Sir Michael Fallon has been unmasked as one of the UK’s biggest security threats.
The FT has dug up a document addressed to the Defence Minister by General Sir Richard Barrons, the recently-retired head of the country’s Joint Forces Command, in which Fallon was told “There is no military plan to defend the UK in a conventional conflict.”
But instead of directly responding to this weekend’s revelations, Fallon has taken the rather bizarre step of claiming the UK will block an EU army for as long as it remains a member.
It’s hard to imagine why Fallon would not be ok with an EU Army that fights ISIS and patrols EU borders.
He says that NATO already looks after this.
It is known that Fallon has had substantial dealings with the private sector over the years.
Questions now have to be asked about Fallon’s judgement, his loyalty to the country, and his personal business interests.
Is he simply feathering his own nest or, like with Zac Goldsmith in the 2016 London mayoral election, could it be that he has gone completely insane?
In this radio interview after the London Mayoral election, Fallon refuses to backtrack on his comments that London Mayor Sadiq Khan is a security threat who ought not to be trusted with Londoners’s safety:
Until he addresses these fears, widespread concern that Sir Michael Fallon may have become the single biggest security threat to the UK looks increasingly justified.
Two groups of EU countries are banding together to call for stricter internal and external border controls and an end to austerity at the first full post-Brexit EU meeting in Bratislava on Friday.
Club Med
Last Friday in Athens, the Club Med Countries told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that austerity is killing the EU and that they want stronger border control to deal with the ‘Migrant Crisis’.
Tax-avoidance-as-a-service (TAAAS) is Dublin’s most famous export.
The Irish government long ago designed Irish law to allow global corporations to split, funnel,and park their profits to avoid paying tax on most of their global profits.
Whoever pays the bills around Dublin likes things as they are.
Yes, a country — as a customer — can be sued by a company.
In that sense Holland — like London — are a bit like a global bailiff.
They want corporations to go ‘treaty shopping’ and arrange their legal affairs to be able to sue countries from Amsterdam.
Visegrad Group
Meanwhile, the Visegrad Group are calling for further recognition of distinct national identities, borders, and Christianity in the face of the ‘migrant crisis’.
Having transitioned from Communism to the neo-liberal market state it looks like many are interested in revisiting the age before communism in which countries were grouped together as empires under a strong leader.
Andrew Marr wrote a piece about the Visegrad Group in the Sunday Times yesterday. All a bit scary!
If ARM really are as world-beating as they sound then surely patriotic Government Ministers like Business Secretary Greg Clark, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, or even Gaffe-Prone Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson would have intervened to protect hard-won UK sovereignty and stand up for GB PLC.
Think Again.
PM Theresa May, former Business Secretary Sajid Javid, and new Chancellor Philip Hammond have a fondness for referring to Britain as being “open for business”.
But what does this actually mean? Is everything up for grabs? Are there no limits?
Judging by this week’s newspapers, the answer is mixed.
For us cynics who believe the UK government can’t help selling everything and anything — the tide may be starting to turn.
TTIP
Following the BREXIT vote the EU-US Trade agreement also known as The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is said to be floundering.
At the G20 this weekend the official communique stated that Globalisation needs to be sold to the masses. Rising populism threatens Big Business — Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump are a step too far.
There is a bit of a paradox at play here.
Businesses and governments are supposed to serve both consumers and citizens.
But has government gotten so into bed with business that it now fears a backlash?
And what of these populist candidates?
Some of them — especially the Tea Party — are funded by Big Business.
Alt-Left
I remember hearing Webster Tarpley in 2008 saying that the only way to get at Obama was to attack him from the left.
That is what we’ve seen played out over the last 8 years.
In the US Big Business has got behind the most extreme side of the Republican Party. The same model has been exported to the UK.
The FT ran an editorial on Monday in which they actually referred to the limits of deregulation. I thought I was hallucinating:
Hannan spearheaded the Brexit campaign from Brussels.
He famously surprised Newsnight presenter Evan Davis the day after the Brexit vote by saying he didn’t think Brexit meant an end to free movement of labour.
