If there's a job nobody wants, give it to the Canadians

Just saw a documentary-dramatisation of the D-day landing.

I've known for years that Churchill didn't want to send
British troops to Juno because of the political costs.
The Americans were nowhere to be found, so it was
up to the Canadians.

These guys thought that they were sent because they were
good. Innocent guys, but they were sent to do the dirty work.
Turns out they were good. Excellent.

16 thousand landed, 1 thousand died and the Germans were
cleaned out.
I've also heard that the shock troops were employed in
20th century warfare to bust across the lines. Even in
WW1, the Canadians were known as good shock troops.

Wikipedia: shock troops
According to Ward, the Australian and Canadian divisions deployed amongst British forces in France quickly came to be regarded as the best shock troops in the Allied ranks due to their ferocity in battle, and were employed accordingly.[3][4]

It's so strange that , as they call themselves, a bunch of
farm boys could do such a good job in awful
circumstances. Listen to them talking about it. No
bravado at all. They were all scared stiff, but just got on
with it.

in 8 parts. the last three have interviews with the soldiers.
They're all together on Ytoob.

Arrange the Flowers, then gun down the Co-op

A couple of months ago, I wrote the story

Coop got done NY mafia style.

The fact that JPMorgan and Goldman were brought in

was just the cherry on top, for this fraud.

You see, my point was, the Coop was set up by the elites, 

usually those found in the government, as a way to get rid

of the only co-operative mutual bank on the High Street. 

This was my educated guess. I was right.

The article below will explain how it was done, by the 

admission (or evident stupidity of) their point man, 

Reverend Flowers. that's right, a priest.

- a drug-taking, with pedo claims and public indecency

claims, fudging expenses claims, and no banking experience.

I "saw" how Flowers was put in place by the elite and 

rubberstamped by the Coop board. How do I know? It's so 

odd. In old, low-key enterprises like the Coop, the elite is 

respected and allowed to do what it wants. Nobody wants 

to rock the boat. I don't want to get into UK meetings 

psychology, but that's also part of it.

So, the elite brought in this loser. The loser admits that the 

elite (see below) pushed Coop to buy Britania Bank, with the 

help of JPM and GS, even though it was obvious that the 

bad debts of BB would ruin the Coop, as happened recently.

The elite also told Coop to buy 650 Lloyd's Bank branches

again with the mounting problems. 

Flowers then blew up at the right time to make the Coop into

a right mess. Yes, the Coop were fools, but the elite destroyed

them, for the benefit of the big banks. Lots of people now 

want to leave the Coop but where can they go. All the other

banks are derivatives cheats, thieves, on the government pay,

corrupt stock market gamblers.

A perfect situation for those banks now. The Coop was on 

the verge of becoming the only option. If you think that big

banks have bigger fish to fry, then you don't realise that those

banks want to corner the market, then they'll charge 

depositors to even look at their balances.

Mark my words.

Checkit: theguardian.com

Co-operative Bank's former chairman 'seeking help' after drugs admission

Methodist minister Paul Flowers seen in video counting out money to buy substances, while texts discuss drug taking

Haroon Siddique     

   Sunday 17 November 2013 09.50 GMT  

The Co-operative Bank's former chairman Paul Flowers has apologised for his "stupid and wrong" behaviour and said he is seeking professional help after a video was published showing the Methodist minister handing over money to buy hard drugs.

The footage showed Flowers counting out £300 in cash and asking if he could also get hold of ketamine. The Mail on Sunday said a friend of Flowers handed over the footage, purportedly recorded days after the former Co-operative Bank chairman gave testimony to the Treasury select committee over the bank's £700m in losses and its abandoned bid to buy branches of the bailed-out Lloyds Bank.

Stuart Davies handed over the video and a series of incriminating text messages after becoming "disgusted by the hypocrisy" of a man who had chaired the anti-drugs charity Lifeline and written columns about the evils of drug use, the Mail on Sunday said.

After being confronted with the material, Flowers, 63, referred to the pressures of his job and dealing with a family bereavement.

"This year has been incredibly difficult, with a death in the family and the pressures of my role with the Co-operative Bank," he said. "At the lowest point in this terrible period I did things that were stupid and wrong. I am sorry for this and I am seeking professional help and apologise to all I have hurt or failed by my actions."

Davies also handed over text messages purporting to be from Flowers. One said: "I was 'grilled' by the Treasury select committee yesterday and afterwards came to Manchester to get wasted with friends." In others he said he was on "ket" and had the club drug GHB. Davies said he smoked cannabis with Flowers and witnessed him smoking crack cocaine.

The Co-operative Bank said it had no comment, while the Methodist church said a thorough investigation would take place.

"We expect high standards of our ministers and we have procedures in place for when ministers fail to meet those standards.

"Paul is suspended from duties for a period of three weeks, pending investigations, and will not be available to carry out any ministerial work. We will also work with the police if they feel a crime has been committed."

On 7 November, Flowers tried to spread the blame for the bank's woes, telling the select committee that politicians had actively encouraged the Co-op Bank's expansion spree involving an ill-fated attempt to buy 631 branches from the Lloyds Banking Group.

The bank also disastrously took over the Britannia building society, a deal that brought with it a raft of bad loans.

Flowers said he had resigned as chairman in June 2013 to take responsibility for a £1.5bn capital shortfall that left the Co-op group having to demutualise the 100-year-old bank and hand a 70% share in the British institution to a group of bondholders involving US hedge funds.

most important research this year. Summary: we're F%^&ked

back when I was a kid, I used to listen to
Greenpeace tell us how factory effluent and
raping of forests was going to kill us.

