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Skeptical Debunker

Prudential-AIG Deal Another Case of Corporate Empire Building - 0 views

moneymorning.com/...prudential-aig

AIG Prudential deal analysis

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10 - Cached
  • In spite of its new whizz-bang CEO, Prudential is a slow-moving but very reliable organization with a level of integrity that is trusted by policyholders. Frankly, that's what you want in an insurance company. I have had a modest U.K. pension with one of its competitors since 1980, and I am constantly worried that some leveraged buyout (LBO) artist will step in, take it over, change the computer system so that information gets lost, outsource customer service, and drive the company into bankruptcy. If you're buying life insurance or pension services, you want a company that's not going to disappear in the next 30 years, and doesn't change its address or computer system too often. Avoid a company like the plague if it is run by whiz kids. However, that's what AIG was like. We know how AIG operated; a guy who thought betting the ranch on the credit default swap market was a good idea ran it. Its Asian operation is no doubt full of similarly clever ideas. Even in the unlikely event that everything there is on the level, the cultural clash with an old-fashioned British insurance company is huge. And why would you pay a PREMIUM for an AIG operation? Like the Kraft/Cadbury deal, Prudential's takeover of AIA is value-destroying. Also like Kraft/Cadbury, it looks likely to destroy a valuable part of the British economy that millions of people have relied upon for generations - only this time the destruction will be caused by the buyer rather than the target. As shareholders we need a new form of corporate governance. Those in management are hired hands. In the old days, large shareholders used to treat management as they would have treated their butler - and management was equally deferential to the owners of substantial percentages of the company's capital. That's how capitalism is supposed to work - with resources deployed in the interests of the owners of capital. We know that system works; economics shows us why it works. The alternative, with resources deployed to satisfy the egos and fill the pockets of the hired hands, has no theoretical justification and little practicality - just as a big country house run in the interests of the butler would be a mess. As capitalists, we must work together to restore capitalism!
  • Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10
     
    To inattentive observers, the recent announcement that the British insurance company Prudential PLC (NYSE ADR: PUK) would pay $35.5 billion for American International Group Inc.'s (NYSE: AIG) Asian insurance operation, AIA, might seem like just another belated expansion of the old British Empire - a strange contrast to the sale of the premier British chocolate company Cadbury PLC (NYSE ADR: CBY) to Kraft Foods Inc. (NYSE: KFT) last month. Yet in reality both deals are examples of Empire-building that for shareholders is much more dangerous than the benign British variety - Empire-building by corporate management that runs contrary to capitalist ideals.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10
     
    Monopolies - BAD (Adam Smith even said so!) Companies controlled and run by management (as if it were their own personal fiefdom and with their hands always in the "cookie jar"), rather than shareholders - BAD. BOTH ANTI-CAPITALISTIC. Both the "norm" for "the titans" of "modern [anti] capitalism". We no longer have capitalism (if that, like communism, ever existed in a more or less "pure" form!). We have a kleptocracy of the rich and corporate aristocracy (as incestuously intertwined as the European nobles ever were!).
Muslim Academy

Some of the most considered Middle East crisis - 0 views

muslim-academy.com/-considered-middle-east-crisis

middle east crisis

shared by Muslim Academy on 11 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Muslim Academy on 11 Aug 12
     
    Zionism is one of the Middle East Crisis which has been increasingly vital for imperialist powers for strategic positions. In 1918, the majority of area that was a part of Turkish Empire was sided along Germany in 1st World War. This area was defeated from Arab armies and by British. During 1920, French and British imperialism further divided Middle East to hand over the pieces of land to the rulers. Lebanon was called as another state which was dominated by the Christian bourgeoisie through a compromise that was taken by the leaders of Moslem peasantry and Druze.
Joe La Fleur

British MP Kris Hopkins ignites furor in the Commons by finally addressing the gangs of... - 0 views

atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/...the-gangs-of-muslim-men-a.html

british gangs muslim kids

shared by Joe La Fleur on 14 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Joe La Fleur on 14 Nov 12
     
