News from Sunny Banks

"We are at war with our leaders"

2012-02-10T21:19:00.002+01:00

At last someone has realised. Trust the Greeks, the people who gave us the idea of democracy.

According to one report on Swedish radio today, the headline in one newspaper in Greece reads: "We are at war with our leaders".

The Greeks are not alone.

2012-01-29T22:55:00.005+01:00

A news item in one of the Swedish daily newspapers caught my eye today. "Swedish police will be allowed to use teargas" said the headline in "Dagens Nyheter", and was, as it turned out, somewhat misleading. The Swedish police have been allowed to use teargas before, but only inside buildings, for example to force people out of an occupied building. Now, however, they will be allowed to use it outdoors also. Possible scenarios are demonstrations and football matches, to quote DN.

Be sure about one thing. If the authorities have a weapon, it will be used, however much they may decry its use in advance, and say that it is to be used under extreme situations only. It's amazing how normal situations suddenly become extreme if you have a weapon which is only to be used in extreme situations. Ask the Americans, still the only nation on the planet to have used a weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb, which they used at the end of the second world war. Somehow the justification was found. Twice.

The article in DN also mentioned pepper spraying. Now actually I must admit that I didn't know the police had pepper sprays in their arsenal. It has apparently not had the medial attention here that it has obtained elsewhere, thanks in no small part to Lieutenant Pike. I also remember reading some horrific reports in the Icelandic press on the use of pepper sprays during the anti-government kitchen demonstrations there three years ago.

Pretty much all that most people know about pepper sprays in Sweden is that it is a criminal offence for the general public to own them, a fact which received much criticism many years ago when a woman was convicted after being found bringing one into the country, to have in her handbag in case of attack. It was not, as far as I remember, even considered extenuating circumstances that she was perpetually being harassed and threatened by her former husband.

Be that as it may, pepper sprays will be more strictly controlled, and may not be used "in arrest rooms...and also inside vehicles".

So now we will see peaceful demonstrations turned into non-peaceful ones by a canister of teargas being lobbed into the crowd. If there's one thing that will piss anyone off, it's being on the borders of a teargas attack, and even those patient beings who aren't pissed off will anyway start to run from the scene of the attack, and suddenly you have a violent demonstration, calling for more teargas and lots of arrests.

Now, you can call me a conspiration theorist for that last comment, and perhaps with some justification, but one thing that worries me is that even here in peaceful Sweden we are beginning to see a brutalisation of the police. More and more often one will see a police force who look like something out of "Star Wars". They swing heavy battering rams into doors as a matter of course nowadays, and the local versions of SWAT teams are more and more visible.

There has been talk of allowing the military to "help" the police in connection with certain "disturbances", something which, as far as I am aware, has not been allowed in the country since shortly after the military shot several marching strikers near a little town called Ådal in 1913. This is the Swedish version of what in the US is called "posse comitatus" a law forbidding the use of the country's military to uphold the law of the land, a law which has recently been annulled by President Obama in one of the clauses of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (US spelling).

It seems to me that our leaders, all over Europe, and, indeed, the western world, and now even here in peaceful Sweden, are becoming more and more worried that fewer and fewer of their subjects are prepared to accept some of the gross violations of trust which these leaders perpetrate on a daily basis, and are brutalising the police, and preparing the way for the use of military, as their only means of ensuring their own protection in the long run.

The signs of unrest are everywhere. In the Occupy movements, which admittedly seem to have run out of steam, perhaps not surprisingly since they have been subjected to an excess of the brutality I mentioned above. In the highly effective attacks on offending agency's websites by the hacker collective, Anonymous, which the mainstream media have more or less successfully managed to cover up. I will not forget other, less exotic hacker attacks by other groups.

And now Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that the US, at least, is losing the information battle - I believe she called it the propaganda battle, which says more than she perhaps intended - to online news sites such as zerohedge.com for financial news and comment, rt.com, Russian television site, or the Asian Times site, atimes.com, giving a Chinese slant to the news. Not to mention the often dystrophic sites for those who merely plan for survival in the face of a collapse of civilisation as we know it, such as chrismartenson.com. Even if one acknowledges that some of these sites may have their own agenda, at least one can assume that they are reliable on general news, and the general news they publish is news which, if it is published at all by the mainstream media, is given a little notice somewhere on page 18, and played down, if not given a downright hostile angle.

I am coming to the conclusion that, in order to distract us from our disgruntlement, our leaders are going to lead us in true "Wag the Dog" fashion into what could easily end up as World War III. Whether or not they succeed in that endeavour, I sense with sadness that war is coming. I believe it will be civil war, The People vs The State, with the bulk of the population on one side, and the government, police and military on the other. Unless, of course, our leaders take their common sense in hand, and start demolishing the restrictions they have raised on our privacy, and remembering who it is who - I will not say pays them, for we know that is not we the people who pay them - who it is who elects them, and whom it is that they are there to represent.

Footnote: if any of my readers thought this post was a bit over-the-top, here the evidence it wasn't, from "The Daily Telegraph".

For shame!

2012-01-26T21:06:00.005+01:00

Sometimes it's hard to be a blogger. It's hard to decide which atrocity of all the atrocities we now read about daily is the one which requires the hardest defiance. Could it be the reports I read recently about how the British Ministry of Defence promotes private arms dealers? If there is one place where even trade liberalists should have second thoughts it is on the question of private arms dealing.

Could it be the continuing insistence on the part of the Swedish immigration authority, despite countless outcries from the general public, to extradite asylum-seekers to countries where their safety is in jeopardy, not just because the country to which they are to be extradited is in one of the stages of civil war, in which people with the profile of the asylum-seeker are at grave risk, but also because the person in question is often a former regime critic, who in all probability will be at least jailed for his criticism if not tortured and killed. And this extradition is usually done on the grounds that another government department has refused to acknowledge what all the world knows and acknowledges, that there is an armed conflict going on in the proposed recipient country.

Or could it be the New Zealand government lying down and playing dead for the US government and its corporate paymasters for the second time in a month over the closure of the file storage site, Megauploads? From the reports that are circulating the owner of this site is not being tried for running a pirate site in New Zealand and thereby - if the case is proved - depriving New Zealand artists and companies of income. He is being tried to determine whether he can be extradited to the US for trial.

But today I think the prize for the most disgraceful act by those in power is David Cameron's attack on the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR). Here are some quotes from "The Guardian's" report:

"Britain wants ... to reform the work of the court so that it focuses on serious abuses of human rights in some of its 47 member states such as Russia and Ukraine."

"The prime minister criticised the court's decision to block the deportation of the Islamic cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan. "We do have a real problem when it comes to foreign nationals who threaten our security," Cameron told [the] assembly."

"Britain [i.e. Cameron] appeared to have won a significant victory in securing general support for reform when members voted unanimously on Tuesday night to agree that the court should be "subsidiary" to national authorities – governments, courts and parliaments – in guaranteeing human rights."

"Cameron, who said that the court has a backlog of 150,000 cases, said it should not act as a court of fourth instance in states where domestic rulings are reasonable and in line with the convention."

Turning the court onto serious abuses in states such as Russia and Ukraine is tantamount to giving it make-work which is not going to lead anywhere other than an annual statement on the state of human rights in Europe, to be lost amongst the latest football scores. And the fact that Britain might have a real problem does not justify their being able to throw the problem to the wolves.

I would have thought it was obvious to the average human being with a sense of justice that, if the court has a backlog of 150,000 cases, this is proof paramount that domestic rulings are not seen to be reasonable and in line with the convention. This in itself should be reason enough to ensure that national authorities should continue to be subsidiary to the ECHR. Most people would suggest that the solution is not a 'sundown policy' of writing off cases after two years, but extra funding so that the court can handle more cases and reduce the backlog. The people who put Cameron and his like in power clearly do not trust them, and it is this he is attacking when he attacks the ECHR.

It is also a matter of concern that this disgraceful suggestion was unanimously agreed to. Once upon a time, when the Council of Europe created the ECHR, there were some courageous thinkers involved, who may or may not themselves have been in positions of power within their own countries, but who, like the founding fathers of the US, could envisage that a time might come when the leaders of countries would again sink to the level of the worst offenders of the 20th century. To protect the general public from the worst excesses of these offenders, these courageous men and women established the ECHR to watch over the principles of human rights, rights which we every day now see under attack.

And now an unscrupulous and disgraceful gang of their inheritors, with Cameron in the vanguard, aware of and ashamed of what they are doing to their own subjects, and not wanting those subjects to have recourse to a higher instance, are moving to take away the authority of the one place where decisions out of tune with the general acceptance of what is right can be corrected.

For shame!

The last night of the proms

2011-11-27T18:45:00.002+01:00

Yesterday evening I watched the last night of the proms.

