Poochunk

On the subject of the recent Tamil protests in London, there’s a piece in The Times which contains a small but telling comment from a police sergeant. I’ve added the emphasis here:

Police had initially appeared hesitant to deal with the Tamils, as some privately expressed concern of an adverse media reaction if they use force after the controversy surrounding policing of the G20 demonstrations.

One sergeant told The Times: “There’s women and children … you can imagine how that would look in the press.” Police cameramen were among many filming when officers began moving the protesters.

So the reason for reluctance to use force (ie. violence) against largely non-violent protesters who include women and children is because of how it would look in the press!?

The police are more worried about a possible bad media reaction than they are about the actual act of shoving non-violent (mainly sit-down) protesters around and then battering them at the first possible opportunity.

After the G20, the idea that they’d still do it all over again if they thought they’d get away with it is really not reassuring. But then again, I’ve come to expect nothing less from the police – upstanding bastions of freedom that they are.

One of the authors of this blog has been paying off debts accrued a few years back while ill and unable to claim benefits due to a mistake by the DWP. The debts were purchased by a debt management company called Thames Credit, part of the Aktiv Kapital group.

It seems not all is well at Thames Credit, who sent the following letter today:

05/09/08

Dear xxxx,

Agreement Number: xxxx
Outstanding Balance: £4xxx.xx

Every single day in the Newspapers, we read something about the “Credit Crunch”, and we wonder what exactly that means to people.

Our Company, the Aktiv Kapital Group, has millions of customers Worldwide, and we have decided to go against the Credit Crunch, to try and help our valuable customers.

We intend to make this short and sweet.

Your balance is £4xxx.xx

We will accept £150 in full and final settlement.

You have not misread the last sentence. We will accept £150 in full and final settlement!

There is no catch, but there is just one condition.

You have only 10 days from the date of this letter to accept this offer.

So, you need to telephone us immediately, as this is a one-of opportunity for you to clear your debt. (Where appropriate, we will update your Credit File to show that your debt is satisfied, which could be helpful to you.)

Please telephone us immediately!! Our number and opening hours are clearly shown above.

Yours faithfully,

Thames Credit Limited

(Image of the letter here if you’re interested.)

After thinking about this for a while, we came to the following observations and conclusions:

• The letter was dated 5th September, but the envelope was postmarked (franked by Thames Credit themselves, presumably) on 10th September, arriving today, the 12th. Why the delay in posting such an “urgent” letter?
• As a company specialising in debt collection, you’d think Thames Credit would know pretty well what the “Credit Crunch” means to people. Instead, we wonder what the credit crunch means to Thames Credit? Perhaps it means that in the face of global economic recession, all of the debts they’ve purchased are quite likely to become utterly worthless. Especially worthless if Thames Credit themselves were to go out of business. They wouldn’t possibly be trying to cut their losses and squeeze people for anything they can get while they still have the chance, before all those debts become basically nothing more than empty numbers, would they? No, of course they wouldn’t!
• That until now, Thames Credit have been anything but nice to deal with – sending letters threatening various things from court action to bailiffs, repeatedly telephoning parents despite being told that the debtor no longer lives at home, and so on. As a debt management company, they’re interested in squeezing money out of those who can least afford it. Why the sudden change in their tune – helping their customers!? Pull the other one! Besides, people only end up as Thames Credit “customers” against their will!
• Going against the credit crunch just to be nice to people – at a time of global economic trouble, that sounds utterly insane! They wouldn’t possibly be trying to hide their real motives, would they?
• Please telephone us immediately!! Please!! Pretty please!! With cherries on top!!

Gosh, what a nice bunch of debt collection people – totally the opposite of their usual bullying and rampant profiteering off the back of those who can least afford it. But to make such an irresistible and generous offer, with only one-and-a-bit working days to think about it… hmm, that’s a toughie!

Let’s see. If a bird looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

At the £1-a-month that is currently being paid on this debt, £150 equates to twelve and a half years worth of payments. But in some ways, £150 sounds like a small price to make these arseholes get lost.

Still, have a guess at how far the nice folks at Thames Credit can shove their highly suspect “offer” to help them cut-and-run up their porky uber-capitalist arses?

This |—| far? Or…

This |—————————————————————————–| far?

Answers in the comments please!

Perhaps only too soon the people at Thames Credit will understand what it’s like to be flat broke and unable to afford the cost of living without getting into debt. Maybe even one day, nice debt collectors and bailiffs will be knocking on their doors too – we can but hope!

See also this thread on Moneysavingexpert.com from another recipient of the same letter.

Don’t forget to Google and see where else this is being discussed.

