longer do much that we pay them for, yet coming along two days later to do the job because a celeb made a fuss is just showing how unequal the whole tax is. Why should he get special treatment when his borough is no doubt riddled with similar potholes that will remain unfilled?

The Institute of Fiscal Studies included this among a review of inequality of tax and benefits:

‘But council tax is regressive. Even after accounting for council tax support (which reduces council tax liabilities for low income families), the poorest tenth of the population pay 8% of their income in council tax, while the next 50% pay 4-5% and the richest 40% pay 2-3%.'

That is a very simplistic way at looking at the council tax. In many cases, the council tax band you live in bears no relation to how wealthy you are: many retired people live in higher band properties but receive ever lower incomes when inflation is taken into account, many high wage earners don’t live in high council tax band properties, much depends on housing costs and areas you live in, and vice versa in places like London where house prices are high and the banding matches but the property is quite basic.

There are so many items that make the council tax not fit for purpose. There are many suggestions, such as a Labour party statement not long ago that suggests the lower bands should (though there were no figures to suggest what that change would achieve) all get a permanent lowering of their charges and the higher bands pay even more.

There have been suggestions that all properties should be revalued as they were last valued in 1991. That is a ridiculous claim as all properties have paid more annually ever since, it has no relation to the properties' current value as they all have risen during that time, so in effect the prices are static for the purposes of charging. If you have extensions or modify your home giving it a higher value then you stand the chance of being moved into a higher band anyway.

I don’t see any of the myriad changes put forward making any real difference unless a form of poll tax is revived.

The difference with the poll tax - with the usual exceptions for those who really can’t pay anything, the infirm etc. - is that everyone who is of working status will pay their bit towards services used. 

Martin Lewis compiled this list of those who will get rebates or discounts, many up to 100%. The list seems endless, many are justified in a socially caring country, but all…?

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/council-tax-discounts/

It is no surprise, and I have done an extensive search to try and find figures regarding how many households actually pay the full tax and there is not a single lead I could find other than the saga to get Haringey to reveal virtually nothing it was asked. The 37% they quoted those years ago is almost certainly now on the wrong side of the truth. There appears to be an industry telling and offering people help in claiming rebates or reducing their payments, and all the time those who do pay are paying for more and more of the cake they don’t really get a bite of. I wonder if anyone will have the guts to lay out a route to the revival of a poll tax that is fairly proportioned; I won't hold my breath.

 

Finally, a wonderful example of not getting what you pay for. We moved last year to a no through road, the narrow road at the entrance to ours is a through road with two inclines, one at each end and both ends are heavily tree lined.

In the autumn upon returning from a shopping trip we came across notices at each end that declared “warning: slippery road ahead; 10mph.” Being new to the area I assumed the warning signs were because of impending road resurfacing, but no, it appears that these signs go up every year now because of the huge amount of leaf drop on the road which when wet and with the incline can make driving dangerous; but do they send a road sweeper, which by the way is around locally in the summer? Oh no, they now just put a sign up, the leaves stay for several months rotting away and helping to destroy the road edgings as leaves do when they rot; round of applause for the council who have just managed to get my council tax bill over the £3k mark.

This is the same council who having spent millions doing up County Hall which resembles Ceaucescu’s  palace and have now admitted it was known there were structural defects going back decades which will require more millions to be spent, most people would be happy to have Fred Dibnah, if he was still around, detonating large charges and demolishing the monstrosity.