Yes, I know it's the end of November, and the last night of the proms takes place in August, but here in Sweden we get to see the recording around the first of advent. We watched the first hour, then had to switch channels to see another program, and came back just in time for the last – and most traditional – half hour.

I sang “Land of Hope and Glory” at full volume, grimacing only mildly over the lines

“God who made thee mighty
Make thee mightier yet.”

For it was not god but an effective armaments industry and the poverty which made so many young men seek a career in the army, coupled with a psychopathic indifference at the national level for the aborigines in the lands they conquered, which made Great Britain mighty.

I listened as the audience sang “Rule Britannia”, and saw no-one choke on the line

“Britains never, never, never will be slaves.”

And so through “Jerusalem” with its

“I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land”

And the national anthem, in which even the third verse was sung, with the line

“May she defend our laws.”

I wondered which laws she now defends.

And in the middle of watching this British orgy of self-adulation, with mini Albert Halls throughout the length and breadth of the land, each with its thousands waving British flags and English flags and Brazilian flags and the flags of many other nations, I wondered: what happened to the spirits of the men and women who wrote and sang those songs?

According to Wikipedia, “Rule Britannia” is the oldest, dating from 1740, predating even the national anthem, which, in its present form, first saw the light of day in 1744. “And did those feet in ancient times” was written in 1804 and set to music in 1916, and “Land of Hope and Glory” dates from 1902. So these four pieces span the entire period of the industrial revolution, the source of British power, and ending with the first world war.

It was a time when mankind multiplied the power of human muscle many times over, catapulting most men from a precarious, agrarian existence on the borderline of starvation to a somewhat more secure life of relative well-being. It was a time when men generated enough of a surplus for the creation of such luxuries as general schooling, organised research, and a thriving cultural life. It was a time when men could create or lose great fortunes on new inventions and discoveries, and the aristocracy had to put up with a larger percentage of parvenues in their ranks than their predecessors.

Men could justifiably be proud of what they created, each to his own capacity, if less proud of how the new-found wealth was put to use, and they sang songs to their own glorification, and believed in a golden future. And for one night in the year, the British are apparently still able to do that. For that one night, they can sing the same songs, and believe themselves to be the equal of the men who lived when the songs were first sung. How sorely they are mistaken.

When the songs were first sung, men and women were breaking down technical, commercial and cultural barriers, breaking themselves free from centuries, if not millenia, of feudalism, exploring our world, whether as scientist, convict in exile, or soldier, bringing home new knowledge, and new words with which to enrich the English language. The convicts to be sure did not return.

I look at the people now singing these songs, at the world that our generation has created, and I wonder how any man or woman could have allowed this to happen and not reacted with anger and revolt. I wonder how such vapid, characterless people as we have in power, with not a charismatic figure amongst them, could so have made a mockery of the line

“Britains never, never, never will be slaves”.

For Britains are now slaves. Who but slaves would have allowed such abominations as the Terrorist Act of 2000 and not protest? Who but slaves would have allowed their government to take them to war on a lie? Who but slaves would accept the right of private companies to close down a person's internet access, the lifeblood of our modern society, without the right to a trial? Who but slaves would agree to the extension of copyright by a further twenty years for no other reason than that the already excessive period of copyright was about to run out, and people were still singing the songs for which copyright had originally been granted? Who but slaves would put up with a justice system which is no longer concerned with public safety, but with putting down in the least sign of protest in the most brutal manner and punishing the protesters with punitive prison sentences?

Now, at last, it seems that there may be a glimmer of hope for these slaves, for despite the betrayal of the justice system, people are at last beginning to protest. Even the riots in august, when some people were singing anachronistic, jingoistic songs, others were rejecting their own rejection in the most pointed way, and taking for themselves, as they saw others take for themselves. Not that I defend the looting, but I can at least understand it, and I cannot justify the draconian crack-down which it has elicited from those who feel the vibrations in their once safe world.

(I do not refer to the so-called Arab spring, since there is reason to believe that there is more behind some instances of this than mere public anger at dictatorial regimes.)

Of course it is not just the British who, somewhat belatedly, may be coming out of their stupified dream. First in Iceland, then in Ireland, then in Greece, Spain, Italy, the protests have grown larger and larger, and not always more violent, at least from the protesters' side, although the brutality with which they have been met has escalated until one can say that in each country there is a civil war raging. Even in the US, which has always held itself up as the protector of the moral high ground, we have seen the worst excesses of right-restricting legislation, the worst excesses of government selling out the people who elect them to the commercial interests from whom they are supposed to protect their electors, and the worst excesses of brutality towards the public from the forces intended to protect the public. Who has not seen with disgust the films of one Lt Pike pepper-spraying peaceful demonstrators the way you and I spray insects, and casually asking a colleague for the loan of his pepper spray, when Pike's own was empty?

There is reason to hope that the brutality itself may in fact contain the seeds of destruction of the present degraded system, for when the people to whom one looks for ones protection, whether at the political level or the level of law and order, react as they have done, one has no other alternative than to reject in the most violent way the so-called protectors, and, however well-equipped they are, and however well-trained, they are in a significant minority.

Let us hope that the reaction we are beginning to see, and others like it, will continue, and grow, and spread, until we come to a time when people will sing the songs of the last night of the proms, and others like them, not just one night in August, but every day.

TBTS - Too Big To Save

2011-04-25T12:32:00.005+02:00

The concept of TBTF, as it is now known, or Too Big To Fail has been around since the beginning of the 2008 recession. Or, if you live in Sweden, it originated in the early 90's, when Sweden had its banking crisis. The hypothesis is that an organisation, often a bank, is too big to be allowed to fail. Why it should not be allowed to fail has never actually been made clear, but in the case of banks, the implication is that, if one shaky bank fails, the public will lose faith in all banks, causing a run even on sound banks. In the case of other companies, such as the SAAB automobile company, the failure would create so much expense in unemployment benefits that keeping the company afloat is an end to be achieved at any cost.

Neither of these hypotheses has ever been stated clearly enough, nor with sufficient supporting documentation, to be verifiable, but since the propounders and the decision-makers are essentially the same people, the theses are taken for granted without further justification, and the arrangements are made which leave the ordinary tax-payer, who has no representative at the negotiating table, as the ultimate guarantor. The question "why?" has been answered with "you don't want to know".

As a consequence, governments everywhere have pumped untold billions or even trillions - it is not necessary to specify a currency; the sums are so unimaginable that the unit is irrelevant - into "rescuing" lame companies from the excesses of their own stupidity.

One result of this was the fact that the oh-so-willing governments brought their own economies to the brink of ruin in saving private enterprises with public money, so that we now have an even bigger crisis looming: the failure of nations, and it is to say the least a little thankless on the part of the organisations which earlier were saved by the intervention of those nations that they are far from willing to turn round and help their saviours. In fact one might say that they are actively working towards the destruction of those saviours, with downgrading of their creditworthiness and speculation against their currencies. (As an aside, it strikes me as very strange that anybody takes notice any longer of the pronouncements of S&P, Moody's and others on the creditworthiness of anyone or anything. After all, these were the people who contributed significantly to the crash of 2008 by grading worthless portfolios of shaky mortgages as AAA.)

Well, now I think it's time to ask the question "why?" again, and not be satisfied with anything less than a reasoned and substantiated answer. It's time for us to turn the tables, and propose that some entities are TBTS - Too Big To Save. The idea that, say, a nation must be saved from reneging on its debt because the consequences of so doing would be so severe, is now visibly nonsense. If it does that, goes the explanation, it will not be able to get credit anywhere for the foreseeable future, it will lack finance for public works such as schools, hospitals, etc., and will be plunged into such misery that the citizens will turn to revolt.

Far better to "rescue" it with an IMF loan, which incorporates such swingeing demands for retrenchment that the nation in question is forced to destroy public works such as schools, hospitals, etc., and is plunged into such misery that the citizens turn to revolt. Hm. Sounds familiar.

Now which of these two alternatives is better for the citizens? They are identical - except for the fact that "rescue" leaves them even more in debt than they were at the start, whereas reneging leaves them free of debt and thus better equipped to lift themselves from the mess quicker and more effectively. I won't say that this is what has happened in Iceland, whose citizens twice refused to pay debts of dubious ethical validity to the Netherlands and the UK, but certain it is that Iceland is now beginning to rise from the ashes of its collapse, which it was forecast would take years if not decades, had they agreed to the demands of the international community.

When we look at the "rescue" of organisations, be they banks or automobile companies, the justification is even thinner. Let us take the case of SAAB, which looks like returning to the "rescue" table any day now. The thought of unemployment benefits for its 4000 employees might seem large, even larger if one takes into account the possible knock-on effects of unemployment in sub-contractors. But this assumes that the SAAB factories will be destroyed at the same time as the company is liquidated, and the land never again be used for any productive purpose.

