The Other News From England.

20 March 2000.

Index of earlier issues - click here.

(Those who like digging about will find that there are hundreds of articles on many subjects to be found on this site.)

Old issues.

I am working again on old issues of Other News (1993) and hope soon to put a few more of them on the site.

The Bonnington Cafe Struggle settled.

Bonnington Cafe have now (surprisingly quickly) resolved their difficulties and are re-opening this Thursday 23 March, with everybody pooling their resources for the catering, and LETSSwing playing. I expect it will be a bit of a knees-up all round. I notice there is a list of caterers on the door, and one of these numbers might be the right one to phone to book a table - but I don't know which.

Bonnington Cafe, Vauxhall Grove, London SW8 UK. Near Vauxhall underground and mainline station, and many buses. Booking is difficult.

Economics.

THE FORUM FOR STABLE CURRENCIES meet in the House of Lords about once a month to discuss major financial issues, such as bank malpractices, financial scandals, bankruptcies, the hopelessness of the present economic systems of the world, and the way they create poverty instead of the prosperity they are alleged to create. You can join if you want. I have learnt a lot more about economics than I already knew (which was already quite a lot) by attending from time to time - and particularly how very amateur people are not just about discussing economics but also about administering the economic systems of the world. It now seems to me very unlikely that any person involved in running the economic systems of the world really knows what they are doing.

More info from Sabine McNeill: sabine@globalnet.co.uk

Education.

The matter of the state versus Summerhill School is coming before the British courts today, and is expected to last for up to ten days. The school argues that it has a democratic right to conduct itself as it thinks fit, given that both parents and children like it as it is. The Department of Education are trying to force Summerhill to comply with certain standard British educational attitudes - which many readers who bother to think (particularly teachers) will consider impractical, inhuman, counter-productive and untenable.

Court 40, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London WC2A 2LL. Start time each day is 10:30 - until about 4:pm.

Health.

Frito-lay

These people have declined to answer my email regarding GM so far, and I can therefore assume that they do use GM ingredients in their products, and I would even go so far as to say that I think it likely that they would use them deliberately rather than inadvertently, with probably the only consideration being the price.

Not stuff I'd knowingly eat.

Here is a copy of the last email I sent them:-

I received today (10 Mar 2000) an email from you that is both ambiguous and evasive, and seems to contradict a message I received earlier stating that you do not include GM ingredients in your products. You have used the words biotechnology and BT, which to one like me implies Genetically Modified, and your statements regarding these have been very ambiguous. In addition to that, one sentence seeks to give you the escape clause that you might (after all) use GM ingredients in your products, even though in the very recent past you have been telling people you do not.

Could you perhaps clarify what you are actually saying, as opposed to that which you appear to be hoping I will believe you are trying to say?

Yours

Banks, lawyers, freemasons.

(this article held over from last week).

In recent years a whole collection of cases have been going through the courts in which the litigants (who are usually litigants in person because they cannot get legal aid, they are broke, and possibly because no lawyer will take them on, challenging the establishment in this way) claim certain irregularities. The self-representation leads to much amateurishness, which does seem to irritate your average judge (who speaks his own language with his own little clique of lawyers), but it also reveals a few common themes, which because of the great number of cases begin to have some credibility. The one which is interesting to me at this moment is the bank forging documents to support their already strong case for what in all other circles would be malpractice, but in banking is legal and fairly commonly practiced. Barclay's seem to be the most commonly complained of bank in these matters.

If the bank's case has been made on the back of forged documents, then of course you would expect it to collapse. But often it doesn't, and it would be very easy to say that as banks are entrusted by the nation to process financial matters they are incapable of dishonesty, and incapable of iniltration by thieves and crooks, and that therefore whatever the evidence suggesting this to be otherwise, the document is not forged. From the point of view of a judge, there appear to be such concepts as 'a proper authority' which is treated as not having the ability to do anything illegal, and so it is much easier to say that the litigant must in some way have contrived this evidence falsely. The fact that accountants uncover millions of pounds in false bank charges every month may not be known to them, or is perhaps ignored. It is possible that the judge may also be a jobsworth.

