yet another blog

Periodically (about once every couple of months so far) I receive through the post a letter from them along the following lines (this one having arrived yesterday morning in fact)…

A begging letter in all but name, trying to entice me back into their ever-caring arms.

“Ever-caring” did I say?

Ah yes, but ever-caring for whom? Certainly not their customers. Not on an individual basis at least. Not until their profits start getting squeezed that is.

Truth is, had they not so comprehensively screwed up my internet access (see this post) I’d almost certainly still be with them as a “valued customer” for all their services… including some they probably hadn’t even introduced way back in October ’06 when I became victim of their original screw-up. That’s it y’see… I tend to be one of those unadventurous types that sticks with existing suppliers (brand loyalty I think its called).

But it doesn’t end there!

Oh no.

For in July of ’07 they inflicted another con on their customers, entirely inappropriately named “Payment Charges” (this post details the intricacies of the lovely little scam).

And now, having just recently learned of BT’s investment in the arms trade I’m even less likely to be enticed back. If that indeed were possible.

So here’s my reply to BT’s letter:

1. Try to understand the real meanings of “good customer relations” and “service”.

2. Stop unethical investment practices. Specifically, investing in companies that trade in stuff to kill people.

The sooner I find a way of not putting any money into BT’s coffers the happier I’ll be!

And… um… had they the guts to publish a proper email address instead of one of those webmail thingies (ok, so they’d get a lot of spam. Tough. We all have to deal with it, why shouldn’t they? The real reason though is probably to deter all those folk with complaints) I’d send them the link to this blogpost!

But if I should suddenly and mysteriously disappear off the web it probably means they’ve stumbled across this post anyway! (Now where’d I put those dongle thingies?)

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Apparently, according to their website, “The GEO Group UK Ltd., is a wholly owned subsidiary of The GEO Group, Inc.” which, according to Sourcewatch, was set up as a division of The Wackenhut Corporation.
And that, again according to Sourcewatch, is a subsidiary of the UK-based G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor).
Now G4S was in turn formed from a merger of Securicor and Group 4 A/S (er… here we go again… that was formerly Group 4 Falck).

Of all these Wackenhut is an especially interesting entity. According to an article by John Connolly writing in “Spy” magazine in September 1992 the Wackenhut Corporation has been involved in all sorts of dirty doings. As retired FBI agent William Hinshaw has said “It is known throughout the industry that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut.”

These dirty doings apparently embraced such things as maintaining files on antiwar protesters and civil rights demonstrators. In 1966 it claimed to have “the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America”, with details on more than four million names.
And a very dubious relationship with the CIA with suggestions that Wackenhut would undertake covert and sometimes illegal overseas operations when the CIA needed some sort of “cover”. Operations like the illegal shipments of nuclear and chemical weapons-making supplies to Iraq, in which Wackenhut is rumoured to have been involved.
(The supply of which being of course one of the less-publicised reasons why the warmongers were so certain Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Hell, they supplied the bloody means for making them in the first place! But that’s another story entirely.)

With a heritage such as this, what of the integrity of GEO itself then?
Not so good seemingly.
According to the Dallas Morning News of 25th October 2008:

Jail firm indicted in inmate’s slaying

McALLEN, Texas – A Florida private prison company has been indicted in South Texas on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release.

The indictment alleges the GEO Group allowed inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks in socks in 2001 at the Raymondville facility. Calls to the GEO Group and the Willacy County district attorney’s office were not immediately returned Friday. In 2006, a jury ordered the firm to pay Mr. de la Rosa’s family $47.5 million in a civil judgment.

Hmm.

So what’s with all this sudden interest I appear to have acquired in what’s clearly a very dodgy (and heavily American-influenced… yucch!) “security” firm?

All down to good old Indymedia again, in which I read that:

However on 29 June Harmonsworth Removals Center [sic] became a lot more like Guantanamo Bay. Management of the facility was taken over by the private prison and concentration camp corporation GEO; the evil people who run Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

What?

Or, perhaps more aptly, WTF?!!!

Just excuse me a moment whilst I take a break to indulge some choice expletives that are far too rich to repeat in this ‘ere blog.