But what if these high-tech engineering factories are converted - even at a fire-sale loss - to other production? Manufacture of environmentally friendly power-generating equipment has been suggested. A significant number of the employees would be needed to convert the factories to new production, and an even more significant number would be needed to man them when converted, and even the sub-contractors can surely modify their output to suit the new production? So the damage we are faced with is not the total and eternal loss of job for every employee of SAAB and many employees of sub-contractors, but a temporary slump in the areas affected which could be filled with retraining for the new production, when it starts.

As for the banks, everybody hates the banks these days, and there is some justification for the disapprobation of a branch which has even less of a social conscience than the private sector usually displays. However, looking at the banks a little more dispassionately, there is room here to question the hypothesis that the failure of one - or even more - badly-run banks would cause the general public so to lose faith in the system that all banks would fail in the ensuing run.

For one thing, most people are themselves so indebted to the banks these days that it would ill behove them to try and take their money out. The banks could turn round and ask them to settle up their debts first. For another, those who have more money in the banks than they owe to them have nowhere else than the banks to keep that money safe. However liquid cash in the mattress may be, it is far less safe there in these days of deposit insurance than in the banks. As an aside, the very fear of such a run might be enough to persuade the banks to return to a more realistic gearing ratio than the 40 times which is all too common nowadays.

No, I think there are more arguments for my thesis that these organisations are too big to save than for the reverse. But, in the event that decision-makers reject these arguments, there are still strong arguments for a harder line for any organisation, company or nation, which is "rescued".

I would like to see it generally accepted that one phase of the "rescue" of a company should be that the entire board, and possibly the first ranks of managers, be removed from their posts without recompense (whatever the terms of their contracts), and with reimbursement to the troubled organisation of the last twelve months' emoluments, both salary, bonus and dividends. That these people be placed under a life-long ban against any form of economic or political activity higher than junior employee, with a sentence of life imprisonment for any breach of this ban. They have displayed themselves to be unworthy of the trust to be placed on persons in such a position.

Similarly with nations: fire the entire parliament and government, with a similar life-long ban against any form of economic or political activity. It's a bit hard on the members of parliament in opposition, but this sacrifice of a few innocents would at least make sure that the next generation of politicians acted a little more responsibly as representatives of the people who voted for them, and less with the thought of short-term party interests at heart.

If you agree, start agitating for the concept of TBTS. And remember this: nations "rescued" companies in the last depression. Large nations are coming to the rescue of smaller nations now. Who is going to be there when the large nations find themselves in difficulties? Some of them - Germany, the US, even China are already there. The time is approaching when there won't be anyone or any entity to do the saving, and how far are they going to get shouting "Too Big To Fail" then?

A question of values

2011-01-17T13:40:00.004+01:00

In my original post about New Year's resolutions for the People In Power (PIP), one of my theses was that I would like to see them defending the values of the people who put them in power.

One area where it seems to me that they fall down on this issue is on the question of immigration. The phrase "white man speak with forked tongue" springs to mind, for the attitude of the PIP is cloven, to say the least. In theory they are all for it, because it sounds good to all except, perhaps the extreme right-wing parties. But when it comes to actually converting talk into action, they either drag their feet or act in a way that the general public experiences as contrary to what is acceptable, at least here in Sweden.

Hardly a week goes by without a report in the television news of the immigration authority's attempt to repatriate asylum-seekers to regions of the world that everyone acknowledges to be war-zones, or where people of the same religious or ethnic origin as the asylum-seekers are persecuted even to death. Everyone, that is, except the PIP at the foreign office or the migration authority, who follow the directions of their masters in Washington or Stockholm and refuse to name the region as being a war-zone. If they do that, even the laws of the land will not allow repatriation. And yet...

There is a generally accepted view amongst PIP that "we need more people in this country". The principal reason for this need is apparently to maintain economic growth. But I have some questions, which I believe I share with many people. Which "we" is it that needs more people? That is, who is it who sees the population of a country as being a resource, an input into some process? In a country with a serious level of unemployment, which most countries have as I write, it seems to the majority of people that what we need is not more people, but fewer. However, if you live in a world steered by the laws of supply and demand, it is apparent that more people means cheaper labour. Which perhaps gives a clue to the identity of "we".

A great many people - far too many, unfortunately - see this, and act on the principle of their own insecurity. They do not rank very highly in the society of which they are members. They are used to being by-passed in decisions concerning them, and treated as objects without hopes or dreams. They do not want more people, but for the wrong reason. They are afraid that more people will increase competition for the limited number of employment opportunities, which they see reducing before their eyes as production units are moved overseas to where labour is cheaper. Perhaps if we stopped talking of labour, of human resources, and began talking about people, it would be a little bit more difficult to put people out of work. One of the most disgraceful examples of this kind of thinking came from a former Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson, who, to his shame, talked of his fear of social tourism when the European Union passed laws requiring countries to grant to citizens of other European countries the same social security that they grant to their own. Naturally no such social tourism resulted.

If one turns to the green parties, they are definitely opposed to this thesis that "we need more people", especially if the reason is economic growth. They would like to see, if not economic contraction, at least no more growth as traditionally defined. The greens may not yet be a majority, but they are a big - and growing - minority.

There are nearly seven billion people on this planet, which is estimated to be able to support one billion to the standard in the US, and between one and a half and two billion to the standard in Europe. Assuming for the moment the validity of the unproven thesis that "we need more people" does it not make more sense to take, say, a million poor farmers from China or India and move them to wherever "we" are, rather than procreate a million more home-grown babies? The million farmers and their families are already mature. They would perhaps need re-education in the ways of the West, but they can work and provide for themselves immediately. A new born child is not going to contribute to the well-being of more than a very few for twenty or twenty-five years.

And even worse...

If you travel by taxi in one of our bigger cities, the chances are your chauffeur will be of foreign extraction, quite probably a first-generation immigrant. If you get talking to them, and ask what they did in their home country, very often you will find that they had a position of some responsibility. They were teachers, at all levels from junior school to university level, they were doctors, they were machine engineers. Most of them are educated people, who are always the first targets of repressive regimes. None of them I have met have been janitors, refuse collectors, or taxi drivers in their home countries. If "we" really need more "people" (read productive units or resources) does it not make more sense to make use of these people who are already here and already trained, rather than giving birth to babies who will not become resources for twenty or more years?

The problem is that allowing people into a country, even if one has an immigration authority which acts in direct opposition to the sense of justice of the average person and thus has more of a function of keeping them out, is only half of the problem. You have to take care of them when they are in. You have to integrate them into the community, rather than allowing them to form ghettos of their own where everyone speaks the same language, which is not the language of your country, and where even the shop signs are in a foreign language. You have to accept that even the often unjustly suspect education of a developing country will have given them some part of the education required to meet local standards, find their level of experience, pay them at that level, and train them up to the post they had in their homeland as quickly as possible. For many people their status in the community is a factor of their status in their career. If one has been a doctor, one does not want to remain too long as a medical orderly in one's new country.

So what do we want from the PIP? Change the law so that one pays attention to the actual situation in a country when deciding whether or not to repatriate asylum-seekers. Start an education campaign explaining to the citizens whether, and if so, how much the population of the country needs to be increased, and why, so that people are not reacting out of fear and uncertainty, and open for immigration to meet those targets. Spend a bit of money on integrating the immigrants better - that will be repaid manyfold from the taxes paid by the immigrants when they start working and stop being a burden on the social system. Start looking again at the immigrants who are already here, and utilise their capabilities as much as possible. They will be as grateful as the rest of us. And most importantly, stop treating the citizens of your country as cattle to be bred up in good times and slaughtered in bad. Remember that it is those citizens who put you there, and who pay your wages.

Another New Year's resolution for the PIP

2011-01-14T23:06:00.002+01:00

Only one country has a railway service the customers can depend on, so I have heard, and that country is Switzerland. I only have experience of two - the UK and Sweden. I don't know which is worse. In the UK the trains are disrupted in the autumn - because of the dead leaves falling on the line - and in Sweden during the winter - because of the snow and ice. It seems that the PIP - the People In Power - in the UK hope that, this autumn the leaves will not fall off the trees. They have every year since railways were invented and indeed many millions of years before that, but perhaps not just this year... And in Sweden the PIP don't believe that there will be snow and ice again, not this year. They really don't need to prepare for that again.

