Banksters, AI bullshitters, Bumsters and State Mobsters
Last week, I went into my main bank here in The Gambia to get some answers on why somebody appeared to be using a local hotel to withdraw money from my UK Nationwide account. That may sound surreal to you, but in Africa banks use anciliary agents a lot in order to maximise their take. It's a collegiate give and take thing: the customer gives, and the banks take.
So I walk into my branch and ask why some joker at the Kololi Beach Hotel keeps making withdrawals. The tellers don't know, so I get promoted up the management tree and a senior staff bod tells me, "No, you're mistaken...it's obviously a glitch on your smartphone".
Having anticipated the likelihood of a lie - and thus taken a page snap of my UK bank statement earlier - I produce the capture and ask, "Well, what does this mean then?"
At this stage, I'm hoisted further up to the General Manager's office, and he admits under oath, yes.....my Gambian bank sub-contracts the main local hotel to handle foreign currency withdrawals.
But fear not (he adds) because you can use our More App and get greater 'transparency' on all transactions.
Three AI app download sessions later, the App is still refusing to accept my password.
Let's have more Bank Holidays
In the UK, last weekend was the late May Bank Holiday. Here in the Gambia, yesterday was the Africa Day Bank Holiday. In the US, it was Memorial Day...also a Bank Holiday.
As the Banksters use every day to screw us all sideways, my jocular view is "The more bank Holidays there are, the richer we'll be".
Meanwhile, once more into the detail of my UK Bank Nationwide. The best of the customer rating research outfits Trustpilot's latest customer ratings of Nationwide service are less than encouraging:
'Poor' is the service rating, although the Bank itself is getting richer and richer. I've been trying to point this out to Nationwide's non-exec directors over the last few weeks....but they too are hiding inside various 'linked-in' style organisations - to which the investigating customers must sign up if they want to speak to these parasites.
Nationwide is failing in every one of its own service promises and in dire breach of Financial Conduct Authority regulations.
Do I have much confidence in the FCA? This is what it promises: 'We enable a fair and thriving financial services market, for the good of consumers and the economy'. Really? Take a look at this FCA Home Page visual:
Yes folks, standard issue happy-clappy poc multicultural drivel.
Can I be bothered? Not really.
Here in The Gambia, we have our own home-grown parasites - generally referred to Bumsters. These are the six-pack exercise freaks who prey upon white First World women, convincing them of undying love and asking only for money and - where possible - a European passport.
The Bumsters can make more in a day from gullible, morbidly obese tourists than they'd make in a month on a building site. So even though the Tourist Development Authorities [TDAs] are crying out for labour, these bone-idle narcissists continue to ply their trade.
And so back to the UK's DWP mobsters, as ever so keen to pretend that benefit fraud is rife, when in reality, the idea that shirkers are stealing from workers is a mendacious obscenity keen to cover up my homeland's greed problem.
Shameless Labour minister Rachel Reeves says "if we’re going to lift people out of poverty and give more people the chance to fulfil their potential, the focus has got to be on supporting people into work"
But the real problem is there aren't enough jobs. According to the latest House of Commons / ONS employment figures there are 1.57 million people registered unemployed but just 781,000 job vacancies. That's two people for each job available
Those unemployed people are the healthy and able-bodied. They do not include the 2.8 million people out of work with some kind of chronic health condition.
At no point in the last 25 years has there ever been enough jobs for all those who needed them.
The ONS jobs vacancy data for the years since 2001 shows there were 2 to 3 people for each job vacancy from 2001 up to the financial crisis and then even worse unemployment in the early years of the Coalition. When George Osborne was talking about "strivers versus skivers" there were 5.9 people for every job vacancy:
Britain has one of the lowest rates of unemployment benefit in Europe. At 70% of basic costs it is designed to force people into work. Work which is clearly not available in sufficient amounts. Have you ever heard a politician or journalist communicate those facts to the British public? They're just neutered lobby fodder plonkers engaging in shameless propaganda designed to disgise their shameful behaviour.
Once again, major hat-tip here to Slog follower DPhil for digging into the data
Drawing some important conclusions on the detail of this Slogpost....
....some culturally awkward questions must be posed:
- Why is the first instinct of every corporocratic institution to lie?
- Why is every AI application so riddled with pointless complexity?
- Why is all First World regulation obsessed with ethnicity?
- Why are self-styled US and Euroliberals so utterly lacking in discernment?
Each of the above represent a danger to genuine libertarian elective democracy. I repeat: none of the main runners and riders in the forthcoming Congressional, Parliamentary or EU elections offers comprehensive, well thought through reforms designed to put power back into the hands of the electorates involved.