The terrorist scam of the credit rating agencies

Headline news this morning is that credit rating agencies have basically flushed the Italian economy down the toilet.  More and more regularly, these scam artists are hitting the news, afforded some kind of guru status in the world of finance; the US recently lost its “AAA” status, and the UK found itself described as performing at “A+” level rather than “AA-”.   Imagine bringing those grades home to your mum.  The moral and financial panic that follows such announcements wipes billions off of economies.

And yet these rating agencies failed to spot the biggest banking crisis in living memory just three years ago.  The US Department of Homeland Security reported last year that “credit rating agencies that investors relied on to provide impartial and accurate analysis of thousands of mortgage-linked securities instead used outdated models and inadequate data, were too influenced by investment bankers, allowed chronic resource shortages to undermine ratings, and delayed downgrading investments once problems in the mortgage market became clear.” 

The fact is that these agencies are just another arm of the cash-guzzling financial services sector.  They have no interest in accurate reporting – who holds them to account? – and merely help to create the conditions under which rapacious markets can fleece economies and bleed countries dry, leaving the ordinary populace to foot the bill with draconian austerity packages.  Credit rating agencies are merely one part of the self-referential cesspool that is international finance, and no more.

For that reason, it’s wholly appropriate that they be investigated by Homeland Security: terrorism can be financial as well as physical.  On the Today programme this morning, Nick Clegg defended his government’s obsession with the dismantling of the infrastructure of society by referring to the troubles of  Greece and Italy.  He spoke twice of those economies being “pushed to the edge” by the markets, and warned that the UK economy would be “harried from pillar to post” by the financial sector if it changed course.  Just why on earth are we then making government policy that specifically panders to these bastards?  When the mantra for so long has been that we don’t negotiate with terrorists, what is the justification for putting up with that kind of attack on our way of life?

We should call out these agencies for what they are: flim flam merchants who enable their fat cat buddies to rape worldwide economies. Every statement of theirs should be vociferously countered with any number of reports that show their incompetence and venality, and then we should tax and regulate the life out of them, and then, if that doesn’t shut them up, we should throw them in jail, regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything provably illegal: hell, lets rendition them to Guantanamo now that Libya won’t play torture ball with us.

Then we can all listen to their plaintive cries as they disappear round the u-bend.

David Cameron’s “rush to judgement”: hypocrisy personified.

"Six months for pinching £3.50's worth of water? I say, jolly good show, old judge!"

In the light of news from Libya that British intelligence officers were apparently complicit in the illegal seizure, rendition and torture of foreign nationals at the behest of their US allies, David Cameron has taken a sober, sensible approach.  The allegations are “significant”, he says.  So serious are they that he will ensure that they are considered carefully, and there will be no “rush to judgement”.

What a thoughtful man he is, bravely resisting knee-jerk reactions to the revelation of  potentially horrendous crimes.

If only he applied such careful calmness all the time.  It’s barely three weeks since he was advocating a stampede to judgement in the aftermath of the English riots.  Courts should dish out “exemplary” sentences, he said.  Rioters should go to jail, he proclaimed, thereby preempting every court in the land from doing the independent job it is supposed to do: consider its judgement carefully.  He praised sentences which threw the sentencing rule book out of the window, including one ridiculous case of four years for two men who failed to incite a riot on facebook.

What has prompted such a terpsichorean change of direction?

Well, Cameron has nothing in common with the mass of underprivileged people in this country, whether they rioted or not.  They are, in the words of that other paragon of restraint in word and deed Kenneth Clarke, the “feral underclass” which must be corralled, contained, taught a tough lesson.  There’s nothing wrong with “rushing to judgement” of them now, is there?  Who ever complains about a hoodie being locked up?

Now the intelligence service, that’s another thing, isn’t it?  Just the name – “Intelligence”.  We’re taking about intelligent people here, aren’t we?  My goodness, many of them come from the same public schools and universities as Mr Cameron and his chums in both the Labour and Conservative parties.  They’re pillars of the establishment.  All round good eggs.

