Joseph Kony: The Governments Reply

It may have taken two Governments, 19 months and one hell of a lot of noise but please behold below a reply from the British Government regarding Joseph Kony and the LRA. In short, whilst it maybe a quite conquest... we, and all other anti-LRA groups, are winning.

Please note this email has been reformatted and my real name omitted, no other content changes have been made.

Dear Mr Magic

Thank you for your letter of 31 July to the Prime Minister about the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). I am replying as a Desk Officer in the Central Africa Team.

The UK Government condemns in the strongest possible terms the atrocities carried out by the LRA. Although much reduced in numbers, the LRA remains an unprincipled and violent threat to civilians and regional security. According to the most recent UN estimates the LRA now numbers around 250-300 fighters operating in small groups in remote parts of South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic.  This is considerably fewer than the number that used to adhere to the LRA, particularly at the height of its activity in 2002 when we believe there were approximately 3,000 active LRA fighters.

We are particularly concerned that the inhuman actions of the LRA have caused enormous suffering to children, including through the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, abduction of children from families and communities, and sexual violence against children. The UK strongly supports efforts to stop the use of child soldiers in LRA- affected regions and internationally. We work at the highest political levels to protect children affected by armed conflict, including through the European Union (EU), the United Nation’s Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict and the African Union (AU). Through protecting children from the threats posed by the LRA, we can make them feel safer within their communities. The UK is giving half a million pounds to a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) programme that will help improve the capacity of AU forces to protect children and women in LRA-affected areas. We are providing this money over a period of two years.

In addition to the efforts outlined above:

• The UK leads the work in the UN Security Council on LRA matters. The Special Representative of the Secretary General for Central Africa presented a regional strategy to the UN Security Council in June 2012 aimed at combating the LRA, and it was endorsed in a UK-drafted Presidential Statement. The UK has continued to encourage the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA) to coordinate the anti-LRA work of the UN, the EU, the AU and the LRA-affected states. In our most recent statement on the LRA at the UN Security Council in May 2013 we welcomed the finalisation of the strategic documents for the operationalisation of the AU Regional Task Force (RTF) against the LRA. We see the full implementation of the UN regional strategy on the LRA and the operationalisation of the RTF as key in seeking to defeat the LRA.

• The UK acknowledges the important work of the UN peacekeeping missions in the region in protecting civilians. We have stressed the need for continued and improved coordination and information sharing between these missions, and with the broader international community and local stakeholders, to enhance these efforts further. This is why the UK currently funds the deployment of a British Military Officer in an information cell in the northern part of the DRC, who has strengthened the capability of the cell to provide useful intelligence with which to counter the LRA and has assisted with the improvement of information exchange between the missions.

• The EU, with UK financial and political support, has helped fund the establishment of the AU Special Envoy on the LRA, who has made progress in co-ordinating the response from the four LRA affected countries. The UK has welcomed the work that the AU has undertaken towards the implementation of its Regional Task Force and, whilst we understand that there are technical challenges to implementation, we have urged the full deployment of troops across the region as soon as possible.

• The UK continues to make significant contributions to programmes to disarm and demobilise combatants and reintegrate them into their home communities. These programmes have helped to remove a steady stream of members from the LRA and other armed groups by encouraging defections.

We should not underestimate the ingenuity of the LRA, and their ability to survive. However, the capture of senior LRA commander Ceaser Acellam in May 2012, the destruction of the base of a key general of the LRA in the Central African Republic in August 2012, and the death of Brigadier Binani in January 2013 demonstrate that progress is being made in reducing the capacity of the LRA and ultimately bringing Kony and other senior LRA members to justice.

I hope that this letters addresses your concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Kerr

A Voice for The Voiceless

Whilst I have never been one to lend a hand to those who place the lives and rights of animals above, or even at times on par with, humans, I do accept that animals have a nervous system. That they feel pain and to some extent joy. I do not follow on from this that they should thus be under some supreme protection where by we cannot use them (provided that they are not endangered) for experimentation or food, I disagree almost whole heartedly with the vegan utopia that is so often displayed by those standing for "Animal Rights". Simply put, we are also animals and it is clearly within our nature (because we do and as such the point is self evident) to consume meat which means that it is clearly within our nature to kill animals. By defying this very element of our own nature we are defying part of the "natural order" which the Vegan dream so demands that we follow. Thus we end in a dichotomy.