Now I don't have recent figures for how it was last autumn in the UK, but I have very fresh information on how it was - and still is - in Sweden this winter. Trains were cancelled in numbers that can only be described as disgraceful. If one counts local traffic, the numbers are in the hundreds of cancelled trains per day on the worst days. During the Christmas rush, with people trying to get home for the holiday, and with only a couple or three days for those who had not taken vacation, there were apparently around thirty cancelled trains a day to and from the capital city, and hundreds of trains seriously delayed from an hour to several hours. And information was generally regarded as almost non-existent. Passengers stood or sat in the Central Station and dared not leave for fear that the situation for just their train might change momentarily, and they would miss their chance if they left the building.

It is now the middle of January, and the situation is better, but still a long way from being resolved. Four weeks ago, shortly before Christmas, I was on my way to Stockholm. I was going to take the 8:15 train. When it arrived I discovered that the 7:15 had been cancelled, and my train was full with people standing in every nook and cranny. Not only that, but the train, which normally has five coaches, this morning only had four. A week later I and my wife were on our way to Stockholm again. We arrived at the station with half an hour to spare before our 10:30 train. We discovered that it was cancelled without declared reason. Fortunately we were in time to take an earlier train which would take us on a round trip through the Swedish countryside, on a two-hour trip instead of the usual one-hour journey to Stockholm, and which would still get us to Stockholm an hour earlier than waiting for the next train. Yesterday we were once more on our way to Stockholm. The 8:15 commuter train is now more or less permanently cancelled so we had to take the earlier commuter train at 7:15. This consisted of the usual five coaches, but we nonetheless managed to get a seat. On the way home one of our alternative trains was cancelled. The one we opted for was delayed by half an hour. We could not leave the platform in seven degrees below zero in case the delayed train came earlier than expected. Other trains that we saw were delayed by up to a hour. Today our son came on a visit on the same train. It was again delayed, this time by only twenty minutes.

This whole sorry story is a repeat of the situation last winter, after which the officers of the railway corporation promised to make sure that nothing of the sort happened again. Twelve months later we are there again.

What is going on with this so important societal communications system? The officers of the company have now blamed a lack of resources which has resulted in poor maintenance of track and rolling stock for many years. Recently the national corporation was divided up into two, one part to take care of the track, the other of rolling stock, a part of a plan to open up the national corporation to competition from other operators of rolling stock.

Both parts, the corporation in charge of track and that in charge of rolling stock have long seen their board used as a retirement home for deposed politicians who, notwithstanding the best pension system in the country, apparently cannot manage without a number of cushy board fees to augment their income. What do these people know about running a railway system? The only thing they have learnt during a professional political career is how to please the PIP.

I have a suggestion: by all means pay the deposed politicians their board fee. By all means give them a room in the railway headquarters in which to meet and drink coffee and make important decisions. Just don't let them make decisions about the railway system. Or if they do, appoint one of the secretarial staff to see that these decisions are run through the shredder and do not filter down through the system. And do not allow them to communicate with the press about the railway system. No matter what they are paid, it will be cheaper to keep them out of mischief, and put the real power in the hands of railway professionals.

Unfortunately I am forced to seriously doubt the competence of the next layer in these enterprises as well, for the reasons below, so I would like to see them put on six months' probation. That way there is time to dispense with them before next winter if they show no signs of being able to cope.

Why, for example, when a commuter train is cancelled, are the coaches which would have made up that train not shared out to the two nearest trains? This is not rocket science. If each train holds, say, 1000 people and one train is cancelled, that means that up to 1000 people must be accommodated on other trains, Let us assume these 1000 divide themselves equally, then the train before the cancelled one and the train after will each be carrying up to 1500 people in accommodation designed for 1000. Even more important, the cancelled train was conveying not just passengers, but coaches intended to form a return train later in the day. If these coaches do not travel to their destination, some train in the reverse direction must be cancelled. Which means that two other trains designed for 1000 passengers will each be carrying 1500 passengers home.

Why is it impossible, with the electricity supply running overhead, to install some system of warming for points which will keep them free of ice. It only has to be turned on when the temperature becomes seriously lower than freezing point?

Why, in the age of information technology, is it so hard to keep the customer in the dark about what is going on? What is so hard about putting more than the word "Delayed" on the arrivals and departures display? Why can the same information - or even more - not be relayed over the loudspeaker system? Why is it impossible to do a deal with all the caterers in the station building that a valid ticket is good for one cup of coffee and a sandwich or equivalent every hour?

Why has an enterprise which is dependent upon both a functioning track and signal system and functioning rolling stock been divided up into two? It doesn't take a genius to see that the part which is responsible for rolling stock loses all control over the track. Unless, of course, there are serious penalties for a non-functional track and signal system, which kick in from the first minutes.

I would like the PIP to reconsider some of their decisions over the past few years, including reversing some of them if necessary, with the thought that the railway system is intended to provide reliable communication for the citizens of the country, and for goods transport, and with the aim of providing a service which can compete with that of Switzerland for being the best and most reliable in the world.

New Year's resolutions for the people in power

2011-01-11T17:56:00.005+01:00

It's January and the holidays are over. During the holidays I used some of the time to think about where my life is now, and where it's going and how to get from here to there. Many people do it. Some call it making New Year's resolutions.

My life is actually looking pretty good at the moment. I am working at things I enjoy doing, which hopefully will bring in some cash to augment my other income. The garden is resting under about a metre of snow at the moment, so there's not much to do there. I have some repair work I can carry out in my workshop ready for the spring. My first book has just been published and writing the second one is going well. So I don't have much to be upset about, that I'd like to change. It took some time to find out what disturbs me that I'd like to do something about.

What disturbs me is the way is the way I'm being shoved to the bottom of the heap by the people in charge. Not just me, of course, but all of us ordinary Joes living our lives, trying to make the best of things, and wondering why it gets harder and harder instead of easier and easier. So I'd like the people in charge to take a good look at what they are doing to me and millions - billions - like me, and think again.

I'm tired of being the lender of last resort, the person who foots all the bills, whether for mistakes or deliberate action. I'd like the people in charge to remember who put them there - at least in so-called democracies - and who pays their wages. It's our interests they're there to protect. It's our individual weakness that they should be protecting from the power of gigantic multi-national companies. It's our values they should be supporting. It's our welfare they should be improving. Let's take a few examples.

Here in Sweden, for the second year on the run, we are paying crippling prices for electricity to our homes and businesses. It now appears that for many years we have been paying much more than we should for electric power. This in a country in which nearly half the electricity comes from water power, and slightly over half from nuclear power. Why? The following explanation is based on my own research and represents the picture as I understand it. The electricity market in Sweden and nearby countries has been made so complicated that it is very difficult to get a handle on exactly how it works, but one thing is clear - it works to the disadvantage of the consumer. How?

Because for thirty years the politicians have been frozen in a debate over a rigged referendum on nuclear power which resulted in a decision to phase out nuclear power, but without providing any reliable alternatives. Instead of taking the lead in educating the populace in the economics of power generation, trying to swing opinion into being more favourably inclined to nuclear power whilst alternatives could be developed, politicians have quarrelled over how quickly nuclear power should be switched off. Research into nuclear power generation was actually forbidden by law. As a result, nuclear power stations which were designed to run for perhaps twenty years have been kept running by a process of artificial respiration far beyond their planned lifetime. They require more and more service, and are in the process of being updated with newer and safer technology, which was never intended to be grafted onto plants of this age.

The process of servicing these power plants is time-consuming. Since plants can most easily be shut down without adverse effects for customers during the summer, the price of servicing is highest then, and lowest during the winter when no-one in his right mind would take a power plant out of service, since it is during the winter that most power is needed. So the power companies postpone their service until the winter for the cheap servicing rates. But aren't they losing money as a result?

No because they then have to import electricity from abroad. For some reason it appears that the electricity companies can buy the power they need at wholesale prices on one scale of charges but the price at which they sell to their customers is based on the marginal price of the dearest form of electricity (which I understand is coal-produced electricity). So by not generating their own electricity they are making fortunes. So much so that many large industries are running at far below optimal productive capacity as they are not competitive when paying the higher rates.

The price to consumers could be reduced at a stroke by the government changing the method of calculation so that it is not the marginal price of the dearest form of electricity, but is related to the wholesale purchase price paid by the electricity companies.

Unfortunately the government also profits from the high price of electricity. A substantial part of the price to consumers is energy taxes of one kind or another, so a high price benefits the government's coffers. Even worse, we pay VAT not just on the price of the electricity, but on the taxes, too. And VAT on electricity is 25%. So once again, the more electricity costs, the more the government makes.