If kidnapping a man, flying him half way round the world, handing him over to Libyan thugs and psychopaths, standing outside the door while he is tortured to screaming point and then rubbing your hands with glee at the “information” he has offered just to please make it stop isn’t a “feral” act of abject inhumanity and barbarity, I don’t know what is.

“Rush to judgement”?  The gears of any inquiry will grind ever so slowly, and at the end of it, as in the de Menezes and Baha Mousa cases, no-one will be held to account, no-one will lose their jobs, no-one will spend time in jail – and the establishment will shrug its shoulders and carry on its hypocritical way.

No judgement.  No justice.  That’s the Cameron way.

Who is ever held to account?

Baha Mousa, died in Army custody, 2003

For Jean Charles de Menezes, Harry Stanley and a whole host of other ordinary people whose lives have been ended by apparently unaccountable British authorities, add Baha Mousa, killed not by the police but by the British Army.

The case is now well known, but an independent inquiry is about to exonerate the Army of systematic torture and mistreatment.  Ninety-three injuries were noted on Mousa’s body: one wonders if he had to top 100 to qualify for “systematic”.

The need, of course, is to preserve the system.   Chains of command cannot be brought into question, senior officers and bureaucrats and politicians must never be blamed.  If anything goes wrong, it must either be swept under the carpet as far as possible or blamed on a few “bad apples”.

But the system also depends on defending those “bad apples” in order to buy their silence and to ensure that the dirty work can keep going on.  We see that in a different context, with Glen Mulcaire’s legal expenses paid by the NotW, despite their apparent “horror and disgust” at his activities, or in the constant promotion through the ranks of police officers involved in the de Menezes shooting despite their incompetence being responsible for a conviction of the Met under the Health and Safety Act.  In this case, the “bad apples” were seven soldiers hauled up before a court martial in what was the army’s version of justice.  One of the seven – Corporal Donald Payne – was captured abusing prisoners on video; faced with such undeniable evidence, he pled guilty to mistreating prisoners and served one year in prison, three times more than a housewife who accepted a pair of shorts from a rioter.

I actually have a little sympathy for people like Payne: just like Simon Harwood – the PC who struck Ian Thomslinson – and the Abu Ghraib GIs, photographic evidence meant he had to be hung out to dry for a system which may well be rotten to the core.  The courts, unencumbered by such public evidence on the other six and faced by what the judge described as “a more or less obvious closing of ranks”, cleared them.

Baha Mousa, died in army custody, 2003

So, yet again, and ordinary man dies and no-one is to blame and no-one explains to Baha Mousa’s family how he came to sustain 93 injuries and end up looking like this.

And if I wonder about these things, how do they look to those who would use genuine anger at these kinds of incidents to fuel fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism?

Help protect the BBC

For all its imperfections, The BBC  still provides the greatest and most diverse broadcast service on the planet.  I love it.  A commercial provider would charge us five times as much for a quarter  what we get.   Sign this petition to protect one important part of that service.

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The IPCC screw up yet again about a police shooting.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

The IPCC released a statement today which cast further light on the way in which its instinctive reaction in the event of police shootings is to protect the officers involved.

It stated “… having reviewed the information the IPCC received and gave out during the very early hours of the unfolding incident, before any documentation had been received, it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged, as this was consistent with early information we received that an officer had been shot and taken to hospital. Any reference to an exchange of shots was not correct and did not feature in any of our formal statements, although an officer was taken to hospital after the incident.”

Given the unhealthy relationship between the media and the police which has been revealed by the News of the World scandal, it is obvious that no-one in the supposedly independent IPCC has learned any lessons since it’s chief, Moir Stewart, was implicated in exactly this kind of misleading briefing over the Jean Charles de Menezes killing.

This is in the wake of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report into the work of the IPCC which was highly critical of its predilection for hiring ex-police officers like Stewart as investigators.  The conclusion is inescapable:  rather than being independent, the IPCC is actually a shadow arm of the police service which thinks like the police and which perceives the world as the police do.

When people like Jean Charles de Menezes, Harry Stanley and Mark Duggan  are shot in circumstances which are at best questionable and at worst actionably incompetent, that is unacceptable.