Update: I checked out Aktiv Kapital’s share price and it’s come down a fair way in the last 6 months – about 35%. I’m no expert on the stock market, but I guess it can only be a good sign that their share price has fallen that far. Hopefully their subsidiary companies like Thames Credit will be the first casualties.

It’s still a gamble not to go for their offer. I guess it depends on how much your monthly payments are. This account is on £1 a month, with a debt of just over £4k, and the “customer” doesn’t care in the slightest about having a bad credit rating.

Finally! This government has done SOMETHING right!

The legislation on tax on empty buildings has been changed so that owners will have to pay the full amount of tax instead of 50%. This obviously gives owners the incentive to find tenants for their properties. Hopefully this will reduce the number of properties standing empty in this country- criminal when you think of the amount of homeless or the apparent ‘housing shortage’ causing large development on greenbelt land.

There are around 289,000 long-term (over 6 months) empty properties in England alone. If these were brought back into use, then the pressure to build new houses would be eased somewhat.

Incidentally, I tried to find estimate figures for the number of homeless people in England and came up with nothing but confusing partial figures and statistics. If anyone can help with this, please let me know! I find it incredible that there isn’t somewhere with this information in plain English!

what if all the advertising you ever saw was propaganda for one party or religion?

how would you feel?

in my opinion, it is propaganda for something like a religion. this ‘religion’ is just as, if not more powerful and all pervasive in our thought and culture than any recognised religion.

ok, so, the thousands of adverts we see are for hundreds of different products or services. but they all represent the same thing: commercialism, consumerism, capitalism. they all seek to manipulate and control our thoughts, emotions and actions by varying degrees of sophistication.

is that an overstatement? billions are spent on advertising, psychologists are employed, whole ethos are created. nowadays this isn’t just to find the best ways for us to spend our money- it is so we identify with products and brands. to attach cultural and emotional meaning and significance. to associate our very beings with the ethos of certain brands. to associate health, happiness and pleasure with material goods.

i’m still undecided whether all of this is just a smokescreen for a system that perpetuates itself so that a small ‘elite’ can get and remain filthy rich or whether- though that is of course the case- that the apparent self deception of the ‘virtue’ of this process isn’t now so pervasive that even those at the top who benefit the most actually believe it themselves.

having said this- if this system were so effective, if it truly were self perpetuating, then why is so much money and effort poured into keeping it going? maybe it’s just a matter of money flow. the advertisers, brand managers, broadcasters etc all expect a certain amount of money for their work or ad space.

it’s a circus. but a deadly one. we are losing so much to this merry-go-round. i am absolutely opposed to the idea that our culture as it is in the ‘west’ is the height of human endeavour. this is not progress. it is just servitude dressed up in trinkets, baubles and assurances of wealth and comfort.

whereas in reality not only are most people in the ‘developed’ world unhappy with some or all aspects of their work and personal lives, less ‘developed’ and more self sufficient peoples of this planet are being stripped of their land, resources and livelihoods by this machine called capitalism and wars are being fought over these resources.

when we realise that the planet and human cultures existed before modern notions of monetary worth, that no amount of money can replenish what we are so rapidly using up, when we understand that these things have a value far beyond money and that our actual continued existence relies upon the judicious and sustainable use of these resources- atmosphere, water, productive land, timber, plants, ecosystems- then we will realise that the cabaret of consumerism that performs in front of the dirty business of capitalism and neo-liberalism is a dangerous and grotesque distraction.

It’s been a few weeks coming, but I finally managed to get off of fucking Facebook! At least as “off” it as you can get, because of course like all good data mining corporations, they won’t let you delete your account – you can only “deactivate” it. (Update: This has now changed a bit, see the update 25/03/2009 below.)

Basically, I left over the privacy – or rather, the total lack of it.

See, we all think we can control our privacy settings, because on the friendly “Privacy Overview” page, it says: “Facebook wants you to share your information with exactly the people you want to see it.”

But that’s not actually the truth, because we’ve already signed it all away when we joined – from their terms of use:

“…by using the site you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

Facebook also “reserves the right to share information with any companies or organisations with which it has a relationship.”

Yes, it was my fault for not having properly read the small print before joining. Absolutely my mistake. Still, when pretty much everybody you know is not just on it, but sending you numerous emails requesting you to join, sometimes the usual safeguards just don’t kick in. I ignored everyone asking me to join for at least six months, but in a moment of idiocy one Saturday morning finally just did it anyway.