******* @@@@@@ xxxxxxx *****

Ahh… that’s better. Now, where was I?

Oh yes, GEO taking over the running of one of our “Removals Centres”. The sort of facility that has, so I believe, been the target of the “NoBorders” campaign for quite some time now.

I have to confess its not a campaign that has particularly attracted my interest very much in the past. A lack of interest born, I suspect, of ignorance on my part.
Ignorance of the issues involved and, until very recently, of the abuses that seem to occur within the walls of these so-called “detention” and “removals” centres.

Which is all a bit strange really (my former lack of interest, that is) given that there’s one of these “immigration removal centres” (Yarl’s Wood to be precise) little more than a stone’s throw from my own locality.

Now I have to confess, even in light of my recently-acquired knowledge, that I’m still a bit ambivalent about the political (or perhaps “philosophical” is a more accurate term?) issues involved in the “immigration debate”. But about one thing I’m absolutely clear… that the mistreatment and abuse of people detained in these centres  is a total no-no… regardless of whether such detention be considered just or not.
That alone would probably be sufficient to stir me into taking a rather more active interest in the whole matter.

But learning that our supposedly State-run facilities are in the hands of a bunch of thugs ultimately under the influence of a bloody American corporation with such a disturbing track record is pretty much guaranteed to arouse my ire.

And if that did somehow manage not to do the trick, learning that this is the same corporation (or an offshoot thereof) that’s involved with Guantanamo Bay certainly would.

Bastards!

And just what the hell is our Government thinking of, having dealings with such a dodgy outfit? An outfit that’s clearly driven by nothing other than the profit motive, with no conscience or morality at all and little concern for legalities. Sub-contracting out to this bunch of hired muscle can hardly be described as an ethical choice, now can it?

Shit! Its so unbelievable I almost wish I’d remained in ignorance.

It all just reinforces the sentiments I expressed a few weeks back.

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It seems to me there’s been something of a seachange in British politics over the past generation or so. Its something I’d long suspected but now, with the latest scandal of MPs’ expenses and the listing in the Daily Telegraph of what various MPs have been claiming, its become totally confirmed.

Perhaps its just in my mind. Perhaps MPs have always been a bunch of self-serving money-grabbing toerags and its just never come to light.

Or perhaps its nothing to do with the MPs themselves but rather our perception of them and, more tellingly, our own expectations of them. In which case the seachange wouldn’t be so much in politics itself as in British society as a whole.

And, I have to say, I don’t like it very much. In fact, I’m bloody disgusted by it.

Its bad enough that our MPs (the people that have supposedly been elected to “represent us” in our supposedly “free and democratic” society) should raid the public coffers to finance their own clearly exorbitant lifestyles. Whether or not such depletion of public funds is within their “rules” is totally irrelevant; just because something’s allowable “within the rules” doesn’t mean its compulsory… there’s such a thing as ethical behaviour y’know. And anyway, who drew up those “rules” in the first place?

So its bad enough that they should be doing this. That they should continue to do so whilst the country suffers in an economic crisis the like of which hasn’t been seen in decades almost defies belief. Can they really be so completely out of touch? So oblivious to the financial hardship that huge swathes of the British population are currently experiencing?

That some of them may have, since being “outed”, mumbled a token apology and offered to pay back their ill-gotten gains is utterly irrelevant. Almost insulting in fact. For they shouldn’t have pocketed the bloody money in the first place!

And let me explain that word “exorbitant”…

I’m a real person. A real flesh and blood living human being (believe it or not). Living in this benighted country of ours. A pretty average sort of bloke. No excessively expensive habits. Struggling to earn a living. Struggling to maintain a home that, in fairness, probably wouldn’t even fetch 90 grand on the open market… and I don’t even own the damn place! Struggling to pay the bills and then, if there’s any money left over, occasionally treating myself to inconsequentials like food.

And I don’t think I’m exceptional. I think there’s probably a whole load of people out there like me. And even more loads in a far worse situation. For at least I can manage nice little extras like a telephone, internet and so on.

But this is a far cry from the sort of lifestyle to which those in Westminster appear to have become accustomed… at our bloody expense!