    PEDOFILIA COMMON IN ISLAM MAN BOY SEX
Joe La Fleur

Obama's Father Exposed As Anti-White Terrorist By British, U.S. Intel - 0 views

www.westernjournalism.com/terrorist-by-british-u-s-intel

obama father exposed terrorist british u s intel

shared by Joe La Fleur on 16 May 12 - No Cached
  • Joe La Fleur on 16 May 12
     
    ACORN DOESN'T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE
Muslim Academy

Genocide of Muslims in Burma - 0 views

muslim-academy.com/genocide-of-muslims-in-burma

Burma muslims killing Burma muslims miseries of muslims Genocide of Muslims in Burma

shared by Muslim Academy on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Muslim Academy on 25 Aug 12
     
    Burma is a country with about 0.7 million Muslim population out of total 75 million population. Muslims in Burma have been suffering badly since the year 1962 after the military took over. Since then thousands of Muslims have been killed and thousands of women have been raped but the recent wave of violence is worse than all the previous incidents. Almost every family of Muslims is a victim of Buddhist led regime of Burma. Suffering from such deliberate genocide, many of the Muslims have been compelled to leave their houses and migrate to neighboring countries. The most sad and tragic aspect of this genocide is that nobody is willing to speak against this cruelty. The entire mainstream media is showing criminal silence upon this mass killing going on in Burma against Muslims. We are not seeing any projection for Burmese Muslims in British Broadcasting Corporation, Cable News Network; Fox New, Bloomberg, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and other mainstream print and electronic sections of the media. The response from various Human Rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others is also very tragic and disappointed. These human rights organizations have failed to project this inhuman genocide against Muslims which is going on in Burma. Like is the case with international platforms or so called representatives of the world. The United Nations Organizations also failed to show significant and powerful response against mass killings of Muslims in Burma. The only considerable response we have seen yet is from the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and a few Islamic countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan etc. Similarly, social media campaigns are also projecting this inhuman incident effectively; there are a number of pages on Facebook and other social media websites that are raising voice for this cause.
barrybcollinss

500 year-old shipyard that is home of British Royal Navy to shut - 1 views

dailynewsen.com/...ritish-royal-navy-to-shut.html

obama politics YouTube

shared by barrybcollinss on 06 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • barrybcollinss on 06 Nov 13
     
    LONDON –  For 5 hundreds of years, considering that the time of the Tudors, the shipyard in Portsmouth, England, built warships that assisted Britain rule the waves and generate an empire. On Wednesday, the yard's employees learned the website will be shut.
thinkahol *

Iraqi Refugee Describes Torture, Imprisonment of Husband Who Returned to Iraq to Free J... - 0 views

www.democracynow.org/...cribes_torture_imprisonment_of

Iraqi Refugee Describes Torture Imprisonment of Husband Who Returned to Iraq Free Jailed Son

shared by thinkahol * on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Sep 10
     
    Rabiha al Qassab, a British Iraqi woman who lives in London, describes the harrowing story of her husband, Ramze Shihab Ahmed. Having fled in 1998 after being accused of trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Ramze returned to Iraq last year to get his son out of prison. He, too, was arrested and was tortured. Like 30,000 other Iraqis, he and his son are being held without charge.
thinkahol *

Protest works. Just look at the proof : Johann Hari - 0 views

johannhari.com/...t-works-just-look-at-the-proof

Protest works. Just look at the proof : Johann Hari

shared by thinkahol * on 30 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 30 Oct 10
     
    Protest works. Just look at the proof, Against Market Fundamentalism, Against Tyranny, British Politics,  Johann Hari
Skeptical Debunker

Leaked documents: UK record industry wrote web-censorship amendment - Boing Boing - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...leaked-documents-uk.html

UK England copyright web=censorship amendment Liberal Democrts

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parliamentarians need to recognize that copyright touches everyone and every technology in the digital age. It is no longer a question of inter-business regulation and deals. Getting copyright wrong has the potential to mess up our freedom of speech, prevent us from getting the benefits of new technologies, and damage society in other very profound ways. It is therefore deeply inappropriate for such fundamental proposals to have been introduced by both the government or the opposition parties at the behest of one side of the debate. That applies just as much to disconnection, which Mandelson introduced in the summer at the last minute under pressure again from the BPI and other rights holders.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10
     
