Barclays £2.1B Bonuses & £0.7B Dividends

In 1985 an old fashioned City stock-broker advised me - "Never, ever, ever invest in companies where the executives are so highly paid, they no longer NEED to work". It is difficult advice to follow today.

RAILWAYS OR ROADS

Tarmac the Railways & Get Britain Moving Fast



CITY CENTRE TO CITY CENTRE. RAILWAYS ARE EMPTY
90% OF THE TIME - SO CONVERT FOR BUSES & LORRIES 

Addison-Lee, the civil-disobedience London mini-cab taxi firm, are economically correct in demanding access to bus-lanes. It is barmy to build and maintain, say, a three lane road and close off one-third of it. In old towns and cities with narrow streets, bus lanes are doubly barmy, as they shut-down half the network; this creates gridlock; as in Oxford UK, on the London Road, where many millions have been spent over the past 5 years on traffic management - including bus-lanes - resulting in daily gridlock.

No accountant ever meant to be an accountant - but I reluctantly accept that I am a long experienced professional bean counter (and Futurist) with a natural inclination to count and to try to be balanced - neutral politically - when counting. I have professionally studied the real costs of transport systems for decades.

IF TRAINS ARE ALWAYS FULL, THEY ARE EFFICIENT.
IF NOT - THEY ARE TRANSPORT DINOSUARS.

THE FUTURE: FACTS.  In correspondence with Lord Weinstock, Chairman of GEC UK, we figured out mass transit systems. They included vehicle free zones served by moving walkways - conveyor belts for people (cheap, robust, pollution free - some New York escalators have operated for 80 years), including replacing The Underground in city centres; peripheral car-parks; electric powered bicycles for the halt and lame; main routes with free hop-on buses only, one bus instead of six or seven fighting for a bus-stop; computer summoned shared public taxis replacing local buses; small low-pollution cars (not unlike the BMW Oxford Mini) with rapid hire networks (the average private car lives for 105 thousand hours and is parked for 98 thousand hours); AND, most controversial of all, giving train-spotters apoplexy, - turning railways into roadways. Railway tracks are "covered" by trains, empty or full trains, for a few minutes each day, 1.5% of the time, and even at that the train systems are dangerously overloaded. Using the centre to centre railway routes for buses, coaches and commercial vehicles will clear the roads for people to enjoy.

These ideas were formed before the 2008 FOODTUBES Project (Google it) to take 50% of vans and lorries off the streets.

In a powered vehicle study for New Zealand, we found that in money and pollution terms per passenger mile, trains are the worst (because they are so damned heavy, often empty and need exclusive routes), one-person cars, buses next, and the most efficient are cars with two or more people. Best of all - the purpose of the study - stop commuting and work at home by computer.

Will London's Mayor Boris Johnson, head of Transport for London (TfL) support Addison-Lee - and go on to tarmac the railways?

Hitler, Stalin, President Carter & The Brave New Internet

Not all regimes are benevolent. Who would you trust most with your personal data - Hitler, Stalin, President Carter or your Employer - or GCHQ Cheltenham, the CIA, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon or your local Parish Council? Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, fears for its safety, survival and independence.

In today's world of ever increasing automated production, robots and computer systems, we have ever increasing, relatively effortless wealth, which augers an increasingly peaceful future, which is fertile ground for stability, civilisation, intelligent co-operation and personal and group creativity. This coming Utopia leaves little room for Nazis, the Stazi, the KKK and other mad extremists to flourish. But somehow mad dictators still rise to power, buoyed by the mass thugish hysteria of deluded mediocrities and incompetents. We do not want our personal data in their anti-life hands.

Many authorities, from local to national governments through to major corporations are trying to control the Internet. They want to stop us talking to each other without their permission, analyses or intervention. They will ultimately fail, but in this time of dangerous transition - from the present gangster-economics where neurotics, bullies, spivs, crooks and sociopaths grab and hoard trillions of dollars and create the largest gaps ever between Haves & Have-Nots - to the future brave new world; there will be upheaval and unrest, before wealth flows evenly across the whole world. We are living in "interesting times" and more lunatics will rise to power. (We follow and support lunatics because they offer us certainty in bad times. But that's another topic).

