Justice & Tribunals

Yesterday evening I went to a talk at the AGM of Norwich CAB by Mr Rosser who chairs Norfolk Tribunals of some sort. He was talking about appeals about benefits. He commented that when he first got involved many of those involved were no even lawyers, as if that is a bad thing. But now there were lots of lawyers so it seems justice goes out of the window.

For example he wants a duty roster of people to represent those who come before the tribunal to help them. He actually said that there were people who wopuld win their cases if they had been represented. If one thinks about this statement carefully it shows that the tribunal is not interested in justice or doing its job properly. How could the tribunal find against someone and yet say that they would have won if represented. It means that the members of the tribunal had realised from the evidence that the claimant had a justified case BUT found against them. I do not ubderstand how this can happen. Surely if the tribunal is interested in the truth and justice they must have found for the claimant.

Perhaps someone can explain.

Crooks & Charlatans; The Financiers

There are people who are very highly paid and who get huge bonuses and have claimed that they were worth it! How did they justify this, well they told us that they were very clever and that they had invested other peoples money very cleverly and they were only taking a small percentage as a fee. And if their company had made 100 billion then their bonus of 1o million was small beer really.

Now the truth emerges they were no more than crooks & charlatans stealing other peoples money. The whole edifice of their ability to make money was not much better than pyramid selling, as long as people believed that they were worth a lot of money and were investing in real assets the trick worked but once it was seen through the whole edifice has tumbled down. However the tricksters will walk away with billions, perhaps not as many as before but still a lot. Moreover the people that they have tricked will end up bailing them out.

It will keep happening unless people realize that making money and being greedy are not values which should not be admired. But when some people seem to be getting rich others get jealous and want to join in not realizing that they are being conned. The difficulties we are now facing go back to deregulation and Mrs Thatcher's government. When the banks that are most in trouble are examined it is easy to see that they were the old building societies, these were heavily regulated and owned by the savers. Many were very solid institutions, perhaps a little old-fashioned but safe. Many then demutualized and the savers took out there pots of gold, the directors paid themselves lavishly and now some years later they are in trouble. The regulation kept them being cautious and and hence they were safe, as houses?

But many were responsible for this, those who were greedy who did not see that the money came from somewhere at this point and it course came from themselves, they were just taking their own money in a lump sum, most then blew it! If the ex-building societies were small thay had to get money from somewhere and having lost their niche as well-regulated safe institutions they had to sell themselves some other way. That is where they began to go wrong.

Again there is a but, we the people were taken in, ably helped by the media. They published the "best deals" never with any warnings as to how the various companies could offer higher rates than others. It is all down to competition we were told, those offering a higher rate must be more efficient and so all will be well. Of course in modern days this is all a myth, there are very few things that can be done to be more efficient, apart from giving a worse service or paying lower grade employees very badly. Most companies have access to the latest developments and they are probably as competent (or incompetent) as each other. You only have to note how quickly they all turned to automated telephone services to see that there were very few benefits for one company over another.

So we were conned into believing that we could all get richer quicker but the only people who were were the city wide boys, creaming off their small percentage. Remember that their percentage depended on their being lots of activity, take overs, lots of selling and buying of shares stocks and anything else they could invent to con people with. In the end that is what it is all about, conning people out of their money, they used to say a fool and his money are soon parted but it is not just the fool, it is the greedy. When we have a society where pwoplw are measuer by their apparent wealth, the politicians and the media fawn over those who are wealthy this encourages everyone to want to make a fast buck. But everyone can't, just do the sums.