    Last week, the UK LibDem party was thrown into scandal when two of its Lords proposed an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill that would allow for national web-censorship, particularly aimed at "web-lockers" like Google Docs and YouSendIt. Now a leaked document from the British Phonographic Institute suggests that the amendment was basically written by the record industry lobby and entered into law on their behalf by representatives of the "party of liberty." This weekend, LibDem members who attend the national convention in Birmingham will have the chance to vote on an emergency measure affirming the party's commitment to an open and just Internet, repudiating this disastrous measure. If you (or someone you know) is attending the convention, please support the "Save the Net" emergency measure and help rehabilitate the party's reputation on fundamental freedoms in the information society.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10
     
    Proving once again that special interests can "buy" the "support" of politicians of any stripe! And they can do so regardless of the "best interests" of the "majority of the people", who those politicians are supposedly morally (by honor) and legally (by oath) bound to represent!
Iftekhar

The ethnocidal civilization - 0 views

onlinejournal.com/...article_5767.shtml

bangladesh India Hinduism Buddhism Islam Sufis Annie Besant caste Alexis de Tocqueville

shared by Iftekhar on 12 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Iftekhar on 12 Apr 10
     
    Ethnocide - culture murder - has been the repeated behaviour pattern of western civilization, as testified by Alexis de Tocqueville. The culture is not content with mere conquest: it must control the very thoughts of those conquered. A recently published book on a Christian mission in Bangladesh retells an old story against the background of both the Muslim and British invasions of India, centering the Garos and the loss of their ancestral religion.
Sana ulHaq

Cameron chairs first coalition cabinet meeting - 0 views

www.newshungama.com/...irst-coalition-cabinet-meeting

shared by Sana ulHaq on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • Sana ulHaq on 13 May 10
     
    The Blairite adviser who couldn't understand why Clegg was wasting his career by becoming a Lib Dem MEP knows better now. The young European idealist who helped Leon Brittan, the British EU commissioner,
thinkahol *

GMF - The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark - 0 views

www.gmfus.org/...article.cfm

economic policy america government denmark

shared by thinkahol * on 27 May 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 27 May 10
     
    Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali
thinkahol *

Surprise, Surprise: Iraq War Was About Oil | Truthout - 0 views

truthout.org/...1303659468

Afghanistan may be the graveyard of empires but Iraq is home a sense humor. Iraqis wonder aloud whether U.S. and Britain would have invaded if its main export had been cabbages instead oil. However obvious answer remarkable array American pundits pseudo-s

shared by thinkahol * on 24 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 24 Apr 11
     
    Afghanistan may be the graveyard of empires, but Iraq is home to a graveyard sense of humor. Iraqis wonder aloud whether the U.S. and Britain would have invaded Iraq if its main export had been cabbages instead of oil. However obvious the answer, a remarkable array of American pundits and pseudo-savants have resisted giving the oil factor any pride of place among the motives behind the U.S./U.K. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. To this day, the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) continues to play its accustomed role as government accomplice suppressing unwelcome news. So, if you don't tune in to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now or read the British press, you would have missed the latest documentary evidence showing that Great Britain's Lords and Ladies lied about how big oil companies, like BP, lusted after Iraqi oil in the months leading up to the attack on Iraq. Oil researcher Greg Muttitt's new book Fuel on Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq presents that evidence, since Muttitt had better luck than his American counterparts in getting responses to his Freedom of Information requests. After a five-year struggle, he obtained more than 1,000 official documents which - how to say this - do not reflect well on the peerage, the captains of the oil industry, and the government of Tony Blair.
thinkahol *

Rupert Murdoch-Owned "News of the World" to Close in Wake of Phone Hacking Scandal | Al... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/..._wake_of_phone_hacking_scandal

