Nearly25Things

First I wish to include a note via my good friend Chip in America who sent me the following;

Muzzammil Hassan, of Orchard Park NY (SE of Buffalo), is the "founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004 amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light. Its slogan was 'connecting people through understanding'."

He was arrested on Thursday and charged with beheading his wife.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29189095/

Keep working on the image building Muzzammil.

I am almost totally caving in on two fronts today. Firstly I have cravenly submitted to the seemingly inescapable “Twitter” craze and signed up after being “Twitted” many times over the last weeks by those wishing me to join the trend. I really don’t see the point of being in a text based messaging system to send or receive chains of random thoughts to and from people I either don’t know well or at all. Perhaps I am missing something profound.

Last week it was the thoughts of actor, comedian and all round genius Stephen Fry when he was trapped in a lift (elevator) with a bunch of strangers. As ever he communicated his plight in tight little sentences; this time is he a Twittee for the transmittal of his plight or am I the Twittee for reading of it?

I don’t see why we should wish to communicate in this truncated form in either direction, particularly since instead of personalizing our relationships this will, by definition, other than by accident, do precisely the opposite. However, this is no doubt one of those giant crazes that sweep the world in minutes so one has to participate to witness its evolution and be annoyed by it.

I have also decided to join another craze, the one in which you list 25 things about yourself, although I have randomly decided that I shall construct a list that is slightly shorter or longer on the arbitrary basis that I must not totally conform. I’m not sure of the precise reason for this listing of one’s peculiarities and peccadilloes being a necessity but on the other hand, it does, momentarily, release your mind from thinking about the economy or Gordon Brown or the multi trillion deficits our countries are all running. I wouldn’t be so angry if at the same time our leaders didn’t keep telling us what we are doing wrong, when clearly they don’t have a clue how to do anything themselves!

So here we go, purely in the interests of not being too serious. Some things you didn’t know about Tony Klinger and perhaps don’t care to know.

1. His favorite color is red, which is the color of the strip for his favorite football team, Manchester United and, of course McDonalds.
2. He must never drive a red sports car since a psychic told his late mother he would be killed if he drove one, Avis and Hertz please note.
3. In the UK Tony drives an American car, a Cadillac, but in the States he usually drives a Japanese car, go figure.
4. The first thing Tony read was the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
5. His first school was St. Francis, in Acton, London, where he was the first non-Catholic to attend. Interesting but ridiculous.
6. The best book of stories he ever read was the Old Testament.
7. Klinger’s favorite book is Catch 22 by Joseph Heller but it’s run close by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that possibly signifies that he has a somewhat split personality.
8. Tony’s favorite film is Citizen Caine and he thinks it is also the best film ever made.
9. Klinger’s dad was also a filmmaker, producing films such as Get Carter with Michael Caine and executive producing, amongst others some wonderful stuff like Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac with the director Roman Polanski and the ultra successful Confessions series.
10. Before that Tony’s dad had many occupations, but he was most proud of having been a structural engineer, having designed, during the Second World War the first machine that tested bombs and other munitions on the production line.
11. TK has worked in every capacity on film and media production except for make up and hair.
12. TK once scored 6 goals in a single soccer match in Los Angeles and when a teen he won all his boxing matches bar one and once won all the races at a swim meet and the Twist dance competition at Hastings Happy Holiday Camp, beat that!
13. Klinger has filmed in 37 countries, and made over 600 productions for cinema, TV shows, music videos, documentaries, commercials and corporate films and in doing so he has won more than 50 awards.
14. Tony’s most proud professional achievement was to be part of the team winning The Queens Anniversary Award for Education when he was a Lecturer, Course Director at the Bournemouth Film School.
15. Tony, like the British BBC news guru, Jeremy Paxman is very disappointed by the fall in standard and quality of Marks and Spencer’s once great men’s underpants, and is still in search of a suitable replacement. Time is running short.
16. Klinger has been called a Socialist, a Liberal and a fiscal Conservative since he started writing articles on politics but is, like Charles De Gaulle, “above such things”.
17. Tony’s first book, Twilight of the Gods will be published this summer.