But a great many of these litigants feel they have fallen victim to freemasonry.

Before I give you a fairly typical outline of a hypothetical case (there are enough real cases along the same lines), I should tell you one or two things about freemasons. Freemasons are a 'society with secrets', a brotherhood who agree to help each other ('masonic preference'), and who use a selection of secret signs to recognise each other. If you are a freemason you are committed to helping your 'brother'. They are an attractive area in which to operate if you are interested in crime, but they are also probably attractive to some perfectly honorable ordinary men who like the camaraderie and complicated and dated rituals associated with freemasons. They are said to date back a thousand or more years, and to descend from knights templars and other self-interest groups. There are said to be a great many lawyers, bankers, politicians and business-people who are freemasons, and they would not normally tell you anything about their organisation. Some persons believe freemasons have their own laws and legal system, perform the odd execution, and work together to cover up any evidence which may come in front of the public that is against the interests of freemasons.

I was once told by a freemason that freemasons 'study politics'. A lot of people believe that most of the world's key political figures past and present are freemasons, including Blair, Clinton, Prescott, Thatcher (there are female masonic groups), Bush, Nixon, etc., and that a change of government just means a change from one set of freemasons to another, with no real change of government at all - particularly in recent years. If that is so, then the easy way forward for an ambitious criminal group is to join the freemasons.

A man once told me "my dad asked me if I wanted to join the freemasons when I was young. He told me if I did I would never want of anything". On the other hand, I know a man who's father was a freemason and resigned from the order - but I don't know why.

Now we should have another look at these legal cases.

When our current slightly left-wing but largely right-wing government was elected, one of the people in the new regime started a campaign to try to force masonic judges to reveal their connections with masons as part of their contract of work. The Lord Chief Justice (or was it the Lord Chancellor?) told the public that it wasn't worth it as there were only 94 masonic judges, thus revealing that he was one himself (or he would not have been so sure of the number), and told us that as judges took their work so seriously masonic preference would not make any difference to their decisions, and that therefore he would not require them to reveal their connection. The fact that a great many people would be quite sceptical about the sanity of a judge who could join such an organision did not seem to occur to him, and the fact that large numbers of people do not trust freemasons was apparently not considered at all. Some of those people who have been dragging their cases through the courts could tell you better than I could why they don't trust freemasons.

Now, I will try to give you a better idea of the general nature of these cases.

Banks lend money to business people (they don't lend money they have, they just write a credit from thin air) on terms that may be varied from time to time as the bank thinks fit, and with the money repayable on demand - not in so many days, months or years, but on demand. The nature of most business is such that one cannot have the luxury of being able to stipulate a period of notice, and so business people by and large have to just hope the bank is interested in their welfare, and hope they would not pull the rug from under them. They do not realise that the money they have borrowed did not exist at all until the bank 'created' it, and that therefore it is of relatively little significance to the bank at the same time as being highly significant to the business.

If a person working in a bank with a fair amount of influence or a person who is able to manipulate by other means knows that (a) a business has borrowed £500,000 which at cannot currently pay back, (b) is borrowing against the security of certain very desireable property that a friend would like to purchase cheaply, and (c) the business has no other source of capital, then it is very easy for the bank to call in the overdraft, and if it is not paid within 24 hours appoint a receiver to wind up the business and sell it's assets. There not being an immediately identifiable market for the property (which might be valued at, say, £1.5m) it can be sold to a friend cheap - the friend being the only readily available purchaser, and the only person making an offer. The friend can then sell the property for £1.5m at his leisure and makes a gross profit of £1m. Nothing so crude as commission changing hands needs to take place if it is freemasons who do this, as freemasons do each other favours. This is not, as far as I know, illegal in this country, and there are not a few insolvency practitioners who would say that our businessperson was a fool for borrowing from a bank in this way. I think I agree, but it is very easy to be fooled into believing a bank is an honest and honorable institution.