What would I like to ask the people in charge to do about this? In the first place, stop squabbling over who said what thirty years ago. It's not relevant any more. Start building more power stations. We already need them. We're going to need them even more. And according to one well-researched book, it can take up to thirty years to get a new power station online, with decisions on location, hearings of concerned citizens and other entities, appeals on the grounds of environmental effects or land value effects, etc. Dismantle the system of pricing to end users based on marginal price of the dearest input form. Require planned service to be carried out between May and September and impose penal taxation for planned service outside this period. And impose your VAT on the service being provided. Taxes are not a service being provided. But most important. Remember who's paying your wages and what they're paying you for, and start taking some responsibility.

Some of my other New Year's resolutions for the people in power will follow.

Sad days in the hen house

2010-06-07T09:46:00.002+02:00

We have had a couple of visits from the fox, first on Friday night and again on Saturday night. Score: 3-0 to the fox.

Earlier this year we had the whole flock in the main hen house under the strong - not to say aggressive - arm of Arvid the rooster. Amongst the birds were Kalle, a young rooster raised last summer by Michelle, the only product of her sitting on seven eggs. Another was Astrid, who came from the incubator. And last Christmas I bought six new hens from a local production unit where they had been pushing out eggs from the age of two months until it was time, at six months of age, to go to the baby-food factory and become chicken and peas.

At the production unit they had been in a flock of 1500 hens - the unit has four such flocks - and their plumage made them look like the poultry equivalent of the a-league. Now in our hen house, which is heavily insulated, there is an infra-red lamp over the perches. But these birds were not used to perches. In the production unit they probably had a sloping floor up to the nest boxes, and my six hens stayed resolutely on the floor, notwithstanding that I came in each evening for a week and lifted them up to the perches.

This winter was unusually cold and unusually long, and their plumage did not improve from sitting on the cold floor, so far from the warm lamp. I was quite worried that some of them would not make it, but they all did, and when warmer - or rather less cold - days returned, two of them were in bad shape. At the same time Kalle had been taking much punishment from Arvid, so I decided to move Kalle and the two nearly naked hens to a compound of their own where I could keep a better eye on them. I used a little hen house which I had made last year for a broody hen. It was big enough for the three of them, and there, in addition to the usual fodder and what they could pick up from wandering around the garden, they received a bowl of warm porridge every morning and sometimes in the afternoon.

The change was dramatic. From being nearly naked the two hens had a full dress of plumage within a matter of weeks, and began to put on weight. The real victory was when we got the first egg from this little flock. Kalle, although not quite as au fait with the duties of a rooster as Sergeant-Major Arvid, was kind and friendly, and the three of them came over to see what we were doing whenever we were in their part of the garden.

We have had our setbacks with this little flock. The magpies, who have built a nest in our pear tree, have learnt how to get into the little hen house, pluck out an egg and take it away for later consumption. Or sometimes they have merely made a hole in the egg where it lies, eaten the contents and left the shell to be picked up later. A full-scale war has now been declared, which won't end without bloodshed, preferably magpie blood. At the moment the score is 4-0 to the magpies.

On Friday I got tired of the way Arvid and the other hens mobbed little Astrid, and decided to move her over to Kalle's flock. I had tried this before during the day, and Kalle had immediately gone to attack, but this time I decided to move her when the flock had gone to roost, and it seemed to have been more successful.

And that night the fox struck. I was surprised the following morning to find two of the hens running around the garden when I came out, for normally they can't get out by themselves. When I came to their little patch, I saw that the gate was pulled down and that there were many feathers around. The feathers were mostly a pale beige, Astrid's colour, and I assumed that she had been taken. But Kalle was nowhere to be found.

I finally came to the conclusion that Kalle had died at his post protecting his flock, whilst the hens had made their escape. Presumably the fox had come back for Astrid later. Imagine my joy when I went over to the main hen house later, and little Astrid came running round the corner, complaining of all she had been through during the night. So only Kalle was gone. Astrid immediately rejoined her old flock, and I tried to return the two remaining members of Kalle's flick to the main hen house, but without success. The two ladies allowed themselves to be driven over to Arvid's quarters where he did his best to seduce them to stay, but they weren't having any, and wandered back to their own ground.

Later that evening they had not returned to the little hen house, which perhaps carried such traumatic memories, and, notwithstanding a long search with flashlights, they could not be found. Well, if we can't find them, who know where their favourite haunts are, no-one else can either, I thought. How wrong can you be. During Saturday night the fox came back twice, and took each of them. I wandered around all over the next morning, looking for them, until I came to the new potato patch. There lay a mass of feathers, and I knew one had gone. But where was the other? I wandered farther, and in a distant corner of the garden, under our large birch tree, the one that give me birch sap for wine, lay another pile of feathers. RIP.

So now our flock is down to Arvid and his eight ladies, four buff orpingtons and four lohmans, all that remain of the six we rescued from the production unit before Christmas. And to make matters worse, it seems that all our hens have gone on strike. We have been getting one egg a day from the whole flock for the last couple of weeks, and have been forced to actually buy eggs at the store.

Mind you, I have circumstantial evidence which points to the magpies lying behind the reduced output. There was an empty egg shell on the grass outside the main hen house yesterday, and I suspect that the magpies are raiding there as well. So now I'm laying evil plans for the elimination of at least one family of magpies.

Why? (1)

2010-04-13T20:51:00.004+02:00

A news item from the UK attracted my attention yesterday. Apparently the British parliament passed the Digital Economy Bill, the UK's answer to France's notorious Hadopi law, and Sweden's IPRED law. The fact that it passed is not surprising. How it passed is.

Whatever one's point of view on the downloading of material from the internet, some of which may be copyrighted, irrespective of one's view that cutting someone off from the internet in these days is a serious infringement of their ability to conduct their lawful business, and may, in fact, hit the wrong person or persons and affect perfectly legal activities of innocent persons, these are side issues for the purpose of my piece today.

This bill was passed after two hours of discussion. In order to get it passed significant passages were either pulled or reworded, producing a bill which in some respects is even more draconian than the original. And the two major parties in the British parliament were in agreement on the passing of this bill. My question is why was it so important that this bill be passed now, since it would anyway be passed in the next parliament after the elections, since both Labour and Conservative voted for it. And if it was so important, why was it left until the last minute, when time for reflection and discussion was so limited? And what was the point of discussion anyway, since both major parties were going to vote for it? With the UK whip system, it would be passed no matter what the objections.

One has to ask: who's paying them? Who is paying the MPs who voted for this bill or at least the ministers who forced it through the house, since the MPs would do what they were told by the whips anyway? Normally legislation in any country passes almost unmarked through the whole process. But sometimes, and more and more often, it seems to me, governments seek to pass legislation which goes right against the citizens' sense of what is ethically acceptable or proportional to the problem being addressed. This is one such case.

Not only in the UK but in France, Sweden - especially in Sweden - and in the European parliament the question of parliamentary response to file sharing has awoken a sleeping dragon. I saw the effects most clearly here in Sweden, where demonstrations, email campaigns and other forms of protest have been organised against virtually all the recent legislation for the digital surveillance of the citizenry. And I know that our Euro-MPs had full inboxes in their email when the Telecom package was being discussed. So one would have expected a little more attention to detail in respect of the Digital Economy Bill, some attempt, perhaps, to explain the point of view of the government and to try and build up some form of concensus.

So, I ask again, why this rush, and the corollary question, who is paying them? It certainly isn't the citizenry.

Emission rights for women!

2010-03-21T15:25:00.007+01:00

Happy family in the summer sun

One fact which is occasionally trotted out is that the current population of the world, at six billion, is five times what the world can cope with, if all of them had the same standard of living as the West. To be sure the six billion figure quoted is several years old, and the actual figure today is about 6.8 billion. And not everybody needs to live in quite the wasteful way that is meant in the reference to the Western standard of living. But even so, if we are really to bring everyone up to a reasonable standard of living, with clean water, enough food, a good infrastructure, and connection to the Internet, then I think we can agree that we're going to put a strain on the resources of this little planet.

I remembered this when I saw an interesting article in the debate column of one of our local newspapers recently which carried the title "With today's birthrate we will soon be 134,000 billion". Soon in this case was the year 2300.

Of course one could never actually reach that number. Thomas Malthus' four horsemen would see to that, long before we even reached a trillion. But the shock effect was probably successful in getting more people to read the article than might otherwise have done so.

The author's main point was that the global birthrate, currently 2.6 children per woman, according to UN statistics must be reduced. If the birthrate were reduced to 2.35, the global population in 2300 would only be 36 billion, still unrealiseable. A birthrate of 2.1 would give us a global population of nine billion in 2060, after which it would level off. And finally a birthrate equivalent to that in Sweden and the UK, 1.85, would, according to the author, reduce the population to 2.3 billion by 2300, still double the number the world can support, but nonetheless only a third of what it is now. (I must admit I have my reservations about the arithmetic.*)

But reducing the birthrate is going to meet with opposition from a great many directions. Most notably, of course, from a silly old man who lives in twenty-first century Rome, but thinks he lives in first century Galilee. As long as the catholic church makes it a sin to restrict one's family size, we have a big problem on our hands. However, the pope is not alone in his anathema for family planning, of course, The same can be attributed to all of the three world religions which stem from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All of them want to conquer the world by overwhelming it by sheer force of numbers. The problem is that they might just succeed, if we can't persuade them to listen to reason.