FUTURE-FACT-FORECAST - What will become of us and our Internet? The massive intrusions, surveillance, snooping, spying, marketing, spamming, scamming, harassing, recording, tempting, seducing and censorship will get worse. There will be a technological cyberwar as, on the one hand, users, ISPs, hardware and software manufacturers, land-line and satellite telecoms engineers, are bribed or beaten into spying on all their neighbours - and on  the other hand as science-savvy, young at heart, impertinent, disobedient, clever, energetic rebels resist being corralled. If the snooping-interference does not reduce to sensible, socially acceptable levels - a new, global wireless internet will emerge for people who respect that the internet should be like a network of roads that anyone may travel on, irrespective of nationality, class, wealth, religion, health, reputation, credit-rating or mental stability. We all use the roads, largely unfettered, with a few sensible safety protocols, and so we will travel on the Internet. It would be a pity if the vast investments into the present system and the dominant Western influences and technologies are abandoned and lost due to the abuse by today's powerful organisations.

18 April 2012

USA & UK Tax Wars Heat Up

The Anglo-Saxon model is attracting some fierce critics. Economist Milton Friedman, Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan ushered in Monetarism, Greed is Good, Light Touch Regulation, The Big Bang and The Free Markets in 1980. Thirty-two years later, the great and the good are wondering if it was the right policy for democracy; and billionaire Warren Buffet proposes that even the loftiest of the super-rich aristocracy should pay the same tax-rate as middle-class families.  President Obama has the temerity to take up the baton for America. http://www.barackobama.com/buffett-rule/tax-fairness. His impertinence will enrage our lords and masters who really should not be taxable at all - and who have the absolute right to empty the nations' coffers into secretive, anonymous, locked and impenetrable treasure chests in tax-havens, bankrupt the nation and then tell us we are bust, out of cash, lazy and unwashed - and must borrow it all back from them on their terms - or else! They have trillions hidden away and even complain, if the central banks pump pathetic bits of liquidity back into the starved economies through Quantitative Easing, that it will diminish the value of their cash. They urgently need our protection.

I am afraid this is my current hobby-horse, so as long as the media focuses on wealth, business and taxes you may have to suffer more articles on this topic. There is a neat slide short show with pictures, which explains the money-economy. www.noelhodson.com/Money-Wars-2012-V5SHORT.pdf which is also on You Tube with music.

Polly Toynbee, one of Britain's most celebrated and influential commentators, battles on - today with an article "Stand up to the super-rich, Osborne. I'm on your side" where she analyses the conundrum created by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who is reducing the tax relief on millionnaires' gifts to charities in the forlorn hope that he can collect a bit more tax from them. Ms Toynbee asks whether the generous gifts they make should be out of taxed income - as applies to the UK middle-classes - and thus feed the government more cash, or given full tax-relief as it is today, thus feeding the charities and by-passing government. George Osborne will be greatly pleased to have Ms Toynbee's public support. The Banns will be read, starting next Sunday, in Westminster Abbey.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/pollytoynbee?INTCMP=SRCH

Of course - several of the tax-relieved charities are not what Joe Public thinks of as charities. They only dispense charity to their own family and friends - usually via tax-havens.

What has all this to do with the Future? I think these issues are leading to massive global socio-economic changes that, allied to the Internet, will result in societies that do not need the Money-Economy. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of money. - 17 April 2011.

• $7.6 OR $32 TRILLION OFFSHORE?
• TAX HAVENS WRECK GLOBAL ECONOMY

Will we pay taxes in the future?

Will we pay taxes in the future?

Will future citizens pay future taxes? (That's taxes not taxis). 

