Yet still we send aid?

I read that:

'A refitted former Soviet aircraft carrier has reached the Indian coast after leaving Russia’s northern shipyard in mid-November, media report said on Wednesday.

The Vikramaditya, a refurbished Russian carrier formerly known as the Admiral Gorshkov, arrived at a naval base in Kanwar in the western state of Karnataka on Tuesday, Indian IBN television reported citing sources in the Navy.

The aircraft carrier was handed over to the Indian navy on November 16 at the Semvash shipbuilder and departed from Russia on November 26.

A team of Russian specialists arrived onboard the ship and will stay in India for a year to fix any possible glitches if needed.

The Vikramaditya is to become India’s second aircraft carrier. The process of the ship’s official commissioning will take between three and four months.

The refurbishments of the vessel lurched from one crisis to another since the $947 million deal was signed with Russia in 2004 for its purchase and refit.

The delays pushed up the cost of its refurbishing to $2.3 billion, sparking acrimony between Russia and India over the contract.'

Remind me how many aircraft carriers the UK has... And yet we continue to send aid to India. If India can afford aircraft carriers they can afford to try and alleviate poverty in that country.

So you think the wealth gap is growing? Wrong - Comment - Voices - The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/so-you-think-the-wealth-gap-is-growing-wrong-8431460.html
A rare bit of sense from The Independent.

Monday morning catchup

The usual story; too many open Firefox tabs and too little time.

1) The LA Times reports that some investors in Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme will not get their money back as:

'This week, a federal appeals court ruled that much of the lost money is irretrievable because it never really existed to begin with. The ruling helps clarify the protection that federal law provides investors against unscrupulous brokers and dealers. In short, they're protected if their accounts are drained surreptitiously, but not necessarily if they're filled fictitiously. It's a tough message for many of Madoff's victims, who were in no position to see through his sophisticated deception. But given that investing in the stock market is by its nature speculative, it's the right one.'

2) John C. Goodman at Town Hall wonders 'Are the por really poor?' Here's an extract:

'To most Americans, the word "poverty" implies significant material deprivation, including inadequate food, clothing and shelter. The actual living conditions of America's poor are very different, however. According to the government's own survey data, in 2005:

• The average household defined as poor lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV.

• The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars).

• For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player and a VCR.

• If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.

• In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove.

• Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone and a coffeemaker. '

I wonder if the problem is the use of 'relative poverty' as a measure, a measure that the poverty industry like for obvious reasons.


3) Ales Masterley wonders how good one set of traders are:

'2 years ago BarCap hired a team of gold traders from JP Morgan, offering them £30 million in cash and shares. Now we hear that Todd Edgar and his team of nearly a dozen commodities traders are to leave "as part of a stream of cuts designed to shed overheads and put the UK bank on target to hit profit targets".

Well it's hard to see how anybody lost money while trading in gold for the last 2 years. At JPM Edgar's team turned in a profit of $250 million in one year on a risk limit of $2 billion, an apparent return of 12.5%. Not bad.

But 2 years ago, I could have bought gold at $900/oz, which today would be worth $1800/oz, which would have been a return of 42% compounded for 2 years. Is there really more than $30 million of value addded in the team?'

He has a point!


4) USA Today have some questions about Barack Obama's patriotic photo.


5) World Net Daily have some questions regarding a Barack Obama land deal. They mention the phrase 'tax fraud'.


6) The Scotsman reports that:

'KAYE Adams, the BBC broadcaster, has been accused of being unfit to present a top current affairs programmes after she tweeted that Boris Johnson "should p*** off back to boarding school".

The former presenter of Loose Women, the ITV talk show, who presents a popular Radio Scotland show, was on holiday in Tuscany when she made a series of expletive-filled Tweets about London's mayor. She has now apologised and deleted the comments from her Twitter site'

Of course at the BBC insulting a 'Tory toff' for being 'posh' is probbaly a reason to get a bonus.


7) Great Lakes ForEx have a fascinating piece about the gold market, including a prediction of the gold price moving back to $850. I am not so sure!

Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs - Updated 2010

Food for thought?


Thanks to Theo Spark for the spot.

'Gordon Brown wants aid to Africa to increasingly focus on wealth creation'

The BBC report that their lost love, Gordon Brown, has resurfaced from his slough of despond to opine that

'Gordon Brown has used his first major speech since leaving office to say the future growth of the world economy is reliant upon the development of Africa.

