Category: government

Online Right to Privacy

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn governmentLeave a comment

Legislation is not considered because politicians fail to grasp the need for legal structures until the law makes an ass of itself. Online legislation requires too much technical history to predict trends and since this blog deals with trends, the can of worms opened by google returning search results including a spent bankruptcy conviction acting against an applicant when applying for new mortgage funding does highlight a human rights challenge faced by the internet.

If practical considerations are the de facto protection for this kind of dead information, then are we faced with a new need to categorise data that requires expiry when written and while a person is living (and for a safe period of time afterward), i.e. certain government documents, tax records, criminal records as opposed to those comprising potential academic value, but only during the life it can affect, or perhaps the lives of immediate progeny. There is a need for balanced legislation rather than a court ruling that protects privacy sensibly while making no blanket assumptions about how we will evolve with the web, as an extension of our human minds. You can not make laws for the ocean.

But the right to privacy requires billions invested by google and this ruling may be the start of a new way to look at data. Ultimately, it belongs to it’s subject.

Progressive Economics

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn economic regression, economy, governmentLeave a comment

The economies of the West have all run into trouble due to the derivatives scam and resultant financial meltdown causing massive capital flows out of national economies. Tax avoidance and corporate logic has led to offshore tax havens becoming significant on the radar of the US and UK governments. Austerity has lain the problem upon the society rather than the entities that caused it, and has prevented growth being a solution to endlessly rising government deficits and ultimately inflation.

The UK and USA could learn a lot from a more progressive and successful Western economy – that of Norway. True, they have oil reserves, not as large as the USA reserves – but they charge a 50% corporation tax levy on oil drilling. And so they should. Oil companies invest in exploration and drilling, yes it is expensive. But once they tap into the Earth’s resources they are effectively using something that belongs to the people and the future.

Western Governments are stuck in a thread of believing that any tax rise is regressive when ultimately what they are achieving with short-termism is to evaporate wealth from their own coffers. The 1% benefit because they avoid tax and yet enjoy the benefits of health and protection (both police and armed forces), education and pensions provided by the Government.

New progressive thinking is required and Norway is a good place to examine for a balanced model.

Illogical conclusions

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn economic confidence, economic regression, government, UKLeave a comment

The use of austerity has worn thin at least for the probable longevity of George Osborne. In its current form at least. Infrastructure spending by this two faced Government amount to allowing private roads to be built which is certainly going to provide some relief to chronic unemployment and incrementally it may result in economic improvement. But it is not what they set out to do, which is to build a bigger economy. That, they surmised, would result if we do what we would want a government to do, to protect wealth – to sustain privilege.

Which seems based on the misapprehension that wealth itself is a thing. It is not, really. It is the flowing of money that is the thing. The flow of money between viable entities finding areas of demand and creating supplies to meet them. I am hungry. I go eat a sandwich. And Joe’s is just around the corner. These connected imperatives, these compelling reasons to do things. Art. Achievement. Enterprise. Hobby. Obsession. A society with flows inward to fewer central points creates poverty as well as pockets of wealth. Taking risk on credit creates debt with a chance of wealth. Governments tend to run in debt as a natural state, hoping to improve things sooner.

If the measuring stick of a society is the degree of economic growth it can achieve, it establishes an instant demand for more population to share the load. If we can find an honest way to limit the growth of humanity we can then modulate our economics to fit more comfortably than the monied classes feeling they need to accumulate so much more than anyone else before anyone else gets their filthy mits on it. It is not so much that economies are inflating by increasing the money supply and devalusing currency slowly – it is the only way to evaporate the effect of trillions of dollars locked into tax havens. Unproductive wealth is the economic glutony of the modern world. And it works like cortisol in the body, it adds sink holes to the economy – which means that there is less actual cash in the system.

This is an ever accelerating economic phenomena of allowing tax havens. To attract people with a lot of asset income to reside Governments are obliged to allow tax havens into the economic equation.

The net effect with devaluation is to make the funds that tend to be locked into tax havens more at a risk of devaluation if left in your currency. The problem is that the Governments are compelled to compete for such retinues as those of the religiously rich.

Job creation by government in times of economic emergency yes. This Government’s record at economic improvement? Negative, trending: negative.

Democratic Evolution

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn government, PoliticsLeave a comment

The French Republic is democratic – like the Republic of India – meaning it has a large number of candidates standing for a multitude of views dictating self rule.

The English First Past the Post democratic method mean that the only way to be elected is to form a massive party to represents a trends of ideas – usually a serving one side of a dichotomy; which has evolved two vastly powerful parties that shun independent views to allow for domination by class – a pendulum swing between capital and labour – gradually alternating directions.

Asserting that the benefit of the populations’ final authority defeating a developing trend or the abuse of power or a developing ineffectualness of the best that one or the other of these schools of thinking can produce. When one is in power, the other is preparing a new batch of leaders.