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m neither envious nor jealous of those folk that earn whacking great lumps of money for doing an honest day’s work. Best of luck to ‘em. Nowt to do with me. Many many years ago I decided I didn’t want to become the sort of person it takes to be an ultra-successful businessman and so I changed the then pattern of my life and, in the words of the cliche, got out of the “rat race”. So fair play to ‘em if that’s what they want. And are prepared to pay the price in terms of what it does to you as a person.

But we’re not talking here about relatively honest businessmen that do a relatively honest day’s work are we? We’re not even talking about some celebrity who through some twist of fate captures the public imagination and thereby can command huge sums for public appearances etc.

No. We’re talking about a bunch of incompetents who clearly lie, cheat, deceive and swindle just so they can retain their grip on political power and sustain lifestyles that most of us only dream about (if we’re so inclined).

Its often been said that these scum are out of touch with ordinary people; that they don’t live in the real world. Well, what more proof is needed than the recent revelations about expenses?

(Ok, there are notable exceptions in that list the Telegraph compiled, but they appear to be in the microscopic minority. So what does that say about the culture apparently endemic to our present parliamentary system?)

And on top of everything else we have this bunch of wan***s constantly introducing ever more repressive and restrictive legislation and seeking ever more ways to micromanage our lives for us. Bloody hell!

However, although I’ve ranted on at some length about the expenses scandal this isn’t actually the real cause of my concern. Its merely, if you like, the “last straw”.

For, and its been most noticeable throughout the years of this bloody “New Labour” government (not that I’m a fan of either the Conservatives or the LibDems, and I don’t know enough about any of the minority parties to comment), it seems to me that politicians nowadays can deviate as far as they wish from ethical behaviour, can spin, manipulate, and distort the truth in any manner they like yet carry on regardless, virtually unscathed.

It seems to me that scandals that in earlier years (indeed, even in my recall) would have toppled governments and conceivably even precipitated constitutional crises are nowadays regarded as little more than peccadillos; minor breaches of etiquette that all too soon are forgiven and forgotten by their peers and, more importantly, by us.

So are we becoming more tolerant? Then if so I believe its a tolerance that goes just a step too far. Its a tolerance that threatens to undermine the very fabric of our society, and destroy everything that I thought we as a nation were supposed to be about.

Tolerance is fine if exercised with discrimination. The need to discriminate between that which justifies being tolerated… and that which demands rebuke or more. And deliberate, knowing, and cynical abuses of office certainly do not, in my opinion, merit tolerance.

Or have we just become blasé? Complacent? Immune to the declining standards in public life, no longer noticing them or considering them worthy of action, of outcry?

Is such immunity a product of the desensitisation that may have occurred with the consumption of an increasingly sensationalist press (competing for their market share), broadcast media, and of course easier access to the Internet?

Or apathetic even? Acknowledging the unpalatable truth that no matter what we say or do we, the “common people”, the “little people”, are just ignored, patronised, our only value being the tick we may put in a box every five years or so that those scumbags can then pretend they have some sort of meaningful mandate.

Oh… and the hard-earned pounds we pour into those public coffers year after year until we’re no longer able to earn sufficient to hold body and soul together. Remember? Those public coffers that are so eagerly raided by our conscienceless politicians.

Or is it the media? Are they nowadays so much in the pockets of the politicians that they no longer provide a sufficiently loud voice for the concerns of the general public, who are, let’s face it, the ones that keep them afloat?

For surely it is the media’s task, as much as ours, to remorselessly hound these ne’er-do-wells out of public office. The media are, after all, as much an integral part of society as we.

What then have we become as a society?

Call me old-fashioned if you like but I still believe that those elected to serve in public office should, in reality as well as appearance, be a little bit above the average. Should be exemplars of such notions as honour, integrity, and honesty.

They are elected to represent us, to conduct the affairs of the country for the common good (not for their personal good be it noted). They are given a virtually free hand to implement measures that impact all of us in our daily lives.

Specific measures, moreover, that are rarely offered to the electorate for opinion. Oh no. It just doesn’t work that way does it? By casting our vote for someone on the basis of what they may say in the run-up to elections effectively we’re giving them carte blanche to do what the hell they like once they are elected.