The local freemasons' lodge is the perfect place to find out which properties are so dangerously mortgaged, and to find out who might be interested in them, to try to influence the bank to call in the loan, and to try to influence who to appoint as receiver. And if the victim challenges the matter, the perfect place to work out who will help you through the courts, which judge you want to hear the matter, how to influence the selection of judges, which documents need to be forged (if they do at all), and freemasons, being a society with secrets, may well be able to arrange everything in your favour. This is why so many people do not trust freemasons - and it is unlikely they ever will for as long as they remain an international 'society with secrets'.

So far, I have only lost a few thousand shares by this process (when banking with Barclays), but as I find shareholding unsavoury that's probably OK.

Ecology, environment and conservation.

CHARLES DARWIN STUDIED botany and other subjects last century and wrote books which suggested that which seems completely obvious to us now, but which at the time wound up multitudes of Flat-Earthers and religious fanatics of the day. In these books he suggested that all species are evolved over millions of years from very primitive forms of life - such as planckton - instead of being designed by a big old man with a beard up there in the sky. I do not think he attmepted to find an answer to where the planckton came from - although what a fascinating subject, and the puzzle not yet solved!

I am incapable of explaining to you this theory of evolution (as he called it), should you not already know it, in a very small space like this other than by starting with something we know reasonably well - the human. If (a hypothesis) suddenly the air was badly polluted with carbon monoxide (a poisonous gas) but some of us survived and managed to breed, we could reasonably expect that the children we had would withstand carbon monoxide better, and after a few generations of this we would be a species designed to be able comfortably to breathe carbon monoxide. We would have evolved. The fittest of us for such circumstances would have survived, and passed on our genes. It was this phenomenum he called evolution - and it is often referred to as 'survival of the fittest' - even by people who don't really know what they mean but can understand the principle applied to other matters (particularly business).

Darwin lived at Downe, in Kent, and amongst his earliest studies were studies of plants and small moving life-forms in a wood called Downe Bank, and now called Downe Bank Nature Reserve - a sure sign of something being amiss. Because Darwin studied there it is described as a National Heritage Site, and those who have charge of it wish to spend a lot of money doing 'maintenance work' on it (they are asking National Lottery Charities Board for the money), when in fact doing maintenance work is the antithesis of natural evolution (that which Darwin studied), largely being designed to encourage the weaker species in their attempts to survive by attacking those other stronger species which threaten them with extinction. This will no longer be a nature reserve at all - like several others I know - and will instead be a garden.

In these matters the real threat is often the trustees.

Labour Relations.

KING COUNTY in the USA somewhere has been accused of a great many malpractices with regard to their relations with the workforce. I will quote you a chunk from an email which came from there this week. It is one of several issued by some people who also covered the Seattle Riots. They do not seem to have a website, but they like to put people on their email list. Here is their latest email:

KING COUNTY LOSES SECOND MOTION TO HIDE UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICES FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY

Faced with global criticism of the union-busting tactics employed by the King County Department of Development and Environmental Services (DDES), King County recently filed two motions with the Washington State Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) seeking to bar the media and public from an unfair labor practice hearing and also seeking a gag order to prevent the union from publicizing the county's abuses.

(they had sent earlier descriptions of malpractices, causing myself and others to comment to the management - I compared their tactics with alleged London Borough of Bromley constructive dismissal tactics.)

The first motion was aimed at keeping members of the media and public from attending the hearing. King County Deputy Prosecutor Diane Hess-Taylor was upset that a KIROTV news team and a group of protesters (not affiliated with the union) attended an earlier stage of the hearing. She filed a motion seeking to exclude "certain" members of the public and media from attending the full hearing on March 30 and 31. That motion was denied on March 13 as beyond the authority of PERC and an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and expression (King County, Decision 6994 PECB 2000).

"I never understood where Ms. Taylor thought she had the authority to hide this matter from public scrutiny" said Ray Goforth, Union Representative for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 17. Local 17 is the union prosecuting King County for unfair labor practices.