Why would a Tory MEP as passionately devoted to both EU-US relations and Brexit be prepared to go on TV straight after an immigration-dominated campaign and say he believes in free movement of labour?
Foreign Firms
And where does this leave us in relation to the foreign takeover of another UK firm?
Foreign firms are obviously in favour of free movement of labour but not that keen on regulation.
So if the UK deregulates even further in favour of corporations and away from employees, then I can’t see the Japanese or any other government complaining.
Here is an article from today by George Monbiot on the current state of play re: TTIP and its ugly Canadian sister CETA.
For anyone interested in finding out more about TTIP & CETA there is a facebook group, a website, and a couple of mailing lists for general trade issues and for organising actions.
Strange to see FT’s resident Bilderberger Martin Wolf attacking University reform last week.
Anthony Seldon is often quoted in the Sunday Times as an Education and Happiness Expert.
He is Blair and Cameron’s official biographer and believes in “student experience”.
Student Experience and happiness are code words for ‘utility’ — an imaginary (and subjective) system for comparing and quantifying human preferences.
Just as the term ‘financial engineering’ was created to make Harvard and Princeton Physics graduates feel better about selling their souls to the devil as they became money-grabbing Wall Street ‘Quants’ — so too are the words happiness, well-being, mindfulness and even meditation now being deployed to not just morally but also scientifically justify the elimination of opportunity to all but those who can afford it.
Seldon’s dad Arthur Seldon set up the Institute of Economic Affairs and was a founder member of New Labour’s favourite think tank — Demos.
After the recent “Brexit” coup d’état the May junta has decided to do some housecleaning and give new home secretary Amber Rudd the wiggle room her status demands.
Vaz, as Chairmen of the Home Affairs Select Committee, wielded enormous influence overseeing current Prime Minister Theresa May’s paedophile cover-ups throughout her 6 years as Home Secretary.
Child Sex Abuse
Midlands based researchers and disability rights campaigners first informed me of the wide reaching implications of having Vaz chair the home affairs select committee which was particularly lacklustre in its desire to investigate or protect vulnerable young people from Child Sexual Abuse.
It has long been speculated that there was dirt on Vaz. His defence of Greville Janner in 1992 showed he kept dubious company.
Many find it suspicious that he was a Council solicitor for Margaret Hodge (another Blairite former chair of a sensitive Select Committee) during her controversial time at Islington and at Richmond council during the period of much paedophile activity at Elm House, Barnes.
Brexit
A former Minister for Europe, perhaps his strongly pro-European views counted against him.
Although Amber Rudd campaigned for Remain she bears all the hallmarks of the pragmatist — more so even than Vaz.
Either way, time has been called on Vaz’s tenure. There must be more dirt on him. I wonder when or if it will come out.
Next up
Prepare for speculation on which media-friendly MP will now be brought in next — how much for Chuka Ummuna?
With funding from several Health Trusts, Universities, and Research Institutes, the £650m Crick Institute is a registered charity and will have 1000 scientists and 250 support staff by the end of the year.
The Crick — Europe’s largest Biomedical Research Centre — will be composed of 120 research groups comprising of around 10 scientists each.
The Crick will build up partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech firms to translate its discoveries into commercial products.
A partnership with GlaxoSmithKline is already in operation.
The Crick Director, Sir Paul Nurse, says he hopes to create constructive “scientific anarchy”.
The Medical Research Centre and Cancer Research UK will provide most of the the Crick’s £130m a year running costs, with smaller contributions from Wellcome Trust, Imperial College, Kings College, & University College London (UCL).
Questions
Does this institute have an ethical code?
Is it engaged in Synthetic Biology and Genetic Engineering?
Is it public or private? Is it subject to FOI laws?
Will it prioritise transparency over commercial confidentiality?
What is The Crick?
Cancer-curing charity, publicly funded institute, or amoral driver of shareholder value?
Here is a Twitter reaction to the Crick. Glad I am not the only one who finds it scary.
The Crick Institute looks like the kind of place zombie apocalypses begin or simian overlords rise from. Steering clear.