As both a self-promoted Futurist, Sci-Fi novelist and a veteran tax-planning accountant, I am honour bound to prophesy the evolution of taxation. Dominic Lawson in the UK's Sunday Times, today tackles Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, who wants all of us including politicians to publish our tax-returns. Dominic warns of the "Fire of Envy" consuming communities and of kidnappers and murderers targeting rich families who have foolishly revealed their income and assets; though I would have thought that the private yacht, personal plane and six mansions might give sufficient clues to bounty hunters. Polly Toynbee envisages the end of hypocrisy from all those who would impose penalties on millions of minor tax infractions while for themselves Minimising (legal and government sanctioned) Avoiding (legal but a bit creepy) or Evading (illegal - "...Which prison bunk do you prefer?") their own taxes by thousands, millions and billions of dollars a year.  My immediate focus would be on officers in the UK Treasury who themselves indulge in fanciful transactions with their family off-shore trusts, charities and secretive companies – what chance of a crackdown on tax frauds if the legal officials are in it up to their necks.

REPATRIATE THE LOOT: Both Polly and Dominic miss the main damage done to the 99%, to the rest of us. The tax dodgers not only fiddle the books to pay less tax - but many of them, in fact probably most of them, fiddle via off-shore companies, trusts, family charities and other sham organisations - and not only pay no taxes but they siphon the capital out of the very economies that have made them wealthy. Having imaginatively created invoices, agreements, bonds, trusts and other funny bits of quasi-legal paper to get tax relief on their profits at home - from industrious, stable, reliable, hard working communities - papers which currently many tax-authorities approve even though they are obviously fake; they take the cake and the icing to strange little countries with funny little governments that do as they are told by the super-rich.

The icing is the Homeland tax relief granted - billions and billions of unpaid taxes that the 99% have to compensate their Homeland for; the cake is the total capital they gouge out of the main economies and hide off-shore – before telling us our nations are bankrupt and have no liquidity. Currently, Christian Aid and the OECD in Paris calculate that from $14 trillion to $18 trillion washes around in tax-haven banks – so its no wonder there is no liquidity at home.

What do the 1% do with the capital they have extracted from our businesses and High Streets? They first globally gamble incontinently with it and distort every key price of vital commodities - distorting all prices everywhere - then, tiring of those silly games they lend it back to us via "The Free Markets" - those mysterious shadowy entities that set conditions for international Bonds, Bail-Outs and other "rescues", which are only needed because the 1% have purloined all the cash. $14 trillion will pay-off every deficit on Earth. The money-economy is bust because THEY have taken all the money out of our nations tills and piggy-banks. This is true for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain – they are all suffering capital flight, to tax-havens, most established by Britain – and of course Switzerland – and now spreading like a plague. .

Will this last into the Future? No. In the far future there will be no taxes.

It is an unsustainable, mad state of affairs. The Internet will reveal all. The past 30 years of siphons will be reversed and the taxes and capital repatriated to the countries of origin. My best professional advice is - Move your Money On-Shore (repatriate before the government does it for you) and Move to Higher Ground (before the land based icecaps melt). Read OUT OF THE DEPTHS and AD2516 to see how it all pans out.

And - remember, if you are a smug Off-Shore-Johnny, President Bush Snr said in the 1980's about the Internet - "Forget privacy - Privacy is dead".  They (your friendly tax-officers, secret-service-intelligence agents, Internet government snoopers and Julian Assange) do know where you live.

15 April 2012.

An Easter Essay on the Aether for Atheists, Humanists and Theists. CREATURES OF LIGHT - TILL THE END OF DAYS

An Easter Essay on the Aether for Atheists, Humanists and Theists.

CREATURES OF LIGHT - TILL THE END OF DAYS

Easter Sunday 8^th April 2012.

On the Spring Equinox, as the Sun ends hoary old Winter and gives Life to fertile new Spring – as Jesus is reborn from the implacable grip of Death to triumphantly give Birth to a new era of unconditional Love – as gardeners plant seeds to be tugged into glorious growth by the Moon – as Jews give thanks for the deliverance in Egypt of the First Born - as sea-level is anxiously monitored at The Thames Barrier that protects London – and as fond friends exchange symbolic eggs – there are a few, an intelligent minority, some of them scientists with high IQs, who stomp on the spring flowers, glower at the global celebrations and mutter “humbug”.  These sad lonely soured souls have nothing they can believe in.