A milder form of the opposition to birthrate reduction was a proposition weathered by the local Christian Democratic party here in Sweden a year or two ago which, if I remember the details correctly, would give families a state subsidy of 10000 crowns (at today's rates about $1400) for each new child. Whether it was a one-off payment or a yearly one to age 18, I can't remember, and it is irrelevant since the idea was quietly buried, but not before it had been discussed on the television sofa. I vividly remember two of the panelists that morning pompously consigning the plan to the waste basket, but, in the next breath proclaiming that "we need a larger population in this country, but that's not the way to go about it".

I wondered which "we" it was who needed a larger population, and how they had the gall to see the citizens as some kind of tame resource, like the slaves of the American south, to be bred for "our" purposes. Assuming it had something to do with industrial production, it fell short of rationality, for at the time there was near record unemployment, so that one could say that what "we" wanted was actually fewer resources. And if "we" really needed a larger population, why not offer the chance to, say, a million Chinese farmers, who would probably jump at the chance to move to the freedom of the West, and improve their own welfare at the same time as they generated value for the local population. China would never notice the loss.

It occurred to me that some present or future Dan Brown or John Grisham could write a story about a lone campaigner for the idea of emission rights for women, whereby all women had the right to give birth to one child, but must persuade another woman to abstain, if they wanted a second, or third child. Presumably money would change hands, which would give a new meaning to human value. And if the woman who abstained subsequently decided she wanted a child, she, too would have to negotiate with another woman to give up her "emission right" in order to restore the abstainer's original right. The problem is one can see that the hero of the story would probably have been assassinated before page eleven, and where is your story then?

* I can see that, if two people produce 1.85 babies, then the population should eventually reduce, when the parents die. My problem with the maths is that China, with it's modified one child policy, claims to have a birthrate of 1.8, and yet the population of China has increased from just under one billion in 1978 when the policy was introduced to 1.35 billion in 2008.

2010-03-15T12:20:00.002+01:00

What's this? Santa Claus' reindeer tracks on our roof?
Nope, just two curious cats!

One of the headlines in the Swedish newspapers today is about how Finnish Sampo's Chairman, Björn Wahlroos, is out to create a scandinavian superbank. His first target is Swedish Swedbank, which should be going pretty cheaply just now since it is the bank most at risk from shaky over-investments in the Baltic states. If Estland and Latvia decide to put the blame for their rocky economies where the bulk of it should lie, and say "screw you, Jack" to their creditors, Swedbank is quite likely to go belly up.

Not that it is that possibility that worries me. What I see is the plan to make banks that are "too big to fail" into even bigger banks that are "even too much bigger to fail" when what the world needs most is the exact opposite, big banks being turned into smaller banks that are "small enough to fail". And small enough to give the consumer a little healthy competition.

Is there really no-one in all the governments of the world who can stand against this process of globalisation and its other face, oligopolisation, and say "enough"? Globalisation is like capitalism and, for that matter communism. They are good ideas in theory, but none of them takes account of the human factor.

Globalisation, say its proponents, is the best thing that could happen for developing countries. Bullshit. The best thing that could happen for developing countries is help to develop their own companies, based in their own countries and subject to those countries' laws and economic needs, not gangs of capitalist vikings (sorry, Iceland!) coming in, ripping up everything that's not tied down and some things that are, and taking it away to their longships for transport to the Netherlands Antilles where it is resold to the home office at many times the purchase price, thus reducing the actual displayed profit in the home country. After some twenty years of rampant globalisation, how much really have the developing nations been lifted from their former poverty? And how much more powerful have the global companies become? How many global companies now have an economy larger than all but the largest countries? They didn't put all that money into the development of the developing countries.

Somehow we have to find a way to build ethics into our legal systems, both nationally and globally, so that activities such as the Icelandic banks engaged in, selling loans tied to foreign currency to their countrymen and at the same time selling the home currency short, all of which was legal but not ethical, can be punished. It would be especially nice if the punishment fitted the crime, such as confiscation of a multiple of the amount of the profit. I would like to see some university - how about my old alma mater, the University of Iceland - introduce a compulsory course in both the law and economics faculties on ethical practices and ethical legal systems.

Well, one can always dream...

2010-03-01T12:26:00.006+01:00

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn", composed in 1836 for the commemoration of one of the starting events of the American War of Independence. But the flags in my picture are Icelandic flags. And what, you may ask, is the connection between the American War of Independence and the Icelandic flag?

Quite simply that perhaps someday some future Icelandic skáld will write an ode to the Icelandic citizens who may cast their vote in next Saturday's referendum on the IceSave law. I say "perhaps" and "may" since forces no less powerful than those which faced the embattled farmers are now working to ensure that the Icelandic citizens will not be allowed to cast their vote on Saturday. I fear those forces may win.

I have been at a loss to explain the eagerness with which Icelandic politicians - and, more surprisingly, their British and Dutch counterparts - have striven to find a solution to the IceSave issue and thus avoid the referendum. After leisurely arguing in parliament for most of the past year, as soon as the President refused to ratify the law, the politicians of all parties suddenly began feverish activity to render the referendum unnecessary. Possible solutions have included a newer and marginally better agreement resulting in a new law; rescinding the old law; secret talks with the US and British ambassadors to Iceland reported on Wikileaks, just to name those that have become public knowledge.

In my innocence I assumed that it was as simple as political bloodymindedness on the part of our elected leaders that, when they have told us what we are to do, they're damn well not going to let us have an alternative opinion. But it is much bigger than that. The answer finally came out in The Financial Times leader of February 26. The final paragraph says:

"London and the Hague have also created an immediate danger. Treating their claims as sovereign obligations means an eventual Icelandic rejection could make investors see sovereign defaults as less unthinkable than before. And the wrath of the Icelandic public raises the prospect of citizens elsewhere* refusing to pay for public debts seen as someone else’s fault. A UK government at the mercy of bond markets should watch its step."

Even here the real message is hidden. The Financial Times sees a danger to the heavily-indebted UK if its creditors see that a country's citizens may refuse to accept unreasonable charges made on them. But the creditors, read banks, are even more afraid that, if the citizens begin to question the reasonableness or even legality of such charges, they may equally begin to question the hypothesis which they have been sold by so many governments that the banks are too big to be allowed to fail, and that nothing can be done to change that.

It is my simple contention that they cannot allow that to happen, and thus, by whatever means, legal or illegal, the referendum next Saturday will be stopped. I hope, for the sake of the citizens of many other countries, that the Icelanders manage to hold out for five more days.

* Like, say, the citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, currently being beggared by the claims of Swedish banks.

A Robin Hood we could do with more of

2010-02-25T23:28:00.004+01:00

Another house, not far from ours, that I fell in love with once...

I saw an article in our local paper about an unknown hacker who is working in the spirit of Wikileaks. This is a link to the original news item, courtesy of the BBC.

Apparently this person, who calls himself Neo (and guess where he got that name from), is part of a group which call themselves The Fourth Awakening People's Army. The group claim to have hacked into 1000 Latvian companies, including the banks, and downloaded seven million confidential documents from the tax authorities. Selected tidbits of this information have been sent to Latvian TV, and claim to expose bank and other directors who have received state support but nonetheless paid themselves bonuses in contradiction with claims made when the state aid was received.

Latvia, as you may know, is even further into its economic crisis than Iceland, and is under similar pressure to that being applied to Iceland to accept responsibility for the immense debt that principally Swedish banks have placed the country under. It occurs to me that we need more Neo's working for a lot more countries. In fact Iceland would be a good place for a potential hacker community to test its skills. And a lot of Icelanders, including one of Iceland's principal bloggers would like to hear from them.

Talking of Wikileaks, this site, which is the whistleblower's safe haven and a mote in the eyes of many governments and companies with skeletons in their closets, is still more or less off-line. They're trying to raise the money to keep running. I've paid my dues to them, and I encourage others to do likewise. It doesn't have to be much. My contribution was only 250 Swedish crowns or, say, 40 US dollars. But Wikileaks needs a further 250 000 US dollars, and the world needs Wikileaks as much as Latvia needs Neo and his army.