As well as offering free masters, iPads, and Premier League Football tickets, Universities are also incentivising overseas students to recruit their spouses and siblings.
The Sunday Times editorial wonders how long before students at Oxford are offered action figures of Cecil Rhodes and, in the case of St Andrews, the chance to marry a member of the royal family.
It claims that “Universities are now so desperate for custom they could teach supermarkets a thing or two about sales.”
Surely it would be more appropriate to compare universities with banking cartels.
The Sunday Times claim a leaked document has revealed that David Cameron and Oliver Letwin wanted to “cap taxes for the banks”.
According to the leaked memo Letwin endorsed Cameron’s plans for an “aggregated City tax take” which would have prevented the government from increasing the banking levy.
The cap on the banking levy was proposed in the early days of the coalition, but was blocked by the Liberal Democrats.
The memo reveals that Letwin suggested that a cap on taxes should have started with a “small club” of high street banks belonging to the British Bankers Association.
“If this worked, we could move on to the hedge funds”, Letwin added.
When asked about the bank tax proposal yesterday Letwin claimed to have “absolutely no recollection”.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Handing €1.1 trillion of public money to ANONYMOUS bankers with no publicly available audit trail is an act so corrupt as to be beyond comprehension.
Yet that is what has happened to residents of that well known museum — the European Union.
Inventing Money
The European Central Bank, owner of the world’s third biggest money printing machine — behind the Federal Reserve’s and the People’s Bank of China’s — has already printed and distributed the best part of a trillion Euros to private financial institutions in exchange for various bonds over a two year period.
In November 2014 just as they started what became known as their Quantitative Easing (ECB QE) programme, I asked them to publicly state exactly which bonds they were printing money to buy.
Seeing as they were spending billions of euros of public money per month during a time of extreme austerity – it felt normal that EU citizens be told how the money was being spent.
Disclosure
The only information the public had been told at that time was that the ECB were buying repackaged bank loans (Covered Bonds) and Asset Backed Securities (ABSs) in order to stop deflation and maintain inflation at 2%.
But the question remains: What happened to the money?
Groupthink
Bizarrely the woman who runs the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has a reputation for being a fair-minded adjudicator.
This week the Irish papers portrayed O’Reilly as a friend of transparency who had rebuked the Irish Central Bank and the ECB for not publishing their correspondence during the Irish Bailouts of 2010.
If only those newspapers had known how O’Reilly has sided with commercial confidentiality and non-disclosure of the multibillion Euro QE recipients.
O’Reilly ruled in favour of the ECB without once consulting me — the complainant — to find out why I had brought the case or to let me challenge the groupthink logic of her flawed judgment.
Too little, too late
Ironically on the date of the ruling (18th July 2016) the ECB itself announced that another slice of its QE programme, the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme, would publish its ISIN codes.
This is a screenshot of the paywalled Financial Times story with the announcement about the new stance on ISIN codes.
How funny that I had to wait 18 months to get a definitive ‘no’ on receiving the ISIN codes for the Covered Bond and ABS QE programme, only for the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme to publish its ISIN codes on the very same day.
A Pyrrhic Victory perhaps?
Time will Tell.
Corruptissima respublica, plurimae leges
The most corrupt state, the most laws – Tacitus
My feeling is that the ECB don’t want to the public to know how much they are protecting the very same German financiers that benefited from the ECB’s imposition of austerity, deregulation and privatisation policies in southern Europe.
Just as the IRA and Baader Meinhoff are known for their politically inspired terror campaigns in the 1970s so has Deutsche Pfandbriefe exported financial terrorism throughout Europe from its tax avoiding, financial engineering Dublin Headquarters as of the early 2000’s when it re-domiciled to save cash.
ECB QE and commercial confidentiality for public money are the very definition of double standards and, in this case, perpetuate the myth that North Europeans are honest and that everyone else is corrupt.
I appreciate that this is not something many people are willing to accept – such is the scale of our programming.
Just as with PPP / PFI in the UK, commercial confidentiality and financial engineering remain the respectable face of corporate fascism and fraud.
Tech2 
the Guardian 
www.thetimes.co.uk 
Independent.ie 