Scottish Review: Is the civil disorder political in origin, or just hooliganism?

I have a piece in today’s Scottish Review on the civil unrest in England.

It was prompted by an interview on the “Today” programme with Boris Johnson, a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a man who seems to walk into any job he wants regardless of his apparent lack of qualifications to do the job, and a man who, along with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, is a former member of the Bullingdon Club, famed for acts of anti-social behaviour and criminal damage.

When Johnson, without a trace of irony, accused kids from backgrounds blighted by inner city deprivation and who have little chance of anything but the most menial employment of having an “endless sense of entitlement”, I just about choked on my cornflakes.

Thanks to the Scottish Review for publishing my thoughts on the matter.

New shooting on the police complaints merry-go-round

I don’t now much about the Mark Duggan shooting that has caused last night’s Tottenham riots because I haven’t been able to keep up with the news on my Poland trip.  However, I am rather suspicious of statements made by the IPCC about “people needing answers” when that IPCC is led by Moir Stewart, the aide of commissioner Ian Blair who was roundly criticised for failing to release information to his superiors which proved Jean Charles de Menezes was an innocent man and not a suspected terrorist, and who was at the centre of allegations that the public were misled about the progress of the de Menezes investigations.

With the hacking scandal revealing a culture of corruption and mutual back-slapping in the police force, it’s hardly surprising that Tottenham residents have reacted with such distrust to a system that seems to favour armed police and to routinely deny justice.  The IPCC had better get this one right.  Or, then again, they can just do their usual whitewash in the knowledge that memories fade and any police officer implicated in culpable negligence or, worse, wrongdoing will eventually get the promotion this corrupt system believes they deserve.

A never-ending cycle of nepotism and incompetence; now the de Menezes case is dragged in.

The Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign

So goodbye to John Yates, latest “victim” of the hacking scandal; welcome his replacement, Cressida Dick, the officer who was in charge of the operation in which a real victim, Jean Charles de Menezes, was gunned down incompetently – and possibly illegally – by armed police on July 22nd, 2005.

He was mistaken for a terrorist. Her new role?  Head of counter-terrorism.  Sheesh.

I found myself at Stockwell Tube the other day, gazing at the rather tacky but nevertheless touching memorial to Jean Charles that has been screwed to the wall outside the station.  It had just been announced that members of the de Menezes family may have had their phones hacked by News of the World journalists.  Given that this is a story I’ve mentioned before and is a stain on the country that makes me ashamed to be British, I wondered if their humiliation would never end.

It seems not.  Now, those in power have decided that a tragically incompetent police officer responsible for the death of an innocent young man is preferable to an bumptiously incompetent police officer responsible for failing to extend a telephone hacking investigation.   Go figure.

My hope is that, in this climate of accountability that borders on public blood-letting, someone or something will link the two, and the de Menezes case will be reopened so that those who made fatally tragic errors that day will be brought to book rather than be continually promoted through the ranks.  That was what the jury at the laughable inquest seemed to want; denied by the coroner the right to deliver an unlawful killing verdict, they bravely returned an open verdict, which means there are still questions to ask.  In the aftermath of that judgement, everyone with power went silent; let’s hope we now get some answers, and Dick becomes yet another casualty of the hurricane blowing through the Met.

The Stasi, J. Edgar Hoover… join your soulmates, News of the World.

Rupert Murdoch

I apologise for clogging up the blogosphere with what is apparently the only story on the planet, but have you ever seen the wonderful film “The Lives of Others”? In it, the lives of ordinary people are surreptitiously invaded by a shadowy bureaucracy, intent on gathering information, however trivial, simply to hold in case it might, at some time, become important.

And have you ever seen “The Private Lives of J. Edgar Hoover”, a man obsessed with information, on gathering anything and everything, regardless of whether or not it might be useful for his own ends?

Well, it seems that News International are our very own Stasi and J. Edgar. The extent of their illegal information-gathering activities – bribing police officers, tapping phones, hacking e-mails – is so widespread it can only be indicative of the mindset of an autonomous agency which considers itself able to operate outside the law. Look at who they hacked and what they obtained: Milly Dowler, one of the Soham parents, the families of 7/7 victims and dead soldiers. What is screamingly obvious is that there was no chance of them ever being able to use any of that in any possible story. It was information that was so personal and of absolutely no value because anything that came from it would have been so clearly obtained illegally, it could never, ever be made public.