Speaking in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, the former UK prime minister said he wanted to see the continent achieve its full potential.'

I admire much of what some countries in Africa are trying to achieve but to say that 'the future growth of the world economy is reliant upon the development of Africa.' is just not true; India and China are the engines for future global growth, Africa at best will play a small part.

Getting rid of poverty in Africa would be a worthwhile moral crusade but transferring money from the poor of the West to the rich dictators and their cronies of Africa does not get rid of poverty.

Before I listen to Gordon Brown say he wants to create wealth in Africa I would rather hear him apologise for the mess he made of the UK economy, now drowning in debt.

Get radical on benefits - Not a right-wing Conservative but Big Issue founder's John Bird

Will David Cameron be radical enough and would the BBC let him be so.

Sunday top posts

1. The FT explain why Danny Alexander has not been caught 'bang to rights' over his CGT non-payment:

'But this morning’s story about his not paying capital gains tax on a London property appears overblown. Alexander bought his London flat in 1999 and started claiming on it only in 2005 when he became an MP; at that point it was his only home.

When he sold it two years later he paid no cgt - even though by then he had a home in Scotland (bought in 2006) and had designated the flat as his “second home” in respect of his Parliamentary allowance.

How come? Because under HMRC rules, if you move out of your main abode there is a three-year grace period during which you don’t have to pay any capital gains tax on selling it. As a result there was no obligation on Alexander to pay the levy and therefore he didn’t breach any rule. It is neither a “legal loophole” nor a piece of cunning tax avoidance.

In fact, I’m not sure the country wants a Treasury minister idiotic enough to go out of his way to pay taxes he was not liable for.'

2. Anna Raccoon beautifully explains the 'Bureaucratic Pecking Order':

'Those who can peck,
peck.

Those who can’t peck,
teach pecking.

Those who can’t teach pecking,
administer the teaching of pecking.

Those who can’t administer the teaching of pecking,
regulate the administration of the teaching of pecking.

Those who can’t regulate the administration of the teaching of pecking,
advocate at the bar, for or against the regulation of the administration
of the teaching of pecking.

Those who can’t advocate at the bar, for or against the
regulation of the administration of the teaching of pecking,
legislate about advocating for or against the regulation of the
administration of the teaching of pecking.

And this whole house of cards, legislation about advocating for
or against the regulation of the administration of the teaching of pecking,
is all paid for only by those who can and do peck...'

3. Blazing Cat Fur details (in his words, not mine):

'Ali Mallah a notorious Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Union Thug Assaults intrepid blogger Blazingcatfur! Mallah, who is also a Vice President of the virulently anti-semitic Canadian Arab Federation, is well known for his anti-Israel derangement and is shown in the video as he attempts to prevent Blazing from filming an anti-Netanyahu protest sponsored by the Leftist Islamofascist alliance in Toronto.'

This story may run and run.


4. Anna Raccoon has found another example of wasted public money:

'The financially pressed NHS has commissioned the Mother’s Union in Somerset to hand knit 150 breasts.

They are ‘cheaper than’ the £35 a boob version they used to buy.

The fake breasts will be issued to health visitors and community nurses who help support new mothers.

...


Before we could afford outreach workers to go and teach new born babes how to suck……

Jeez, no wonder the country is broke.'

There are examples of this sort of waste throughout the public sector, but if the Conservative/LibDem coalition propose any cuts the cry will be 'doctors, nurses and teachers' not outreach workers and teachers of tit sucking.


5. And talking of breastfeeding, And there was me thinking reports on a most peculiar fatwa:

'One of Sunni Islam's most prestigious institutions is to discipline a cleric after he issued a decree allowing women to breastfeed their male colleagues.

...

Dr Izzat Atiya of Egypt's al-Azhar University said it offered a way around segregation of the sexes at work.

...

His fatwa stated the act would make the man symbolically related to the woman and preclude any sexual relations.

...

According to Islamic tradition, or Hadith, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers.'

There are some really strange people around.


6. Burning Our Money explains why the poor have not got poorer but richer and why the definition of poverty needs updating:

'Yes, there are plenty of people who live sad dysfunctional workless lives. But that's nothing to do with lack of material resources. That's to do with poor education, destructive personal behaviour, and our grotesque level of welfare dependency. None of which will be solved by yet more welfare cash.