2010-02-23T16:20:00.003+01:00

I wanted a summer picture again.
This is the meadow up to the barn

An otherwise uninteresting item of news this morning dealt with a split in the Swedish social democratic party over what, in English, might be called "close-to-home services". It concerned the party's attitude to tax breaks for ordinary citizens for services in and around the home, such as cleaning, baby-minding, repairs and renovations and the like. These were introduced by the current right wing government* as part of their job stimulus package - they came to power on the slogan that they wanted to get people back to work. The left wing* opposition, including the social democrats, was outraged. They had visions of housemaids and nannies in uniforms and little caps, curtseying to the rich, like something out of Upstairs, Downstairs.

The result of the tax rebate was that in less than three years, over 11000 'new' jobs have been created, and any number of small businesses formed to handle the market. Of course, these are far from all being new jobs. Many are formerly black jobs that have become white, and result in better conditions for the employees and more tax money for the state. And the beneficiaries are not the bankers and directors the left wing feared, but ordinary middle class people whose lives are so hectic that they - principally the women, of course - just don't have time to cope.

Of the three parties in the left wing block the greens were the first to realise that scrapping this tax rebate would piss off the middle class, but also piss off the formerly unemployed, now working in close-to-home services, who would once again be out of a job. Today we heard the abovementioned report that one phalanx of the social democrats wants to keep the tax rebate whilst the main party line is that it will be scrapped. I saw in this news item a symptom of one of our society's problems and a glimmer of hope.

The symptom is the main party line, that something popular with a large part of the population, something that people have voted for with their wallets, something that is working as intended, is against party policy and should be scrapped. It's a symptom of the total estrangement of politicians in every country from the actual wishes of the citizens. Everywhere one looks one sees a conflict between the views of the rulers and the views of the ruled, to the extent that one can speak of a we versus they situation. Very occasionally, often over some minor point, there will be a massive outcry in the press or via internet, and the government will scratch a plan or more likely postpone it until they have had time to bring the power of the media into play to change the people's minds, or enough of them to be able to effect the original change.

The hope I spoke of is that some politicians - usually the younger ones, understandably enough - are beginning to realise that they are painting themselves into a corner, making unnecessary enemies of the people they rule. Unfortunately I'm afraid I have difficulty buying their conversion. Their older colleagues have so damaged the public opinion of politicians that all I see is opportunism.

One problem the social democrats have, and probably the reason for their holding to the party line is that the third party in the left block, called simply "The Left", (formerly the communists) is so far removed from reality that one can hardly say they live on the same planet as the rest of us, and the idea of some people working so that other people can have a slightly easier life is anathema to them.

Another symptom of the estrangement of politicians from the people is playing itself out now in Iceland. That country, as many people know, is still struggling with the effects of the total collapse of its economy a year and a half ago, at the hands of some extremely thuggish and, to my way of thinking, psychopathic bankers. A new government was voted in on the banderole of openness in government, openness in the investigation into the causes of the collapse and the protection of households from the effects of the collapse.

The result is not encouraging. The people in key positions in the collapsed financial system are back in the same or similar positions in the reconstructed banks, the report of a parliamentary committee into the causes of the collapse have been delayed from November 1 to February 1 to February 24 to March 1. The government has made no attempt to alleviate the situation of the households of the country, who are waiting for executive auctions of their homes and belongings. These auctions have, to be sure, been postponed three months today (so as to place them after the local elections in April).

And the government has spent the greater part of the past year negotiating for the repayment of bank guarantees to Britain and the Netherlands (the so-called IceSave business) instead of taking the matter to the European court to challenge the legality of the debt And after the President listened to 20% of the population, who signed a petition asking him not to ratify the agreement, the government have since been in constant negotiations with the current opposition, the ones they were elected to replace and the ones with a significant responsibility for the collapse, to find a way to avoid the referendum that is a necessary consequence of the President's refusal. In other words, they're more scared of being put in their place by the citizens than they are of trying to put together a new deal involving their political adversaries, who have everything to gain by becoming a party to the renewed negotiations with the Netherlands and Britain.

I'll be coming back to this issue of the estrangement of governments from the governed, you may be sure of that.

* "right wing" and "left wing" are relative terms. It has been said that the Brits and certainly the Americans would call them the left wing and the very left wing respectively.

Things don't always go as you planned...

2010-02-18T12:29:00.003+01:00

Tired of winter pictures?

Arvid leads his ladies to something good

As most of you know, last Sunday was... well, yes, it was Saint Valentine's Day, but it was also the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. I sent HNY messages to all my friends and even did a small piece on the event here. And I planned to make some Chinese food in the evening, but that was postponed as my better half had already planned something else.

Never mind, on Tuesday I was told we would be driving in to Eskilstuna, our nearest town, and I took the opportunity to suggest that we go in the afternoon and stay for dinner at our favourite Oriental - actually Mongolian - restaurant, Bamboo House, which has an unbelievable oriental buffet. This was cheerfully agreed to, and I printed out a little cheat sheet of Chinese phrases in pinyin, which included the Mandarin for Happy New Year, gōng hè xīn xǐ.

For those of you for whom the term pinyin is new, this is a way of representing languages which use Chinese characters in latin characters, with accents over the vowels to show how they are to be spoken. The straight line over the 'o' in gōng means that the vowel is pronounced on one note, whereas the 'e' in hè slides down the tone scale as one says the word.

As we arrived at the restaurant I took a last quick look at the cheat sheet. Inside we were greeted by a young lady of oriental appearance, to whom I said "nǐ hǎo", or "good day", and received the same back. This was a good start. So, with the phrase fresh in my mind, I tried "gōng hè xīn xǐ" to be met by a blank look of misunderstanding.

"I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese," she explained. "I'm from Thailand. But I know "nǐ hǎo".

OK, we had a good laugh and I explained what I had intended to say, which, of course, had no significance for her.

A little later I was on my way to take a second helping and saw a young chef refilling the buffet. Out with the cheat sheet again, then I tried once more in my best Mandarin. Again a look of total incomprehension. And I thought I had a talent for language! Once again I explained what I had tried to say, and this time met with another reaction. This guy was very grateful for my good wishes, as he shared the Chinese New Year, but he himself was from Vietnam, and didn't understand Mandarin.

And the moral of this story? Don't assume because you're in an Oriental restaurant, even one with Chinese associations, that the staff are necessarily Chinese.

Actually, I should have been warned. You would be amazed at the number of pizzerias in Sweden where the staff talk arabic or farsi amongst themselves. It's enough for the blonde Swedes that they have black hair and work in a pizzeria, and everyone assumes they are, if not from Napoli, at least Italian. But don't greet them with "bon giorno" unless you're very, very sure!

gōnghèxīnxǐ - Happy Chinese New Year

2010-02-13T17:58:00.006+01:00

New Year's decorations in GuangDong
Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Hope I got the Mandarin pinyin phrase right. There were four variants on the on-line English Chinese dictionary I use. Whether or not, a very Happy Chinese New Year to all who read this.

I have become interested in Chinese culture since one of the principal characters in the novel I'm currently working on comes from China, in fact from the province of GuangXi, just to the west of GuangDong, where the above picture was taken.

Here's another picture of children in a martial arts dance during the Chinese New Year, this one courtesy of ChinaPictures.org

And that's it for this post.

Some unnerving headlines this evening...

2010-02-10T23:23:00.003+01:00

A light at the end of the tunnel or a long, cold winter?

In my scan of newspapers this evening I came upon three very worrying headlines, all from the Telegraph on-line.

First was Barack Obama 'Doesn't begrudge bankers their million dollar bonuses' which to me means that we've been thrown to the wolves again. Maybe Timothy Geithner has whispered to him that he can't do anything about re-regulating the banks without having the WTO breathe down his neck.

Then I saw that China orders retreat from risky assets. What they mean by risky assets is almost anything in dollars that is not guaranteed by the US Government. If they try to unload, for example, their holdings in Californian debt, Arnie could be in deeper shit than in the Terminator films.

And then the real frightener - worse than Wolfman: Britains quarter of a trillion pound exposure to the PIIGS. No, this is not an expensive agricultural research establishment. PIIGS stands for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, all of which are pretty rocky at the moment. Now Britain is in for a quarter of a trillion pounds in these countries, but some of the other European countries are in for even more. Britains figure is 16% of GDP. But the table in the article shows that France is in for 30% of its GDP, the Netherlands for 29% and Switzerland for 21%. That's got to be big money in all these cases. One really scary fact is that Ireland itself is in for 34% of GDP in these countries, presumably in the other four, and Portugal for 24%. All of which makes me wonder just how safe the Euro is. If the Greek government caves in to the massive national protests, then the whole of Europe could become bacon overnight.