Then, the world created banksters. It seemed
that the environment didn't matter any more
because, once, we had lots of paper money,
and now we don't. So, we're on a paper chase
and haven't given two thoughts to the environment.

Canada's PM Harper is set on forcing uneconomical
tarsands oil on the US, so that it can leak out all
over Tex-Arkana and suburbs near you.

Idiots are ruining water tables with their fracking
juice just to get a bit of shale gas, while the earth
belches and shakes.

And, we can do nothing about these. Nothing short of
blocking their access by thousands of determined
people, 24/7 will work, and as I said, you and I
are too busy chasing paper.

In all this, we've forgotten the old demons.
Industrialists , at least those who can  get bank loans,
are busy using up Earth's resources at such a rate
that one scientist who actually looked at the data,
held a conference talk called :

Is Earth F%&ked?

His answer : More or less [Fucked , that is]

Enjoy your Black Friday trawl.
Hug a Black person, too. That would be a good thing.

checkit: New statesman

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.

By Naomi Klein Published 29 October 2013 10:00

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

I've been trying to tell you, it's a planned crisis

If this were a banking crisis, banks would be paying.
So, it isn't a banking crisis, it's an oligarch coup.

They were waiting to install austerity and unchecked
financial behaviour for 3 decades provided just the
opportunity.
So. they planned it, they put in place the laws,
and now they're sitting pretty.

You're having a fantasy if you think the banks are
at all moral.

BOSS, The PLAN, THE PLAN, FUCK THE POOR

[0:41]
I always thought that Herve was saying "the plan, the plan"

checkit: rowan's blog

The secret plans for London - Why the financial crisis has in reality been a financial revolution

The financial crisis through which we have all suffered (by 'we' I mean the ordinary man and woman), will turn out to have been less of a crisis and more of a revolution.

Ironically, if you have been in a well-paying job, in banking, consulting, IT, head hunting, recruitment, or any of the adjunct functions which serve the City and the financial sector; or you have been in the professional classes, the law, auditing and accounting; or the tame and timid regulatory agencies, the financial crisis has not really caused much damage to you in the longer term.

Oh sure, you may not have drawn down quite such high bonuses as you were used to enjoying, but you have still been able to continue to live very comfortably. Interest rates have been the lowest they have been in any living memory, and they have remained at neo-negative rates for a long period of time. You have been enabled to trade up in your property purchases, borrowing significant sums of money, leveraged on your existing properties, and in so doing, you have enabled the property market to resist the ordinary impact of the crisis.

To a very large number of people however, the 'squeezed middle', those who are coming to the end of their immediate working lives, but who are still supporting elderly parents, as well as children who cannot find jobs; those who are still able to work and at the top of their skills ladder in terms of knowledge and experience, but who are deemed 'too old' to be employed by an ageist jobs market because they are over 55; those who have been made redundant at the wrong age and thus forcibly retired and who have been living on income from insufficient pensions, and who have watched while the government has squeezed the life out of community spending in the name of 'austerity'; those who work in teaching, nursing, policing, the fire service or any of the other vital municipal service provisions on which our communities rely so heavily, there is no end to the damage that the impact of the financial crisis is causing.

…

And the outcome has been to sweep the whole fucking mess under the carpet in a traditional British way of reconciling these scandals. Essentially, it has been decided that those responsible for the biggest banking crash in living memory, to say nothing of the resultant scams, frauds and other examples of financial skulduggery will not face any kind of scrutiny by regulators or government. The revolving door at the top will go round and former regulators will become bankers, accountants will become regulators, the most egregious will be allowed to slink away with their pensions and their pay-off's, while you and I will be ritually and righteously screwed!

Why?

Because I am slowly beginning to realise it is becoming clearer that the aftermath of the financial crash and its attendant outcomes was not just an accident waiting to happen. It was carefully thought-through by a group of powerful elites who realised that they could use the implications of the mess left behind by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls.

They could begin to dismantle the benefit culture ethos which had undeniably been allowed to spread like a virus under Brown. Brown believed that the City was bringing in the money because he wanted to believe the bullshit the City told him. He, in turn, extolled their actions in after-dinner speeches at the Mansion House, while spending public money like a man with no arms, until even he was forced to realise there was nothing left in the pot, as Liam Byrne so eloquently reminded his successor in post!

By driving out the poor, the indigent and the work-shy and relocating them to other useless towns and cities in the Midlands and the North, they would free-up a workforce in London who would be willing to work for limited or minimum wages and zero-hours contracts, made up very much of European immigrants driven to the UK by the awful financial conditions at home, ready and willing to service the new post-crisis economy planned for the new London.

…

London houses and apartments are a form of money.

The reasons are simple to understand. In 2011, at the height of the eurozone crisis, citizens of the two countries at the epicentre of the cataclysm – Greece and Italy – bought £400m of London bricks and mortar. The Italian and Greek rich, fearing the single currency would collapse, got their money out of euros and parked it some place where government was relatively stable and the tax regime was gentle – very, very gentle. Considering that tax evasion in Italy and Greece was a significant contributory factor to their debt problems, it just seems grotesquely cynical to encourage this kind of behaviour.

But that's what Britain in general, and London in particular, does. The city is essentially a tax haven with great theatre, free museums and formidable dining. If you can demonstrate that you have a residence in another country, you are taxed only on your British earnings.

And the savings on property taxes are phenomenal. The property taxes on New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's $20m London home come to £2,143.30 a year. That's $3,430. Clearly, the mayor bought in at the right time. The Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is reported to be house-hunting here – he's looking in the £30m (about $48m) price range. Yet he will pay a similar amount in property tax as Bloomberg does.