Does anyone really read all the small print? I guess I will in future, but seriously, how many people out of Facebook’s 62+ million users have actually read and digested every single word of the terms of use? I’d wager not very many. Are we all suckers, or is virtually all “small print” designed to be impossible for a human to take on board? I’d say the latter is certainly true – though I definitely feel like a sucker too.

In short, Facebook can do whatever they want with whatever data we give them, forever. So much for “exactly the people you want to see it”, eh? That’d be exactly the people I want to see it, not including all those other people corporations and government agencies you share it with then, would it Facebook?

The “carrot” of seeming to be fully involved in our friends’ lives does a good job of concealing the “stick” that behind all this is a massive corporation – one that not only is known to be devious and untrustworthy (no surprises there), but isn’t accountable to us and owes us nothing. We are simply a factor in the equation that makes up it’s bottom line, and like most companies, it will go to extraordinary lengths to protect that. Who knows what they are doing with our data, or who else has access to it?

I was already pretty annoyed with myself for being taken in by this crap, and then along came this article in the Guardian by Tom Hodgkinson (author of one of mine and Katy’s favourite books – we hung out with him for a couple of hours at Shambala last summer, very nice guy), which investigates the people behind Facebook. I guess it comes as no surprises to find out that they’re a bunch of uber-rich multimillionaires, but they’re also a bunch of hardcore neoconservative activists and biotech / artificial intelligence kooks.

It seems rather a lot like they are seeking to extend their lives as long as possible, and to exploit and capitalise upon as many people as possible in the process. The early stages of this exploitation apparently start by attempting to profit from a situation where money simply does not belong: human friendship.

So whatever. Fuck these rich bastards and their crazy dreams of immortality and unstoppable hyper-capitalism. I’ve drawn a line under my participation in the creation of their vision of the brave new world, because it could not be further from my idea of a green and pleasant future for all life on Earth.

I screwed up badly when I joined Facebook, and it had to stop somewhere. I don’t want to be a contributing factor in the billions being made by the neoconservative bastards behind it. They and their soulless, humanity-purely-as-profitable-commodity ideas can get stuffed.

I can only hope that there will be more and more backlashes against Facebook as time goes on. Goodbye, and good riddance – I won’t miss it one bit.

Further reading:

• Guardian: With friends like these… – Tom Hodgkinson takes a look at the politics of the people behind Facebook.
• Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? – Short video about what Facebook does with your data.
• How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account – Not quite what it says, but I reckon slightly better than just deactivating (of course, there’s no guarantee that they don’t just keep everything anyway, and I’d suspect they do).

Update 25/03/2009:

• BBC News: Social network sites ‘monitored’ – Just in case you didn’t think it was enough that the UK government wants to monitor every website you visit, and every phonecall and email you make, they’re also now planning to monitor social network sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.
• Apparently you can now delete your account by going to Facebook: Delete My Account, though again, I don’t know how much data they’ll retain. For all we know, it may just mark your account as logically “deleted” (does not show up any more but the data is kept), rather than physically deleting it (actually removing the data), so it could well be just the same as deactivating. Unfortunately there’s no way of really knowing – nor will there ever be.

All this US election coverage and speculation (yes, even in the UK) is starting to get on my nerves.

Where are the mainstream journalists who are pointing out the obvious – that it’s all a big glitzy popularity sideshow and has next-to-nothing to do with actual issues or politics that affect real people’s lives?

I mean, of course the outcome of the US election will have far reaching consequences that affect people’s lives (most of them negative), but the question to ask is:

Whoever “wins” the election, can the people of the US and the wider world ever actually come out on top in any situation at all where politicians are involved?

I think the answer to that is clearly “no”.

Sure, sometimes politicians are involved in the accomplishment of good things, but isn’t that usually in spite of their involvement, rather than because of it?

All that this cabaret of US electoral political coverage serves to do is distract most people with yet more chin-wagging irrelevant gossip. Meanwhile politicians and their business chums take actual control of people’s lives further and further away from them, whoever “wins”.

We are told that “if you don’t vote, you have no voice” and so on. This is an utter load of garbage.

I think it’s plain to see after even a rudimentary examination of the realities of this statement, that far from giving people a voice, all voting serves to do is take it away by dressing it up in a system where we lose the moment we even participate.

The legitimacy of so-called “democracy” is based on essentially what boils down to people making a “choice” that isn’t one, which allows a few members of the pre-existing elite to declare themselves “our leaders” and claim to have “the will of the people behind them” and so on.

Please don’t fall for it and vote – EVER! It only encourages them, and serves to “legitimise” and further ingrain politicians’ despicable hold over our lives.

Further reading

• New Internationalist – “Big Babies” issue – Explores the way the current political culture infantilizes both the elected and the electorate.