Which is why we have long argued for reformulating our definition of what constitutes poverty. Ideally, we'd like to switch to an absolute standard of poverty such as they have in the US. But if we have to stick with a definition measured relative to median income, we'd settle for dropping the current poverty line at 60% of median income, and switching to a 50% line.

Why?

First, because we estimate it would save £20-30bn pa from the current welfare bill. And second, because it would increase the attractiveness of work relative to welfare (ie it would make the poverty trap problem a whole lot easier to solve).'

Gordon Brown's poverty trap

"In Gordon Brown’s Britain if you’re a single mother with two kids earning £150 a week, the withdrawal of benefits and the additional taxes mean that for every extra pound you earn, you keep just 4 pence.

What kind of incentive is that? Thirty years ago this party won an election fighting against 98 per cent tax rates on the richest."

That was DAvid Cameron in his recent speech. For more details on this Labour pverty trap please take a read of Burning Our Money.

The Labour/BBC narrative

This BBC report has all the hallmarks of a joint Labour/BBC operation. The article starts:

"It is "unacceptable" that two million pensioners in the UK are still living in poverty, a group of MPs says.

The Work and Pensions Committee says the figure is a third lower than it was in 1997, but wants ministers to commit to ending pensioner poverty altogether. "

Sounds laudable? But what is the definition of "pensioner poverty"? A little further down we learn that

"One in five pensioners in the UK are classed as living in relative poverty. "

So "pensioner poverty" is a relative measure; relative to what? If it is relative to other pensioners then how can "pensioner poverty" ever be ended?

The article includes this:

"Committee chairman Terry Rooney said: "The government has committed to eradicating child poverty, now they need to commit to eradicating pensioner poverty."

I know "child poverty" is a relative measure and so eradicable, is the same true for "pensioner poverty"?

The BBC bring in a quotation from the Labour minister who is willing to spout some tractor stats:

"Responding to the report, Pensions Minister Angela Eagle said more than 900,000 pensioners had been lifted out of poverty since 1997."

A definition of "lifted out of poverty" would be useful and also a figure for how many pensioners had "fallen into poverty" since 1997; somehow I don't think Angela Eagle is quoting a net figure.

Of course this story is really about something else entirely; it's about Gordon Brown being able to say that whilst Labour wants to end "pensioner poverty", the old-Etonian Conservatives want to impoverish all pensioners. The BBC know this and are happily complicit.

The unasked question on child poverty

BBC Radio4 One o'clock news had a piece on child poverty and they had a fairly long interview with a woman who was raising five children on benefits. Interestingly the interviewer did not ask why a woman without a job had had five children, I would have thought that that would have been pertinent.

What is poverty?

According to Barnardos:

"The main poverty line used in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union is a relative poverty measure, a level of income set at 60 per cent of the median household income."

So for Barnados poverty is a relative measure, which makes the end of the Barnados article all the more interesting:

"In 1999, the then Prime Minister, Rt Hon Tony Blair MP, made an historic pledge to end child poverty within a generation – by 2020. The milestones along the way involve reducing child poverty by 25 per cent by 2004/05 and halving it by 2010."

If poverty is a relative measure then how can child poverty be ended? Presumably Tony Blair was as serious about this promise as most of his others...

Barnados then report on "How are we doing?":

"* The first target to lift 1 million children out of poverty by 2004/05, was missed by 300,000. It will now be even harder to reduce poverty as the easiest to reach families have already been helped.
* To meet the 2010 target, the number of children in poverty must fall to 1.7 million, currently 2.9 million (before housing costs). On current policies this will not be achieved."

How appalling, the UK is failing to meet an artificially set impossible target to cut poverty. So why set the target? The answer come next: "What else do we need to do?"

"* In order to meet the 2010 target, £3 billion must be invested in tax credits. In order to meet the target, this money must, at the very latest, be committed in the 2009 budget.
* Meeting the 2020 target will take much more than simple redistribution. Focusing on making work pay; sustainable and progressive jobs; and adequate, appropriate and affordable childcare will be vital."

Some good old-fashioned Labour redistribution of income allied with increasing the size of Gordon Brown's Labour voting client-state; doesn't it make you proud to be British?