MyFunnyValentine

Today we feature my exchange with, Brad, about the potential future of our economies. In featuring this we have edited for space and use of expletives, mostly on my part. I apologize for our not being more loving on Valentine’s Day!

“Tony:
Well...I am not sure who predicted what...but I know that every time you beat the war drums I came back with four paragraphs on the economy and got nowhere--you called it "pragmatism" and "cynicism"...defeatism, etc. America's top spook came out today with something interesting: the top threat is no longer terrorism but the economy. …--That’s been true for six years. Things have been bleak in America for at least six years--this is what I kept trying to tell you--but only if you were in a city--I mean really in a city, teaching in urban schools or hanging around industrial America. Anyone with a credit card and credit line was basically skating by--but the scale of the homelessness and misery was staggering. The cost of these wars is also largely hidden--you have to go to towns around here that have actually sent a significant number of troops--where just about everyone is in the national guard because there is nothing else to do --it's been hardcore for years.

I would say that things were also bleak in the Reagan era if you lived in Hollywood and saw the mental patients that Ronnie let out of the asylums after canning federal money for mental health--the immigrants, the uninsured, all of those shut out of the emerging "bubble" economies that are now bursting around our ears. The "economic downturn" is not just a matter of a change in the weather...it's a touch bigger than that. Things aren't the same in this country, and haven't been for some years now.

Those were the Ronnie Reagan eighties--for me at least. Having said that, I think your recent stuff on the economy is interesting, and I am glad to learn. I've been reading heavy criticism of Obama along the lines that he should essentially be nationalizing the banks and every month that he dithers on this is a month closer to Japanese-style decline. Does that make sense to you?

Hello Brad,

On the economy, banks and Obama, and I would add the UK and Brown. Yes, we're heading, if we're lucky, to stagflation a la Japan just a little while ago. I was there for a few weeks in that period and it was hard to understand……..there seemed no way out even though they had a huge balance of payments surplus and were manufacturing like crazy, and on the surface it should have worked out fine.

The problem there, as it is here and in your neck of the woods, is that the structure of our economies is false, and can't work longer term. That's because the whole thing was based on smoke and mirrors and now that they've been removed we can all see the little green man, and we know he knows nothing and is incapable. Like the bankers in the UK this week who turned out not to have a single banking qualification or experience between the lot of them.

What I'm saying, somewhat clumsily, is that the whole trick could only work with the good faith and blind gullibility of the masses and that is now gone, possibly forever. Once that cat is out of the bag there isn't much that can work properly in a market capitalist society. The problems have not yet really begun, and I'm afraid, unless we get very lucky it is going to be truly awful for all of us.

I have already predicted that the banks will have to be largely nationalized both here and in the US, and I'm sticking with that view. One of the banks here, Lloyds TSB, was 45% nationalized a month or two back when it was encouraged by our Prime Minister, to take over HBOS to now have about 30% of all British retail banking. Lloyds TSB, announced that the taken over bank had a bad year, it lost £10 billion, in one year; in fact its about £1 billion worse than that according to my brief computation of their figures!

This doesn't spell immediate disaster for Lloyds or the government, because the bank is presently pretty well capitalized, but if things go wrong at all, then the only way back would be for this bank giant to be totally nationalized, which would mean more than half of our giant retail bankers were now publicly owned, in less than 3 months.

It is a huge and bloody disaster but next will come the printing of money, (probably in both the USA and UK) and who knows how that will work, but what else can they do now that the interest rates are effectively zero, what tools are left to our governments to energize our economies? Then we might be choosing between stagflation and hyperinflation and both are poisonous.

Hold on to your hat it’s going to be a very bumpy ride!

All the best,

Tony

WhenYouAreWrong

It is human nature to let others know when you predicted something and it turned out as you forecast. I managed this feat with quite a few things that modesty forbids me mentioning here if I was modest. OK, you forced me; I did predict the recession and the busted flush in the property market etc. But I am not here to boast; too much.