Rupert Murdoch-Owned News of the World to Close in Wake of Phone Hacking Scandal | AlterNet

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11
     
    As AlterNet's Addie Stan reported, the phone hacking case has had broad implications, "threatening the administration of British Prime Minister David Cameron and "boomeranging back to New York, engulfing the top executive at the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States, the Wall Street Journal."
Michael Haltman

Will the BP oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico make that company disappear? - 0 views

www.examiner.com/...e-that-company-into-bankruptcy

Gulf of Mexico financial crisis BP British Petroleum oil spill 2010 environmental disaster live feed bankruptcy stock dividend debt credit default swaps price

shared by Michael Haltman on 09 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Michael Haltman on 09 Jun 10
     
    BP bankruptcy: As the oil continues to flow and the environmental disaster continues to grow, it is a scenario that has to be given some credence.
Levy Rivers

Tom Watson MP » Blog Archive » Power of Information: New taskforce and speech - 0 views

tom-watson.co.uk/index.php

data leadership phones coverage prime minister taskforce

shared by Levy Rivers on 02 Apr 08 - Cached
  • We commissioned Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg to write the Power of Information report because we knew that information, presented in the right way, was a potent driver for improving public services and government.
  • Today I am going to offer two arguments that I think compliment the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on public service reform
  • Firstly, that freeing up data will allow us to unlock the talent British entrepreneurs. And secondly, engaging people - using the simple tools that bring them together - will allow the talents of all our people to be applied to the provision of public services.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The difference of course is that today we contend with what Richard Saul Wurman describes as a ‘tsunami of data’
  • My job is to make sure that government can benefit from this new thinking too. When we were first elected in 1997 people had a recipient relationship with data, they got what they were given when they were given it. It was static.
  • In scale, the spread of social media is comparable to the spread of telephones in the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Yet it’s happened in two years not 20.
  • As Clay Shirky would say, we’ve reached a point where technology is simple and boring enough to be socially useful and interesting.
  • Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
  • Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least
  • Richard is here tonight and I hope that after the formal proceedings you might like to share some of your own ideas with him. Richard is also joined by a number of other taskforce members. They’re all people with remarkable track records in this field. We’re lucky. The UK has some of the world’s leading talent.
  • And today the PM announced an initiative that would allow you to find your community Bobbies using your postcode.
  • The taskforce will bring its expertise to bare on existing initiatives to see if we can what we already do better
  • I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.
  • By bringing people onto the taskforce with the skills and experiences of people like Sally Russell we can move further and faster in this area.
  • Two weeks ago the Prime Minister signalled that we were moving public services to the next stage of reform. He said that we were not only going to, further enhance choice but also empower both the users of services and all the professionals who deliver them - to drive up standards for all.
  • Transformational government is about wrapping services around the citizen, not citizens around the services.
  • Last month DirectGov had over 7 million visitors. Peter is seeing the aggregate desires of millions of UK public service using citizens. I had half an hour with him a fortnight ago and came away with a dozen ideas as to how we can improve our public services.
  • I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.
  • And much of that information has the potential to be reused in data mashups. Some of it already is, like Hansard on theyworkforyou, or Google Maps using Ordnance Survey data.
  • The Power of Information Report recognised that, and made recommendations to the Treasury. The Treasury, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, published an independent economic study in the Budget and announced its intention to look at these issues during this spending review cycle.
  • It was this early open source approach that arguably fostered 500 years of Islamic scholarship in important fields like medicine, astronomy, lexicography, literature and science. In contrast, European data was stored in monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As Gibbon wrote in the ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’ the ‘age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years’ and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals?
  • I believe in the power of mass collaboration. I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few. I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever. I said that I don’t believe the post-bureaucratic age argument. It’s just old thinking, laissez faire ideas with a new badge. The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.
  • The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access. The point is, who cares? It doesn’t matter who has the ideas. It’s what you do with them and how you improve on them that counts.
thinkahol *

The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

British government

shared by thinkahol * on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 May 10
     
    Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism. In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities). Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a Lib Dem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'."
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