In terms of animal experimentation, which people associate with unnecessary cruelty, what we are killing/using animals for is in essence the same reason that we have always killed them for, which is to consume them to prolong human life, whether that be in terms of an individuals digestion or by a scientist using the carcass/creature to find a cure for some life shortening/ruining disease. Yes there is often animal pain involved but it is (as it should be) minimal and by this I do not mean that special measures are put in place to monitor and reduce animal pain but that the pain is not the focus, the purpose for the experimentation is the focus. In the same way as eating is the focus when we are talking about killing animals for meat. As such, finishing the experiment in as short a time as is scientifically acceptable for the purpose of speedily finding cures also just happens to keep as short as possible the length of time that the animals are in pain. Again, in the same way as when killing for food, the faster the animal is killed the quicker it can be eaten.
What I am opposed too, however, is killing or pain for superficial reasons. Putting animals in pain because you want to look better, killing for the vanity of a Trophy. This is simply an extension of barbarism as far as I am concerned, particularly when we are talking about trophy hunting which, incidentally, is almost totally concerned with hunting animals which are or have been considered threatened. It is this particular issue that this post is designed to address and it is being written for one very particular purpose.

FRIKKIE DU TOIT.

I was unaware of this until I saw an unfortunate video, on an unfortunate website. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXiJhldwGJY. Now a few facts need to be cleared up. I am yet to have found evidence of this particular range partaking in anything that would be considered illegal, however almost its entire premise and execution is repugnant if considered morally. What is really interesting about this particular safari service is that they (or in particular Frikkie himself) integrates hunting with Christianity. Indeed you can even go on a seven day "Provider for Chris Hunting Adventure" where you may kill and slaughter, behead and mount in the name of your Deity.

I can understand the desire to experience the African plains and to be in the presence of some of the worlds most majestic creatures, I can even go so far as to see how creationists may consider the experience to be godly or religious, however my empathy stops when a gun is then loaded and part of that majesty is blasted into oblivion and its corpse desecrated. I cannot see the morality in this, only the most basest form of selfishness and twisted supremism. This is not an argument to say, as the Vegan dream again dictates, that we should not have any affect on the world, but I would say that we shouldn't go out of our way to have a destructive effect which is exactly what these people are doing actively and without remorse.

There is also a continuous stream of mis-information given by such "outfitters" exaggerating greatly the dangerousness of many of these animals. If they really wanted to hunt an animal based on its dangerousness then how about the mosquito? The animal responsible for the most human deaths in the world (about 2 million a year). Or perhaps the Asian Cobra? Responsible for nearly 50,000 deaths per year. Or The Box Jellyfish? The Black Widow Spider? No, hunted animals are not being hunted because they are particularly dangerous, they are being hunted because they LOOK fierce. They APPEAR to be dangerous but are actually mostly docile. A Great Stag only ruts for around 3 months of the year and the rest of the time lazily grazes. Lions hunt once every few days and spend the vast majority of there time relaxing under the shade or by a pool. If you really are under the impression that a Tiger is a terrifyingly dangerous animal that must be killed lest they mate and grow to such a population that they start eating human children!... then I advise that you consult the following vidoes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnvDKfCQnZY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z8KLlCfzwc

Not the image of the man killing monster you may have previously had of this rather docile animal.

To conclude I will end with one simple truth. That barbarism is a highly transferable skill.

Mr Magic

Anti-Propoganda Laws!? In Russia?? What!??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rrtuo4NcV8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5bfvvL-3JE

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/photos-from-russia-everyone-needs-to-see

When you have been watching the game play out for as long as we have, it becomes quite clear when something really begins and when something is said to have begun by those doing it. It is true that The Final Solution was made Official in 1942 calling for the Genocide of the Jewish people but it is equally true that over one million Jews were massacred during the war years prior to the decision being officially made. The process to vilify a group of people is actually very simple and does not happen in one great national epiphany. It happens, normally, via the following method:

Pick a minority that is already Culturally different to the majority (Jews, Blacks, Gays, Benefit Claimants)

Then control all information regarding this group (October 1933 all Jews were banned from owning News Media Outlets or being Journalists, June 2013 Russia passes Anti Propaganda Law forbidding the public passing of information regarding Homosexuals)

Now portray this group as different, strange, immoral. Dehumanise them so that the population doesn't empathise with them. (Talliban, Insurgents, The Enemy, Arab, Poly-amorous... anything but nothing that is easily understood)

Now blame them for something (Nazi Germany blamed the Jews for causing the German depression, for causing Germany to lose the First World War, for dragging out the Second World War, for causing WW2, for contaminating German children, etc, etc - Russia is currently blaming the Gay community of damaging the values of Russia and posing as a threat to Russian children)

Now Punish them.