Standard and Poor threatens Greece

2010-02-10T22:53:00.003+01:00

I just saw an article in one of the Swedish newspapers about the crisis of confidence in Greece. One point that was made was that Standard and Poor has threatened Greece that their creditworthiness can be damaged.

Is this the same Standard and Poor which rated toxic credit as AAA a couple or three years ago, and, together with Moody's and the other credit agencies, played a big role in unscrupulous finance institutions being able to unload the shit onto unsuspecting individuals, councils, charities and other investors who trusted them?

Doesn't sound like much of a threat to Greece. More of an honourable mention.

Come to think of it, the names of these agencies: Standard and Poor. Well, poor at least is what those investors are. And Moody's? Well yeah, I guess I'd be pretty moody if someone told me that toxic waste was a good investment.

Quick and - I hope - funny

2010-02-10T13:33:00.003+01:00

Tired of winter pictures? Here's a summery one of our hens

Sometimes one gets a bit jaded with the lack of originality in the presentation of news on television. I have the definite impression that the object is more entertainment value than information distribution. And the requirement that few items should be longer than a couple of minutes leaves most of them at a most unsatisfactory point.

Why didn't (s)he ask the obvious follow-up question? How can they be so stupid? If they know it's wrong, why don't they change it? These are just some of the questions which the watching public ask.

I was particularly amused with the article recently about a small town which had been so badly affected by the heavy snow-falls here in Sweden recently that they had not been able to plough the snow from the streets properly, and had created a meter high wall of snow outside the cars which were legally parked when the plough passed, which prevented them from driving away, to the chagrin of the owners. Even here in Sweden not everybody carries a spade in the trunk during winter, especially not in town traffic. Imagine the stupidity of the city council which then sent out its parking attendants to fine all the owners whose cars they had themselves prevented from moving.

Here at last is revenge on the news reporters, if not on the decision makers. Taken from a new series running in England, apparently, this shows just how to make a television news item. Does it look familiar?

Sunny Banks

2010-02-06T19:18:00.004+01:00

The cottage in winter - well, it is winter now!

What's with the Sunny Banks, I hear people ask. Well, Sunny Banks is a rough translation of the name of our house. In Swedish it's called Solbacken, which is the name one of our grandchildren selected during that first summer when we more or less camped here before we had officially moved in. Like childhood, our memory is that every day was sunny that summer. Or maybe it really was so. It does seem to us that there are an unusually large number of sunny days here.

We live on a couple of hectares of beautiful Sörmland, about 100 km south west of Stockholm. Three quarters of the land is forest - we'll never want for firewood! - the rest garden, formerly flower garden. We're slowly turning it into kitchen garden although I'm afraid my better half will not allow me to root up all the flowers. We're getting to the stage where we see roses as weeds!

There's the main house, which you can see in the right hand column above - until I change it - then there's a small cottage and a barn as large as the house. We have a huge greenhouse and, behind the cottage, an earth cellar where we store our vegetables and fruit from autumn until they are eaten. At the time of writing, we have maybe a month's potatoes left, some carrots, onions, beetroots, and probably enough apples to last the winter. Oh, and some pickled cucumbers.

We have built a swimming pool where the old kitchen garden used to be - a paltry kitchen garden it was - and we have installed geothermal energy and cut our fuel bills by about three quarters. We have some chickens which more than provide us with eggs and some meat. We also sell to one or two neighbours. And I have my plans for other animals and maybe birds, but don't tell my better half...

Make them small enough to fail

2010-02-06T09:40:00.005+01:00

The barn in winter

Whenever there's an economic crisis, whether it's limited to one country or covers a region or is, like the current one, universal, some banks somewhere land in a worse situation than the others. When that happens, the cry we hear is "they're too big to fail", and this mantra is used to justify the government going in with millions or billions or even trillions of kronks* to rescue the banks in the danger zone, and, at the same time, to shore up the other big banks for safety's sake. Sometimes, but not often, a fraction of the support may be paid back.

And then comes the day when the government sounds the all clear, and promises that they will do everything they can to make sure it never happens again. We're at that stage now, with irrelevant chat about the size of bonuses, possibly a new Glass-Steagal act, not just in the US but elsewhere as well. But none of this really cuts it. It's just cosmetic.

Why don't they just force a break-up of these big banks that are too big to fail into smaller units that are small enough to fail. Not only would it save the tax payers a lot of money, it would increase competition in the banking sector, which is good for the consumer, and the very thought that they could be left to fail would undoubtedly change the behaviour of most bankers for the better.

Now I'm not saying that this would be an easy reform to enforce. Quite apart from the lobbying power of the financial sector, it might be hard to say what is a reasonable size for a bank. Would one go on the number of employees or the size of the balance sheet? A geographical area perhaps? But, whatever criterion is selected, the important issue would be that no one person could control more than one bank either through shares or position in the bank, and that the bank was small enough to fail.

Or here's a thought - forbid the limitation of liability in the finance sector.

* A kronk is a unit of currency, whatever takes your fancy. When you get into these numbers, it makes no difference anyway.

Revolt against parliament - why not?

2010-02-05T14:52:00.006+01:00

(This is what the main house looks like in winter.)

In an earlier lifetime I had a connection with Iceland, as a result of which I have been paying more attention than the average citizen to the events leading up to, and in particular resulting from the economic meltdown in the autumn of 2008. So it is probable that a lot of my posts will contain some reference to Iceland - as indeed this one does.

I noticed on one of the Icelandic blog sites that I visit regularly a news item in which a politician, Svavar Gestsson, formerly an mp for the communist party, now one of the countries special negotiators with the UK and the Netherlands over the IceSave issue, complains that the president's refusal to sign a recent piece of legislation about IceSave and thereby sending the law to a national referendum has damaged Iceland's image overseas. He goes on to say that the president "has initiated a revolt against parliament". There are a number of points raised by these statements.

The first, and most obvious, is that 60,000 people signed a petition to the president requesting him not to sign. 60,000, you might say. Not so many. Who cares. But in a population of around 300,000, that's 20% of the population. It's as though twelve million Brits or sixty million Americans signed a petition. It's not something you can ignore. Or at least, it's not something you should ignore. So what does it say about Svavar Gestsson's view of democracy if he wants the president to ignore 20% of the population?

And as for tarnishing the image of Iceland overseas, what sort of a country is it that thinks Iceland's image has been tarnished as a result of sending a parliamentary decision to a national referendum at the request of 20% of the population? Well, I can imagine that there are a number of governments, both dictatorial and those purporting to be democratic, which would blanch at the thought of a citizens' revolt of that magnitude. If there's one thing a member of parliament or a minister in a government fears above all else, even more than the loss of power for his party, it is the loss of power to the people who put him there, in other words the loss of power for the parliamentary process as he has designed it for his own benefit.

On the other hand, I can imagine that there are many countries where the citizens are extremely pleased to see other countries' citizens claiming the right to have the last say in respect of laws passed by their governments. It may be subjective, but I think I see an unpleasant trend of governments and parliaments actively working against the interests of their citizens, and this trend seems to me to be increasing with time rather than standing still or decreasing. In Sweden we have seen similar revolts in recent years against the increasing general surveillance of the populace, surveillance comparable to that previously reserved for serious criminals. And the turning over to private companies the kind of official powers that properly belong to the police, such as the ability to demand access to the name and address behind an IP address which they suspect has been used for the dissemination of copyrighted material.

It's no use saying that the president of Iceland shouldn't have used the powers he is granted under the country's constitution, that he is merely a figurehead. You can't have your cake and eat it. If he is given certain powers, one must expect that he will use them sooner or later, in appropriate circumstances. If you don't want your president to have those powers, they shouldn't be written into the consitution.

If there is one thing that the internet has given us, it is the enfranchising of the citizen in a way not previously possible. By email-bombing their mps, joining Facebook groups, taking part in on-line petitions, or registering their choice of important election issues, as the group, www.power2010.org, has organized for the upcoming UK elections, ordinary citizens can make their views known to the people who are supposed to represent them.

Small wonder that the people in power, both in government and in opposition, want to increase their surveillance of the Internet, and the people using it, and preferably to take control of it out of the hands of the populace.

Well, here I am...

2010-02-04T16:51:00.000+01:00

There's something a little frightening about a blank screen that you know you have to fill with material if anything is to come of it. It's like the old saying - was it Mao who said it? - a journey always starts with one step. Well, here's my first step.

What I hope to do here is to put down my thoughts about anything and everything, particularly about the society we live in today. I won't hide the fact that I'm a little worried about where it seems to be going. There has to be a better way, and if we're the crowning point of evolution, we should be able to find it. On bad days I have my doubts.

But we'll see. Maybe my thoughts will find an echo with some of my readers - if anybody comes here to read what I write. If not, at least I will have concretized my thoughts.