It also does us good to admit when we have made a mistake. Having taken some credit above I shall point out a very recent error on my part. On the day prior to the Israeli elections my prediction was for a narrow Benjamin Netanyahu right wing Likud victory over Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party. In fact she won the battle between these two parties by one seat. It being Israel, and therefore very politically complex, his potential right wing partnerships are potentially just a little more likely to work than any combination of the centre and left, and therefore it will probably be Bibi (Netanyahu) who is called upon by President Shimon Peres to form a government coalition, if he can.

This is made even more difficult by the fact that the leader of the third largest party, Y’Israel Beytenu, Avigdor Lieberman, detests the religious parties who would normally form a natural part of any Nehatanyahu coalition.

So, it being a very Israeli business, I was wrong but I might yet turn out to be right, although I admit that my head hurts thinking about the possible permutations.
For the sake of peace a broad based coalition of national unity would be the best solution but we’re probably several weeks from the answers.

What is clear from the voting in Israel is that security and how to deal with the Palestinians is the paramount question, even in these parlous economic times; financial issues barely warranted a mention during the elections.

I also stated that during Israel’s brief and stormy history it is their strong, right wing leaders, not the well-intentioned liberals, who do the best peace deals with their Arab neighbors. This is a paradox I ascribed to the national characteristics and histories of those at the negotiating tables. I remain convinced that this is the case but I didn’t mean to include Avigdor Lieberman in the category of strong leaders. He, and his supporters are potentially nearly as big a danger to the future of peace as the extreme Arab and Muslim leaders he seems happy to confront.

So there you have it, a fulsome admission that I was in error, and I don’t feel blemished or diminished by my act of public contrition.

In the last few days we also witnessed a series of bankers and other financial titans admitting that they made mistakes. President Obama also owned up to a minor gaffe. The head of the Bank of England also admitted that the bank’s reading of the financial tealeaves had been severely at fault.

It seems the time when it is fashionable, as well as desirable to hold up one’s hands and utter the words, “I screwed up, and I got it wrong, I am sorry!”

So why does Prime Minister Gordon Brown find it so difficult?

He hired Sir James Crosby as deputy chairman of the financial watchdog, the Financial Service Authority, which is created to oversee the running and well being of our financial institutions. During his tenure of this office, Crosby, while also Chief Executive of HBOS apparently personally fired the bank’s most senior risk expert for predicting that Crosby’s risk taking stewardship of HBOS could lead to huge future problems for that company.

When this was exposed Sir James Crosby almost immediately resigned his post as deputy chairman. Did he fall or was he pushed? The answer is that he was pushed, very quickly and very ignominiously and almost certainly from the direction of Number 10 Downing Street.

This situation is rendered surreal when it became clear that the FSA had also issued warnings about the risks HBOS was taking. It is more than strange that the man effectively running both was Sir James Crosby.

Today there was a parliamentary inquiry into all these dealings that personally questioned the Prime Minister. As ever our dour leader failed to show any contrition. As ever none of this is his fault in any way. He didn’t apologize for any of it.

For those with short memories you will recall that Mister Brown accepted all the praise for everything that seemed to be going right in the British economy for the last dozen years or so. Now that our recently mighty financial ship has hit stormy weather he must accept culpability and blame or he will be consigned to the dustbin of history along with all the other fakes and phonies.

StatingTheObvious

It’s pretty obvious what went wrong with our economies in general, but needs stating anyhow. Too many people were too greedy. Too few people are making stuff and too many are selling and buying financial products that no one understands.

Abraham Lincoln said part of this better than anyone else, “I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich…(But) we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.”

There is nothing wrong or objectionable about creating wealth but there is certainly something wrong if that becomes the sole motivation for our society. In the last years the deal became king, short-term gains were paramount, above any other consideration. We simply cannot and will not sustain our way of life on this basis.
You cannot build society on consumerism and rising property prices alone.