So the mindset of the News of the World was not that of an investigative news outlet, but that of a bureaucracy which sees itself as having the right to gather and store information of whatever nature simply because information might just give power, might just be of value. That is the mindset of a secret police who are absolutely sure of their position being above the law.

Rebekah Brooks clearly indicated that this is the way she sees herself when she gave evidence to a Commons committee as long ago as 2003. Given that she admits to knowing that police officers were routinely bribed by her newspaper and gives no indication that she has reported such illegal payments to the police, you would have expected her to be arrested for at least withholding evidence from the police. Eight years later – still no arrest. Therefore, don’t blame Brooks (entirely); it seems she has absolutely no reason to doubt that she is above the law, and that she is protected by the relationship between her boss, the police and politicians both in the Labour and Conservative parties.

This sense of entitlement – “we are not judged by the rules of the little people” – is clearly shown by NotW editor Colin Myler’s outrageous tweet that “The Guardian were out to get us, and they got us.” In other words, the fall of NotW does not originate in their illegal activities, but in the commercial rivalry with a fellow news organisation. Of course, he fails to acknowledge that the Guardian was simply following a (very newsworthy) story, a story The Times and The Sun have done their best to play down and avoid.

But in one sense, The News of the World (and News International and other news gathering organisations in general) are much, much worse than the Stasi or J. Edgar Hoover, and are much more like The Thought Police of Orwell’s 1984, in that they have two-way access to the people they spy on. For the viewscreen that pumps out propaganda to Winston day and night, read those red-tops on the coffee table or the 24-hour news culture yacking from the TV. In an ideal world, organisations with that sort of responsibility would tread carefully, but in our imperfect world the currency of the news media is ratings, cash and power. That is why the BBC – for all its imperfections – is so valuable for its independence and its influence, and for the fact that it is free from the stranglehold of billionaire megalomaniacs who understand where real power lies today.

You couldn’t make it up…

After my recent post about competition in the health service and the way in which privatisation of public resources perpetuates a low-wage economy in which the working poor are systematically exploited, along comes Conservative MP Philip Davies to show that the depth of the Right wing’s nutjob economics knows no bounds.  He’s obviously competing with Francis Maude and John Glen for the title of the Conservative Party’s most obviously out of touch representative.

I won’t go over the story in detail – he’s far too famous now to waste the space – but I love the concept that the disabled and people with mental health problems shouldn’t be “forced” to work for sweatshop wages, but they should be offered the “choice” if they want to.

Choice?  What choice is it between starvation and the coppers on offer from the fat cats who would jump at the chance of a pool of even cheaper labour?  What choice do the poor ever, ever have in the face of the self-serving machinations of the rich and powerful?

And of course, it comes at a time of vicious attacks on that other vulnerable sector of society, the retired.  Public sector pensions, they bleat, are far more generous than those in the private sector.  No one seems to be posing the corollary: why are pensions in the private sector – and again, only for low and middle wage earners – so stingy?  Why has the financial services sector reneged on so many promises to those investing in their pensions while continuing to pay mammoth bonuses and – yes – obscene pension pots to the executive classes?

It seems that the exploitation of the weakest in society will, indeed, carry on apace: and hell, the country voted for it.  We need our own “Arab Dawn”, methinks.

Update: I found some blogs supporting Davies’ approach, including this: http://nhs999.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/philip-davies-and-the-mob/

In reply, it seems to me that if  the argument is that accepting lower wages would make the disabled more “employable”, that suggests they are “unemployable” in the first place. However, that is to accept a simplistic right-wing economic definition of employment, when it is actually so much more. Employment is a social contract between employee, employer and society in general. In terms of what anyone can offer to society by being employed, no-one is less “employable” than another. Therefore, as a society, we must make the commitment – and make employers make the commitment – to being “disabled blind” when it comes to employment.