The second motion filed by Prosecutor Diane Taylor was for a gag order on IFPTE Local 17 itself. King County complained that Local 17 was publicizing its charges against the County and asking its union members and supporters to e-mail King County Executive Ron Sims about the illegal actions. The King County Executive office reportedly received more than a thousand e-mails from Local 17 members, other unions and human rights groups from around the world.

"The attempted gag order showed an arrogance and contempt for the democratic process rarely seen from the King County Prosecutor's Office," said Goforth.

The King County Coalition of Unions (composed of all the labor unions which represent King County employees) sent a letter to King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng asking for a formal repudiation of the attempted gag order. To date, the prosecutor's office has not responded.

After the deluge of global criticism for their attempt to censor Local 17, Deputy Prosecutor Diane Hess-Taylor withdrew her motion for the gag order without comment on February 25.

"We're confident that we will prevail on the merits of our case" said Goforth. "I can only guess that the prosecutor's attempt to censor Local 17 and hide this case from the media stem from an understanding that they are in the wrong. If that's the case, then the prosecutor should stop wasting public resources with nonsensical motions and settle this matter. King County must cease its harassment of our union activists and hold those who committed these abuses accountable," Goforth concluded.

### Contact: Taryn Gerhardt, Communications Director (206) 328-7321 ext. 118 Ray Goforth, Union Rep. VOICE (206) 328-7321 ext. 105 FAX (206) 328-7402 EMAIL: goforth@ifpte17.org

Well there it is, and isn't it nicely written? I like the style.

If you want Goforth and co to email you direct, contact them. They have sent me about one a week on average over the past couple of months. If you don't want other types of files (ie htm, pdf, etc) tell them and they won't send them.

Politics.

IN LAMBETH about 200 tenants are in danger of being evicted from their homes because the company which administers the housing benefit system (something which we and our parents and grandparents have all paid for through our National Insurance contributions) are evidently incapable of processing the claims. Just like any civil servant might, the company will no doubt try to lay the blame on somebody else's doorstep, and the housing association will try to get rent from the tenants by threatening to evict them - and it seems likely that nobody will do anything to resolve the problem.

One tenant is reported as saying "Since the housing association took over last year there has been a shortfall in housing benefit being paid", leading more than one person to speculate whether what is going on is in fact organised crime milking the housing benefits system in a hitherto untried way. It would only take a bit of co-operation between possibly only one member of the housing association staff and one member of the benefits-paying staff to make a few million disappear.

The reason I am interested in this subject is that not only does the same thing happen in Southwark but also that the system of employing ordinary limited liability companies to administer large sums of money on behalf of the public was a system started during the Thatcher years on the grounds that it would be cheaper to do than the councils and a collection of civil servants doing the work themselves, when in fact by the time you allow for all the fiddles and failures it may well be a lot more expensive. Trying to squeeze ever more out of a company by sacking staff until you don't have enough people to do the job is not the answer either - especially as it increases the opportunities for dishonesty. Furthermore, there is nothing to stop those who run such companies from bleeding them white (almost legally with excessive directorial salaries and bonuses, or just not bothering to be legal) and then allowing them to go bankrupt - which is something I have recently predicted for one of these companies, so we shall see.

Since nobody seems to have raised any of the more obvious questions about Thatcher economics since the eighties I would like to point out that this appears to be just part of the end-game of a long programme of ransacking the British economy for a few self-interested parties. Now there is no profit left to be made legally from these firms, there is little point in trying from the point of view of the director - although there might yet be quite a lot to fiddle.

As to the populace, they can whistle.

Southwark.

See above, because the same comments might be applied here. There is quite a lot of evidence of a substantial freemasonry in Southwark.

.......................................................................................................

The stuff that doesn`t often get changed now follows:

Wanted: Established musical act performing to reasonably sophisticated adult audiences needs an agent. This act is already on the road but needs help with increasing it's profile, and getting in front of a wider variety of audiences. Please email pcj@gn.apc.org or editor@othernews.co.uk if that doesn't work.