It only takes a few people obtaining a disproportionate share of the pie to upset the balance for the rest of society. That’s exactly what has been happening with rapacious bankers and deal making entrepreneurs at the very summit of our economies over the last decades. This was exacerbated by insufficiently stringent financial regulation, and where the law was sufficient it was not applied with any rigor.

There was also an entirely cavalier and inappropriate duty of care employed in the hiring of the men to run our leading banks. During yesterday’s inquiry in the UK’s House of Commons it became clear that none of the leaders of the banks that have just been bailed out had any banking qualifications.

All of these financial gluttons should learn something from Millard Fuller who passed away on February 3rd. This was the man who more or less invented the term, “sweat equity” and the “theology of enough.” He developed a philosophy that typified generosity of spirit, which should inform all our thinking for the future well being of our society. He co-founded Habitat for Humanity with his wife, Linda.

He didn’t start off as an altruist, making his first million before he was 30. Linda refused to stick with him if he was going to obsessively collect money as his reason for living. To get her to return he changed himself and his ambitions. He not only got Linda back he also went on to fulfill his dream of building homes with no interest mortgages for the poor. With the help of uncountable volunteers and many future occupants their organizations have built nearly 1.5 million homes with no interest mortgages around the world.

As Fuller said, “There are sufficient resources in the world for everybody but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority.”

BankingTrust

Today in the UK there was a governmental commission of inquiry into the banking debacle that led our economies to the brink of a total financial apocalypse.

For the first time, in public, our leading bankers were summoned to explain their actions and inactions to our elected representatives in the full unforgiving stare of the public. For the first time these so called Masters of the Universe volunteered that they were unreservedly sorry for their mistakes and injudicious decisions. It’s about time.

The Chief Executives also admitted that the bonus culture, which they led and profited from, is a flawed system. Everyone now seems to share the view that bonuses should be linked to results over the longer term, measured in years, rather than linked to single deals. I am relieved that the greedy bastards have admitted this, and now, feeling contrite, one supposes that these pigs at the public trough will return their own grossly inflated bonuses of the past?

What was not investigated in today’s question and answer session is the cause of the underlying problems, in order to prevent any recurrence. I believe I know what is at the root of the catastrophe and it is a more profound, albeit simpler thing to correct than the obvious greed culture.

When you look at the relative knowledge and experience of these former banking Chief Executives one factor stands out, and it is so clearly the key factor in the disaster that I am surprised I am the only journalist to write about it. These men were brought in from outside banking, and they had no idea what they were doing! This is so obvious that I’d better repeat my research finding, these men largely had NO experience in banking prior to running our biggest banks.

Would any of us hire someone with no experience to run a chain of supermarkets, would any of us hire someone to run a car manufacturer with no experience, would any of us hire someone to run anything without any experience?

Of course the answer is no. It clearly didn’t occur to the Boards of Directors, the personnel officers, the shareholders or the headhunters that the bloody banks needed someone who knew something about banking before they hired these incompetent apologists.

The reasons for hiring these Chief Executives was a history of perceived success elsewhere, usually garnered from their deal making entrepreneurship. These Chief Executives didn’t even have sufficient knowledge to be a bank cashier let alone run a bank.

The banks clearly deserved what happened to them, but we, the public, did not.

IsraeliElections

There is about to be an election in Israel. Leading in the opinion polls is Benyamin Nehatanyahu, who heads up the right wing Likud party and who was Prime Minister a few years ago. He swears that if elected his party will not give one inch of Israel or the West Bank to the Palestinians and then dilutes this somewhat by stating that there could be pullbacks but only if there were a comprehensive peace settlement.

Trailing him is Kadima, the current government, who are being led in the campaign by Tzipi Livni, the present Foreign Minister. This is the party formed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, prior to his stroke. If Kadima lose this election as it seems they will it is possible that the party might just implode. Their campaign has simply failed to ignite the people of Israel behind their pledge to continue negotiations for a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestine Authority led by its President, Mahmoud Abbas.