Another form of government is the selective capitalism of China hardly benefiting a vast population of traditional self-sustaining farming. Ironically, it has evolved an extreme aristocracy – a bubbling caldron of capitalist ideals inside a massive feudal population that feeds itself.

The weakness that the traditional Westminster based Western Governments, (USA and UK) have is this modernist limited duality. If one side of the argument is correct, then every other is (with contempt) to be assumed incorrect. Limiting the potential for adaptation.

Proportional representation is a method that includes new voices into the management of the affairs of a country. The reason we maintain countries per se is that allows us to organise in different ways. War can be made a thing of the past by recognising that it is not race or even territory that makes wealth – all those are is the imposition of rule over people. Wealth is a measure of accumulated activity versus need.

We experiment to experience different forms of governance. Traditions are a part of this but without change and variety our national barriers remain economic barriers. War is the imposition of another system upon a population. It is bound to eventually fail as assimilation is a false objective – as we adapt to environments by necessity – that we adapt to ideology is not as efficacious in producing the spectrum of social norms – as is the necessity of getting on with those who live around you.

War imposes brute force and eradication. Democracy can evolve a stronger form of government.

Pension funds lose value

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn Economic disaster, economic regression, governmentLeave a comment

The value of pension funds is bleeding away in the UK and across America protesters decry Wall Street’s corrupt practices and greed. We were told (by politicians, most likely) that freedom in the markets would free things up and maybe it did. What we were not told and did not realise until it was far too late, is that continued freedom for the market to create new instruments that multiply values without any effect on the other side of the ledger, well that is not the creation of growth. It is mediation by greed. It is irresponsible government and it is pointless.

The world system is a board where each member represents badly controlled feudal entities, each of which is an experiment. Some return value funds can be directed there, others do not get a look in. For years the bleeding empires and the super consumer states appeared to be the best bets, followed by those who had a point to prove or to recover from. We have a system of systems, each of which potentially returns differential values to investors.

It works when the members have control of their entities – for stability and continuity it is reasonable that more strict regulations should apply to state controlled enterprise. When you put the power generation into the hands of a private monopoly there is nothing to stop societal extortion. By inventing methods to fit more water into the same pool, the investment banking sector has very slowly and carefully increased the money supply. The effect is to create mathematical fountains which they in turn invested in new pools, ad infinitum. It is great to create these self perpetuating multipliers of wealth but there comes a point, if the water evaporates before it hits the ground that the whole system becomes a liability, deflated by the absence of pressure and unable to restart the infernal machine as it requires more dynamics exist to feed into its frenzy.

So the pool masters, realising the one way nature of this effect dipped their cup into and extracted what they needed as they then fell from the self induced elevation of their wealth and into, hopefully, obscurity in a country mansion.

And the executive board that runs the world hope for excessive rain to refill those myriad of pools. At first they pump all the water from the foundation pools into the top pools hoping to restart the fountains. Out come more cups draining the network before any can trickle down. And the new pools are starting to rust.

It is inevitable as Governments wind down their public sector and invest heavily in rescuing “capital” from itself, that pensions are going to universally drop. The solution is to demolish the structures that feed on tax payers to rescue pensions. The other solution is to nationalise core banks and protect national sovereignty.

The theory is that the Bilderberg Group of the hyper wealthy that seem to sit above democracy want to eradicate governments at a national level, and replace it with their own, the guiding hand of the benevolent dictatorship, the grandest lords of them all. The ones that own everything.

In 2001, Denis Healey, a Bilderberg group founder and, for 30 years, a steering committee member, said: “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group

See also Telegraph article on decline of pension funds.

The end of war

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn government, Leadership, Republican, warLeave a comment

The End of War is a notion, certainly, but it is also a statement of intent. Many do not understand war as anything other than a force that some evil leads our side into, until our side bluffs its way into warfare and we then question if our leadership really does know what it is doing, what right it has to life and death and what the limits on use of armies as police are, and why.

Leadership has to be more than bravery and, let’s face it, being suckered up to by the manufacturers of weapons that require Governments to consume their armanents to stay in business is a source of election funding.

Americans may blame Jimmy Carter for things that were economic consequences of the massive cost of Vietnam. When shall we learn the Republican adventure is actually a larger and more expansionalist form of Government?

Iraq March

On By Nicholas AlexanderIn Global Warming, government, IraqLeave a comment

The march at Majaf instigated by the Sadrist Shiite majority demonstrated against the foreign forces occupying Iraq. The political capital enjoyed by Bush and Blair is evaporating rapidly. The naked ambition to control the world’s oil supply appears the apparent goal in seeking to control outcomes in the Middle East. It is a rational strategy of the US Government as controlled by the remanants of the all bases covered Republican Senate, House and Presidential dominance of recent times – with only the office of President left to argue for the war. It is the voice that counts, the one voice in the wilderness of “who are you kidding” disbelief. Dragging the West into this unsavourary and premature war has recreated divisions on our own soil. The Bush Black/White doctrine does not allow hesitation but it is exactly that, hesistation, that has saved the world from Nuclear madness, on more than one occasion.