To give someone that degree of control over our lives requires, indeed demands, that we should be able to trust them implicitly. Yet offhand I can think of no single politician worthy of that degree of trust. Indeed, I doubt if I would extend that level of trust to many of my acquaintances with whom I’m far more familiar.

In fact, I wouldn’t trust a single one of these damn politicians to even do my shopping for me and not rip me off for the change. How then can I trust them with so much more than loose change?

To call those people who sit in Parliament (when they can be bothered to attend) “Honourable” and “Right Honourable” is a joke. Worse than a joke, its a bastardisation of the English language, stripping those words of the meanings they should truly possess. And it insults the very very few that may be genuinely honourable.

Honourable only insofar as they’re not also dipping their fingers into the till of course… though still not raising a hue and cry (on behalf of those that elected them) about the behaviour of their brethren. And I wonder what reason there could be for that particular silence?

Moreover this far less than honourable behaviour on the part of what appears to be the majority not only brings into disrepute the (what should be) worthy institution of Parliament, but also the country itself… showing a face to the world akin to that of some tinpot dictatorship where every petty official is “up for grabs”.

Far as I’m concerned its about time we got rid of the whole bloody bunch of them and started over. Way after time in fact.

Elections are a farce, structured in such a way that those who “win” only ever represent a minority of the population leaving the rest of us, to all intents and purposes, practically disenfranchised. So that too needs a complete overhaul.

I begin to think we’d all be better off with being ruled by a real Monarch than this present pretence of a “democracy”.

Or even another “Lord Protector”!

Oliver Cromwell where art thou?

Update 13.06.09 20:38- Here’s an interesting insight on how the Telegraph acquired their info on the MPs expenses…
How Daily Telegraph ‘bunker’ tackled MP expenses

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Mate of mine decides to revamp his blog. Move away from the rather innocuous “personal journal” type thing he’d set up ages ago and didn’t seem to do very much with, and change it into something rather more “in yer face”… with a new title (So who died and made you King of the Zombies?) and theme to match. Neat.

A little place of his own where he can spew forth a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse and obscenities (of which he has an impressive command) in the most narrow-minded non-politically correct blinkered way imaginable at any of the thousands of things that seem to spark his ire on a daily basis. Even neater.

Then he invites me to be a guest author, periodically contributing posts (or rather, rants) of my own in whatever manner I care to express them. Cos I tend to have a few gripes about the world now and then meself. Neater still.

Sez he to me “How about changing the link name to the blog that’s on your blog?” (no, not this one, another one of mine… I seem to have them all over the place. So many in fact I suspect I’ve lost track of one or two. Just don’t ask).
“Good idea” sez I, and promptly jumps on the computer. No. Not literally. Though heaven knows, there’ve been enough occasions in the past when I’ve felt like doing precisely that.

Anyway, fire the infernal machine up, get on-line, and suddenly remember that before I do anything I want to download a little utility I had ages ago and then somehow lost. Web Ferret. A sort of online search tool that queries multiple search engines at the same time. Should come in real handy for a particular project that’s recently started occupying my attention. Been meaning to grab another version of it for ages and kept forgetting.

In the process of tracking that down I come across this other search tool type thingy, a desktop search app that finds offline files on your local machine not just by file name, extension or whatever but also searches the actual content of files. All sorts of files.
That’s something else I’ve been wanting to get for ages. Tried Google Desktop Search… didn’t like it for all sorts of reasons. Tried Copernic… seemed to take ages to build/update the index. Currently using Agent Ransack. Which is fine, but cos its not index-based it does take a bit of time to find things. And it doesn’t search every type of file.

So, download and install this newly-found app named… um… SearchInform. Give it a try at least. If it does the business it’ll come in real handy for quick searches of the absolute gigabytes of archived files I seem to have acquired over the years.

What next then? Ah yes, best just quickly check my mailbox. And that’s another hour or so taken care of. Quick tour of the blogs. Mine and other folks’. Back to the mailbox to deal with a couple of new arrivals. Then its just about time for bed. Power off and that’s it.