But, this message from the manmade magical blogosphere; enabled by the mysterious transmission through metal wires, printed circuits, silicon wafers, thin-air and allegedly empty-space-time, of, we firmly believe, trillions of utterly invisible sub-atomic particles and extraordinarily well ordered, eternal, coherent electro-magnetic spherical pulses, waves, that speed out to the boundaries of the Universe …and back again – might inspire them all; believers and unbelievers alike, to recognise their own immortality.

The fundamental stuff of our universe is an ever-changing matrix, a criss-crossing, of these very same coherent, indestructible waves that scientists study and manipulate and that the entire population unwittingly but undeniably experience energising their mobile-phones, radios, televisions, Ipods, laptops, Mars Explorers and – if they pause to think for a moment – their own brains and nervous systems. We are all, along with all phenomena, with every material thing, embedded in and formed by these electro-magnetic waves.  Each of us starts as a seed-within-a-seed-within-a-seed, inside our great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother (you might like to count how many mothers you come from) – a seed that we can track scientifically back to about 1750 where it magically existed in a sphere smaller than the Planck minimum – which scientifically cannot exist – but we or it did; and with a little help from just one, per generation, of billions of otherwise superfluous and abandoned male spermatozoa, maybe at their wriggling and bumptious best at Easter, our unique selves emerged. The energy patterns from which we, undeniably, emerge are electro-magnetic - commonly and collectively known as Light. We are all Creatures of Light.

23 Aether-Matrix Illustrations

http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/Life-Universe-Everything-8Mar2011.pdf

We at all times, without pause or effort, transmit every movement and every thought, electro-magnetically, into the stuff of the universe, that I call the Aether-Matrix. This Aether-Matrix is both incredibly delicate and extraordinarily indestructible. It changes to accommodate all the signals from all phenomena – it is constantly informed and reformed by those signals – yet it is also the Inertia of the universe, another mysterious and immensely powerful force that keeps Galaxies and Atoms in shape and in their places, and prevents boiled eggs from falling through the surface of the table. We all emerge from, inform and reform and return to the Aether-Matrix. Our unique message, our light-waves persist and are coherent, scientifically speaking, until The End of Days.

Happy Easter.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!

TOTAL SURVEIILANCE IN "1984"
by GEORGE ORWELL

Total surveillance of YOU! 

by Sinister Agents of RIPA

The intended HM Government surveillance of ALL Internet traffic by the UK's GCHQ radio interception centre at Cheltenham, takes the world a step nearer the Q-Field in AD2516-After Global Warming, where eleven billion citizens have a priceless diamond PC on their foreheads, connected both to their brains and to the quantum-field of communications.

While the civilised, advanced and democratic people of 2516, living in a world without money, illness, want or poverty; and bless the global, indeed universal, telecoms - We here today in AD2012 are going to experience interesting times as governments, corporations and lunatics of all types try to control all our communications on today's  fledgling Internet.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee created hyperlinks and the World Wide Web at CERN, on the foundations of the USA's "nuclear hardened" military telenet, he envisaged it as free, open, non-commercial, intelligent, private and beneficial.

As control freaks pervert its development and route our every exchange via spies, spooks, snoops, police, employers, medics, head-teachers, data-marketeers and nosey neighbours, I foresee that a 2nd Wave WWW, the 2WWW, will quickly be created by alienated and new ISPs, innovative hardware enigineers, useful free websites like Wikipedia, impertinent emerging economies and disrespectful, disobedient users everywhere. Initially, the 2WWW will be the intelligent-cooperation network that Tim Berners-Lee hoped for. It will almost certainly be hand-held, wireless, global and low cost. This 2nd Wave Internet is the tool that will evolve and eventually give birth to the marvellous and indispensable Q-Field of AD2516.

* RIPA is the UK's existing intercept law. "We only seek to protect you from paedophiles, criminals & terrorists."  Rt. Hon David Cameron MP - Prime Minister.

NH