Not far behind Kadima in the polls is the Yisrael Beiteineu party led by Avigdor Lieberman. This party has a largely Russian born support base and boasts a platform in which all citizens of Israel, including the Palestinians will have to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state. The fact they are showing so well in the polls is a sure indication of the general shift to the right in the country’s politics.

Trailing in last of the big parties is Ehud Barak and the Labour Party. For many years after the independence of the country they were the natural government. Presently Barak is the Minister of Defense and is recognized as doing the job well following the perceived military success of the recent Gaza operations. His foreign affairs policy and that of Kadima are pretty much indistinguishable. But he is hampered by his previous experience as Prime Minister when he negotiated with Clinton and Arafat to give up approximately 97% of the West Bank to the Palestinians, which they famously declined.

The likely outcome is for Likud to win a fairly narrow victory which will need the support of other minority parties to form yet another shaky and fairly narrow coalition. The probable partners in this will be religious parties and potentially the even more right wing Yisrael Beiteneinu. This fills many observers with dread, as they perceive Netanyahu to be a right wing fanatical bogeyman. They hear his American accented English picked up during some of the years he spent growing up in the USA and they translate this into hearing him as if he were an American neo- conservative. It would be a mistake to do so. This man is steeped in Israeli history, myths and legends and this, for good or ill, informs his every thought and action.

It is entirely possible that a future Prime Minister Netanyahu could be the perfect person to make a lasting peace with Syria and the Palestinians. Historically it is strong men from the right who are more able to make peace deals with the Arabs, not the well-intentioned liberals from the left. This might be due to the psychology of both the Israelis and the Arabs who respect strength in their paternalistic leader figures. In both societies nurturing and conciliation are sometimes perceived as female traits, often confused with weakness.

Also necessary will be even handed support for any reasonable settlement by the USA that provides guaranteed security behind recognized borders. Within this mix there must be economic benefits for following the agreed path and the reverse for those that don’t. Hamas must not be allowed to sit at the table unless and until they recognize that the State of Israel is legitimate as a Jewish state. This includes a renouncing by them of all acts of violence and an acceptance and adherence to previously agreed treaties.

The irony is this; Hamas is stronger politically because it was badly defeated militarily. If there are moderate forces within the movement they must now show their heads above the parapets or whoever will soon lead Israel will simply have no one to speak with.

EnglishVacations

Just when you think there isn’t much more you could write about the erosion of personal freedom in the UK along comes another brick in the wall.

Our freedoms are being removed, adjusted, lessened and blunted a little more with every passing day. Our present government is sleepwalking us to a totalitarian state in which it will become an offense to even question the lessening of your freedoms.

Our government has decided to monitor every trip into and out of our country. It has already started to do its utmost to achieve this by recently logging 70 million of our recent journeys, and they aim to raise this number to over 100 million in the next few months. After this has been achieved they aim to know where you went, who with, when and for what purpose. This is part of their obsessive wish to know everything about you and then will come the control.

Imagine a time when the civil servants will ration the number of trips you can take in order to reduce your carbon footprint?

Think about a future in which an anonymous official decides you mustn’t take your child on holiday during term time and will have the information to make it impossible for you to do so?

How far are we from being monitored for tax purposes using this new information?

The published reason for this governmental need for such information is that it will help them deal with externally linked terrorism threats. This is, of course, the same reason given for huge swathes of new legislation and quite frankly it is not believable or tenable when confronted with forensic examination.

The government is setting up a new centre to monitor and evaluate all this additional information in a part of Manchester, North West England. It will no doubt employ several hundred trained operatives. Their purpose will be much broader than the one admitted.

As with the money transfer tracing it has another purpose than just anti terrorism. This is a function of governmental control and tax gathering. The more information that Big Brother has on us the more it can dictate our lives.

The real danger for our future is that all of these small breaches of our freedom will be abused, misused or simply botched in a future in which we might find ourselves governed by some form of dictatorial government who will only need to use the levers of control now being foolishly put in place. We must do all we can to roll back this tide before it is too late.