This website is about the destruction of countryside and agriculture. Worth a visit if you want to find out about how it is thought the British countryside will fair under the ongoing creep of the multinationals.

This website is one to do with monetary reform. If you are interested in economics it is worth a look. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~bamr1

This is a website about alternative currencies.Might be worth a look to those who have realised that you don't necessarily have to have money as such to be prosperous.

This is a website for something called The Green Guide. I know nothing about it, but am hoping it is something worthy. Please let me know if it is questionable.

This is a site concerned with one of the most unpopular planning decisions ever made in Greater London, the Crystal Palace Complex. It is so stunningly awful that only a handful of people who do not live near it appear to approve, whilst the rest are not entirely uninclined to mention such things as payola, freemasons....you name it! The site belongs to the London Borough of Bromley, but the aggro generated by it and the destruction of amenity caused by it will be almost entirely suffered by residents of adjoining boroughs and not the people of Bromley themselves.

This is a recycling site based in London, and offering materials to anybody. The organisation is a charity seeking to link suppliers of surplus materials with users. Especially good for the more ingenious designers amongst us.

The email of the people who run the above site is cs@london-recycling.demon.co.uk. They are called Creative Supplies. Look them up for more info.

Here's an interesting education site - particularly for those who have young children and are not quite sure what to do to avoid the worst of what`s on offer in the mainstream of education.They are called www.edrev.org.

early Othernews - 1992, 93, 94.

Early Other News essays.

There were a few essays that went out with the early Other News as a freestanding item. You can read these by clicking below.

Essays.

The Soup Designer`s Handbook.

The Soup Designer`s Handbook.

London Journey - a trip from Docklands through Beckenham and back to Docklands.

Friday Woodworkers.

(Friday Woodworkers are suffering a temporary break due to some of the episodes not having been fully edited at the time of writing. It may take some timne to fix this problem.

Episode 17.

(These articles were written in 1988, and were my first attempt at writing. Some people when shown these fell about laughing, some smiled faintly - and some yawned. I thought I was going to write a technical book, but it soon became apparent that I was much more interested in the people than the technology - and that is the main reason there are no drawings - although it might be rather good to do a couple of caricatures sometime.)

Index of Friday Woodorker articles (and a means of access).

Index of earlier issues.

Gabriele Gad on alternative therapy.

A READER COMPLAINED that it was not possible to go back more than 6 articles in Gabriele`s area. Regrettably this is because there is no index, and I have not the time to organise one yet. However, for those determined enough to find the early ones, they should be accessible by going to an early Other News and clicking through from it. This will not be fast, but I think will do the job. They started about November 1997 I think.

editor@othernews.co.uk

Cartoons and graphics.

drawings click here.

sheet music click here.

Consumers.

LEXMARK 3200 PRINTER.

In an earlier issue I told you about my feelings regarding Tempo retailers and the Lexmark 3200 printer I bought from them.

The Lexmark 3200 printer I got from Tempo must surely be the most uneconomical printer I could possibly have bought. The black cartridge only does about 250 pages of ordinary type - for £28! That makes each sheet cost 11.2 pence plus the cost of the paper and probably another 11.2 pence more if any colour is used! - ABOUT 22.4 PENCE A SHEET! Nearly a pound for every four sheets!

I wouldn`t recommend you to buy it - but also look at my earlier article for an idea of Tempo`s service.

Wanted

A person to help make up a subject index for the growing numbers of articles on The Other News From England. Email editor@othernews.co.uk

8- or more-track tape recorder. email pcj@gn.apc.org

All material on this site is copyright. Contact me if you want to use it. I am quite flexible. Educational non-profit use is free - but ask for permission and print an acknowledgement. If you can`t think what to print, put:

From The Other News From England. http://www.othernews.co.uk

editor@othernews.co.uk

That`s all this week folks