The rest is documented by the volumes of history, from the Genocides in Rwanda and Germany to the Witch hunts and crusades in ancient Israel. This formula is the one being followed by Russia and it is about midway through its completion. Steps three and four tend to last the longest, but sooner or later something always happens that can be used in propaganda against the groups. From a violent protest (never mind who caused the violence, they only focus on those involved in it) to a individuals human error, something always happens because things are happening all the time that can be twisted to fit the desired theme.

The volumes of history also answer for us a question which has recently been hyped up by the press, Will the Winter Olympics be safe for Gay Foreign Athletes? The answer is unequivocally Yes. They will be perfectly safe in the same way that the Berlin Olympics in 1936 were safe for black, Jewish and Disabled Athletes. And in also the same way, the sigh of relief shall be heard by our politicians on a global stage, that the situation is exaggerated, that the rumours of violence and extremist behaviour is nothing more than the reminiscent ramblings of war wishers and conspiracy nuts. Thus the violence shall continue unchallenged.

Fight this now! It is a cancer that spreads slowly by we all know the damage it causes.

Being apathetic, in situation, does real damage. Sitting on the fence is tantamount to endorsement.


Mr Magic

Mr Magic is back. Ready yourselves...

It has been a long time since my last piece of writing, since this time we have had a whole array of controversies, from SOPA and ACTA threatening the safety and openness of internet content, through to the economic devastations of Greece, Portugal and Italy, through to the mass release of secret government information from the likes of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to the ever increasing cuts to public expenditure by the Coalition Government of the UK including cuts to policing budgets and cuts to local government budgets which in turn have led to almost the complete centralisation of funding for local arts and community projects. We also seem to have forgotten, like so many of the campaigns that came before it, including Make Poverty History and FairTrade, the fight against Joseph Kony, and the fight against Robert Mugabi and the fight against other tyrannical regimes, as if our own financial issues somehow give us the right to forgo our principles on the international stage in regards to the UN Convention on Human Rights. The campaign against Guantánamo Bay, fought so vigilantly by Senator and President-elect Barack Obama, seems to have been forgotten by the now elected second term President of the USA. That we have repeatedly shared the G8 and now G20 platform with countries such as China and Saudi Arabia without any remorse or sign of repulsion for the totalitarian regimes that these countries inflict on their civilians though it were only a few years prior that our liberal minority, which is now part of the UK Government, was calling for those in power to speak out against such regimes. They are now those in power. Where is their voice? Where was the no vote on the replacement of Trident? The no vote on increasing Student Fees? Where was the compassion and fairness when the Church of England was legally forbidden to marry same sex couples though other denominations and other religions are given this freedom?

We seem to live in a world of undulating and cyclical  focus whereby we, as an electorate, are so often distracted by fabricated fears and controversies that, when we begin to unravel them, we find are nothing more than superficial exaggerations designed to distract us from some government policy change or some previous, equally hyped up, superficiality. We have been accepting, for far too long, "steps in the right direction" that repeatedly seem to miss their destination. We want to find renewable energy sources and yet we are now debating fracking natural gas from rocks. We want fiscal security and yet we are STILL borrowing money that we cannot afford to pay back. We want a safer, less nuclear world, and yet we are talking about renewing our nuclear program. When, at what point, will we give up this nonsensical approach of doing the wrong thing and yet expecting the right result?

