....And Another Thing!

About 2,400 years ago, when I was alive, I bought my first house and on the advice/recommendation of some suited lizard at the Halifax Building Society (as it then was) I took out an endowment policy to cover the mortgage (no, don't laugh).
I was told that the policy would not only pay off my mortgage at the end of the term but it would also give me a bonus of up to 30 per cent of the total. In hindsight, I should have smelt a rat at the time because the bloke also told me there were fairies at the bottom of his garden and if we both clicked our heels and wished, and wished, and wished, we could go and meet The Wizard.
Well, times moved on and I no longer needed the policy to pay off the mortgage, fortunately, but I kept up the payments until last year when it reached maturity. Guess what? Not only did I not get a bonus pay out of up to 30 per cent, the surrender value did not cover the original mortgage amount. Not only did it not cover the original amount, IT DIDN'T COME FUCKING CLOSE!!! It was actually worth......wait for it.......50 per cent of the mortgage amount. Yes, FUCKING HALF!!!! The said policy was with Standard Life. You know, the tossers whose slogan is "Standard Life - For All of Your Life". Shouldn't that be "Standard Life - For Half of Your Life and Then Fuck Off and Die In Abject Poverty You Wankers"? Not as catchy, I'll grant you, but at least it's honest.
Anyway, I was offered £2,000 by way of compensation - a bit like offering the burning Joan of Arc a throat lozenge! Turns out, this spectacular shortfall was the result of the bean counters getting their sums and market predictions slightly wrong - you know, in much the same way as Robert Falcon Scott and his pals got their gap year camping plans slightly wrong.
The result of this monumental fuck-up by parties third was that Pither's Stock Market value plummeted. I became somewhat "sub-prime", to say the least. Now, bearing in mind that Bush and Brown believe in fully recompensing the banks and insurance companies for THEIR financial fuck-ups, am I to be similarly recompensed for the fuck-ups of their mates? Huh? Huh? Am I? Hmmm? YOU BET YOUR DANGLY PRIVATE PART I'M NOT!!! How's that work, then?
You gotta hand it to these bastards, however. I mean, their after-sales service is excellent. After Standard Life had given me a financial enema, they only fucking wrote to me inviting me to their AGM and enclosed a gushing statement from the chief executive who had the buggery brass bollocks to say the company had "enjoyed another successful year"!!! Too fucking right they had - with my fucking money! Taking the piss? Noooooo! It's only like the Nazis sending gas bills to synagogues!

And another thing. One day there is a bank called Lloyds TSB, with assets of about one trillion quid. On that very same day, in the very same space-time continuum, there is another bank called HBOS, with assets of about a billion quid. Then, poof!! As if by magic, the very next day there is just one bank, called
HBLloydsBOSTSBWANKFART, or something. They merged, you see. Over-fucking-night! In a matter of minutes, possibly seconds. One day, they were two separate entities, the
next day they were as one. Now, how fucking complicated must that merger have been? I mean, there must have been people in a room somewhere saying "Now, that's your money in that pile by the croissants, and this is our money over here, by the mineral water. Roger, you act as banker and when we've counted it all out, you take the lot along and pay it in, will you? Then we've got to change the letterheads. Then we've got to change all the signs. Then there's new uniforms for the boys and girls. Then there's...."
Pretty involved, I would have thought, and yet they managed to do it all overnight - in seconds!! So how fucking come, when I pay a cheque for £40 into my bank (Lloyds TSB, by the way), it takes four fucking days to clear???? I don't want the letterheads changed to reflect my investment. I don't want all the livery changed. I don't want all the money the bank has transferred into a new fund where it can be mixed up with dosh from another bank. I JUST WANT THE FUCKING, POXY, PALTRY SUM I'VE PAID IN.....STRAIGHT AWAY!!!!!!!! It is MINE, after all. If these two avaricious bastards can pay in £3,458,876,982,715,489,994,437,200,856,873 and get it fucking cleared overnight, what's the problem with my forty bastard quid?

And another thing. As Private Eye pointed out, Lehman Brothers Ex-Bank ran up losses of $6.6 billion this year, up to and including the point when it went tits up. Do you know how much the bank paid out to staff in 2006 in bonuses - in BONUSES???? They paid $8.7 billion!!!! They employed 5,000 people - you do the maths. Here's an
idea. If you didn't want to be flushed down the financial pan, like some fiscal turd on the porcelain slope of capitalism......why didn't you ask some of those cunts who took the money and ran at the time to hand back their Ferrari's and Lear jets! How on God's earth can you feel sorry for any of those glycongenic gits we saw trooping out last week, weeping into their Gucci Filofaxes having just been told they were surplus to requirements? It was their selling short, cashing in quick expertise which put us all teetering on the edge of the economic pooh pond in the first place. I mean, just how fucking bright do you have to be to succeed in getting a homeless bloke you find sleeping in a shop doorway and shooting up to sign for a £1 million fucking loan? Jesus H Christ, if molluscs could sign their names they would have flogged them fucking loans as well!!.........and these wankers got bonuses for that kind of thing!!!!!!!! The only bonus I've ever had came in 1987 when the receptionist at the office I was working in came to work not wearing a bra! All I did was start rubbing myself and moaning and I got the fucking sack for that!! It's political correctness gone mad and it's just not fair.