So there am I, drifting off to sleep when suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, it hits me. Wham! Bloody hell! I’d forgotten to update that link… the very task I went onto the computer for in the first place.

Oh how I wish that sometimes, just occasionally, I could actually remember what I’m supposed to be doing. Bloody bloody hell!

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As noted in my last post, quite inexplicably I appear to have been delving into the murky realm of political blogs recently. And, I have to say, its a bit addictive. Probably on account of all the interesting little snippets that are revealed therein.

Not that I’ve ever been an especially political creature.

Politicians? Pah. Far as I can see there’s nowt to choose ‘twixt any of them and I don’t think you’d hear many complaints from me if the whole lot were bundled up in a sack and dumped somewhere in the Thames.
Um… no… skip that. There would be a complaint from me… something about unnecessarily polluting our rivers and waterways methinks.

For most of my life my default state’s tended to be “let the scheming toerags get on with their politicking and conniving and leave me alone to live my life”.
And there of course is the rub. For undoubtedly their scheming and conniving does impact my life, and that impact has become increasingly noticeable over the past few years. To the point where its getting to be bloody irritating in fact, and I’m starting to resent all the nasty little intrusions that seem to be multiplying on an almost daily basis.
One could be tempted to just point the finger at this damned New Labour government, but I suspect that’d be a bit unfair cos, far as I can see, they’re pretty much all as bad as each other. The “political class”? They simply don’t live in the real world, and I wouldn’t trust a single one of them.

Which of course explains why I’ve always tried to keep all that politics stuff at arm’s length.

But there’s another thing that has led to my becoming increasingly observant of the political scene. And that’s this growing involvement I appear to have with, for want of a better term, the “activist community”. Y’know, protests, campaigns, demonstrations and the like.

Apart from a brief skirmish therewith for a coupla years in my youth (CND, civil liberties, anti-apartheid… all the usual stuff) I’d not really been hugely motivated by all that protest malarkey. Far too busy just earning a living I suspect. Until the Iraq war. Tbe second one that is. “Blair’s War” as I think of it.
And boy, was that an eye-opener. I’m sure I must have rambled on about this at great length elsewhere so I won’t cover all the same old ground again. Suffice to say that here I am, several years on, eyes opened much wider now than hitherto and aghast at all the things successive governments (those bloody politicians again) have been doing “in my name” (to nick a phrase from the anti-war movement). More to the point… continue to do!

However, all that’s by the by. What’s really prompted this little rant is a snippet on, of all places, the Daily Mail website (needless to say, the Mail’s not a ‘paper I’d normally read, along with all the other ‘papers I wouldn’t normally read… hmm, is “paper” the right term to refer to the website of a “news”paper I wonder?).

I was actually led to the snippet through a link on a political blog (hence the intro to this post), but that’s also by the by.

So what we have in this little snippet (dated 26th April, and referring to a meeting between the party leaders over that “MPs’ expenses” controversy) is the news that

Angry Gordon Brown shouted a ‘take it or leave it’ ultimatum at David Cameron… [and] repeatedly waved his fist and stormed: ‘We have to get this sorted! We have to get this sorted!’

Hmm… so that’s democracy in action is it?

And then, apparently

To the Tory leader’s astonishment, Mr Brown said: ‘If you didn’t keep raising this at Prime Minister’s Questions, we wouldn’t be in this situation.’

Now I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, and I could well be given that my knowledge of and about politics is so limited, but isn’t the whole point of an Opposition Party to raise awkward questions? Isn’t this supposed to be one of the checks and balances that are a whole part of our parliamentary system?

Seems to me that Brown’s indulging a bit of a power trip here. Lost sight of what his real role’s supposed to be methinks. Wonder how much longer we’re gonna be stuck with the oaf? Problem is, I can’t see whatever follows being a great deal better. Time to ditch the whole kit and caboodle mebbe and start over.

It also seems to me, incidentally, that if MPs weren’t raiding the public coffers to support lifestyles that most ordinary folk can’t even afford to dream about  then they wouldn’t be in that situation. Nowt to do with Cameron raising questions in the House. Or is that too simplistic a view?

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