And another thing. The Trades Union Congress has called for an extra day's public holiday for us. Hurrah! The Good Ship Britain currently has fewer public holidays than any other place on earth, with the exception of Siberia and Guantanamo Bay. We also work longer hours than anyone else and there's no chance of that ever changing since the Tories and New Labour are adamantly opposed to the EU Working Time Directive. Why? Well, that would mean people couldn't be exploited, wouldn't it? Where's the fun in that?
Any road up, how does the TUC go about calling for this extra day? Does it call on workers to man barricades and go toe-to-toe with the greedy corporate bosses and those golfing cunts at the Confederation of British Industry in a bloody civil war until they agree to give us work drones in Sectors 1-9 one more poxy day off? Does it organise a march from Jarrow to London and provide free cloth caps for the walkers? Does it call for a General Strike? Does it - and heaven for fend I should advocate this in any way - kidnap Brown, Cameron, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson et al and string them up by their scrotal sacks until they give in? No! No it doesn't. What it does is say that an extra day's holiday will boost spending and increase revenue for companies!! WHO GIVES A FUCKING SHIT ABOUT WHAT IT WILL DO FOR THE CORPORATE BLOOD-SUCKERS!!! FUCK 'EM!! It's about hard-pressed employees, the vast majority of the country, not management. It just shows you what a sad state of affairs we have reached when trades union bosses start sucking up to big business and metaphorically fisting them off while claiming to act for its members. NAIL SOME SENSE INTO THEM, I SAY! HANG 'EM HIGH!!! BRING ON THE REVOLUTION!!!!!

And another thing. Why, in that fucking advert for Rice Krispies where a bunch of
snivelling, resource-consuming, non-contributory brats are challenged by their gushing mummy (who seems singularly unconcerned by the fact that her kids are all, evidently, the same age and yet one is black and the other two are white) to count how many "snaps, crackles and pops" there are in a bowl of the dessicated mouse droppings which constitute that particular breakfast cereal, doesn't someone tell that ADHD-striken little cunt to get off the fucking table, stop eating with his hands and talking with his bastard mouth full?

And finally. Why, oh why, oh why, oh fucking why does Jane Fonda believe that she's "worth it"? "I'm 70," she twines. WE FUCKING KNOW YOU ARE, YOU RANCID OLD BAG!!! YOU'VE GOT A FUCKING KNOT OF SKIN AT THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD AND EVERY TIME YOU SMILE YOU PULL YOUR FUCKING KNICKERS UP!!! She looks like a sodding burns victim!! "Worth it"?????????? I wouldn't with yours, let alone mine!!

I'm going for a lie down.

Clause 4 Thought

Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha-ha - now fuck off!!



Now, I may have got this wrong, but to the best of my memory...........

Nationalised industries - and by these I mean utilities and essential public services, such as post offices - were owned by the tax-payers. They kept charges to a minimum as they had no NEED to make vast profits, only to make money to reinvest in the service, and any money they did make belonged to the tax-payers anyway.
Their bosses were paid morally justifiable wages, wages which could be seen to fit at the top of a scale on which their employees were paid.
When these nationalised industries made a loss, the shortfall was made up by the tax-payer.
However, Murdoch and the Daily Mail told everyone that nationalised industries were crap and couldn't work and always made a loss. They said they were run by crap managers and the only way forward was to privatise everything and base the whole system on a share-owning "democracy" (Ha, ha, ha, ha!). Deregulation would then open up the "markets" and, with loads of different companies competing for the same business, prices to the consumer would be driven down and services would be improved. Private enterprise would attract the very best managers (aka people who produce fuck all and take all they fucking want). Also, the tax-payer would not have to fund the infrastructure or any losses.

Well, how fucking come, in this mad, massively unstable world of private enterprise, when banks and insurance companies go bust (as a result of their own sheer greed, greed not only of their chief executives but also of their think-short-term-get-big-bonuses-driven employees), Johnny Tax-payer is expected to pick up the fucking pieces?
Were we given regular wads of cash from their gigantic profits in the early days? No, we weren't. That went to the bosses, the employees and the shareholders. Were these shareholders little old Mrs Snatchbollock down the road, Mr and Mrs Wifentwokids on the new estate, Ms Canvaspants, the struggling primary school teacher and well known lone parent? Nope! You see, the vast majority of the shares in these corporations were/are owned by other coporations and mega-wealthy speculators.
Were the bosses of these obscene outfits paid salaries in some way linked to a pay scale at the companies? Nope! They were paid as much as they could fucking get away with, while the rest of us in the real world paid the price in cut services and highers charges. "Well, you've got to pay the best to get the best", said Murdoch and the Mail. Well, if they were so fucking good, how come all these banks and financial corporations are going tits up? Isn't that the fault of the managers? Wasn't it them who made ridiculously risky investments in pursuit of short-term profits?

So, who suffers? Those red-braced, stripey-shirted, Mormon-coiffured fucking avaricious young BMW-driving wankers who were only interested in making lots of money for producing absolutely nothing except numbers on a balance sheet, for a start. Five thousand of them were made redundant with the collapse of Lehmans - and I've never laughed so much to see people losing their jobs. All the other bastard banks and insurance companies are still in the firing line, however. Which will go bust next? Merril-lynch? Morgan Stanley? Goldman Sachs? HBOS? The answer is the same as to the question "If Jim Davidson, Margaret Thatcher, Liam Gallacher, Anne Diamond and Vanessa Feltz all fell off a cliff, who would hit the ground first?"..........WHO FUCKING CARES!!!!

Now AIG is on the verge of collapse. Everyone around the world will suffer if it's not rescued by the taxpayers of the good 'ole US of A, we are told. Well, my advice is, think long-term, not short-term like them. Endure a little bit of suffering - go on, forego that third holiday of the year or that fourth 4x4 - until these wankers go to the wall and they all start weeping and wailing. Fuck 'em. When will they ever fucking learn - global capitalism don't work!!

Global capitalism can go to Grantham.