Lets just take a look at Education to highlight this point. Recent changes to the UK Education system have attempted to align it more closely with the Grammar School Model whereby gaining knowledge of large amounts of raw data and remembering vast amounts of this data is deemed the primary purpose of schooling rather than the knowledge of how to interpret/re-encode data or formulate your own data, which is considered the primary purpose of the newer comprehensive model. On the surface this may appear simply to be a difference in approach, two different schools of thought that achieve the same objective, however they are not. One is a draconian system which has already been tried and is opposed not just by those teachers who are new to the profession, but by those teachers who had to follow this prescribed methodology for years and by its previous students who are now the parents of the children for whom this arcane system has once again been prescribed. This system was originally operationalised in 1946 and has since had very little revision. The other method is one of comprehension, whereby focus is put on the understanding of data rather than its retention. This method follows in conjuncture with most modern child psychological theories on learning and behaviour as well as is compatible with other creative learning and phenomenological learning strategies such as the phonetic method of literacy education championed by Montessori and the holistic contemporary methods being developed by Steiner Schools. Sir Ken Robinson has repeatedly spoken about the importance of creativity and innovation in formal educational settings, that in the Grammar model success in examinations relied not on the child's talents and skills but on their regurgitation of trivia. Patrick Awuah goes further to say that creativity and Arts Education in critical to forming the true leaders of tomorrows world, in terms specifically of creative arts and not just the arts history so often excused as art classes under the aforementioned model. Yet is the UK increasing its use and acceptance of the recommended comprehensive model which is advocated by nearly all educators including our own Universities? No. Instead we are blindly following the moronic method condemned by so many because it has been chosen by our own infallible Michael Gove. A man who is not an educator, not a lecturer, not a person for whom any of his decisions affect except maybe the light irritation of the occasional protester. But we must not fret, for whilst he maybe winding the clock back on most mainstream educational institutions to a time of tyrannical cane wielding and the endless recitation of mildly useless information , he is also a great supporter of "free schools" which are schools run by Educators free from the influence of Local government and the National Curriculum, provided they meet the educational standards set by Ofsted. These schools are also advocated by almost all educators provided they are correctly audited and inspected and it is here that we find that over-used cliché "its a step in the right direction"! Really?! Well if you feel that a group of 24 schools, three of whom Ofsted regard as "require improvement" and one of which has been deemed "inadequate", are the saving grace by which the rest of the poorly made educational policies can be counter weighted against it might be worth remembering that there are 3,268 mainstream secondary school institutions in the UK educating  7.2 million students each year that are being plunged back into the dark ages of church-mentality teaching. A "Step in the right direction" is a far cry from arriving at the correct destination and "a miss is as good as a mile".

I now turn my attention to the legal case of Bradley Manning. It is very clearly written in the UN Third Geneva convention that prisoners still have certain rights including the right to adequate food and water, the right to humane treatment including the prohibition of humiliation, public curiosity and intimidation towards them. All of these rights were broken by the US when several members of the Senate, including the speaker of the house, publicly announced Manning as a traitor who should be on trial for treason and killed. By saying "and killed" they had already assumed guilt which people in such legal positions as Senators and House Representatives have no right to do. Furthermore, there are reports from friends with visitation rights to Manning that he was getting thinner and was looking unhealthy. In light of the aforementioned Guantánamo Bay and other prisons such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base Prison and Shebarghan Prison it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to assume that Mr Manning may have been subject to some loose form of starvation. If any of these claims are proven to be true (which in the case of public curiosity I hold to be self evidently true) any admissions or confessions are thus null and void because, according to the UN Third Geneva Convention which The US has signed in agreement with, they were coerced from Manning. This is a very clear case, this is not speculative theorising, this is universally recognised law which, if this were in any other country, would have Amnesty International crawling all over it. However, instead, Amnesty is supporting free speech not by defending someone who has used this right in one of its most important and intended forms (whistle-blowing) but is instead supporting "Pussy Riot's" right to stage a punk prayer. Whilst it would be counter-productive for me to condemn Pussy Riot to the pit that Vladimir Putin has destined for them, I do think that Amnesty should prioritise Bradley Manning's case as his current sentence could be as much as 136 years imprisonment, which is quintessentially a death penalty. BUT don't worry, at least he hasn't been actually given THE death penalty... and as such once more that ugly phrase rears its semantic face "its a step in the right direction"...

Mr Magic

The Volunteer Performer Scam of The Century!

Warning! This blog entry is more of a rant than anything else...


"Volunteer performers needed!"

And with these words, the biggest scam of the 21st century begins! Now, I know that by the end of this blog post, I am not going to be favourable with alot of people within the "Arts world" however you wouldn't ask for a volunteer barmaid or a volunteer cashier, but by some amazing streak of industrial blagging, employers within the arts industry feel no remorse at refusing to pay people for performing. Furthermore, the victims of this industrial slave mentality are so engulfed by their stockholm syndrome for the arts that they begin to Thank! to Thank! those who have refused to pay them for their services for giving them "the opportunity" and the "experience"!

This is very simply a scam and please don't just take my word for it, lets take a look at the numbers! If I sell tickets to see a show at £8-10 and I get an audience of say 400, that  £3200-4000 of income. If I only have to remove say £200 for the rent of a hall for an evening (this is often waved, especially if the venue has a bar as the bar intake is normally enough) and a further £300-500 for props and costume, then I, the very very crafty producer, am walking away with a profit of £2500-3500 for the first show and then a profit of £3000-3800 for every subsequent show! if I paid each of my actors just MINIMUM WAGE and the show lasted one hour, I would need to employ 455 people to make a loss. As it is the average show contains 10-25 actors and this means that, unless the show lasted for more than 18 hours, I am guaranteed a profit. Moreover I could, at these prices, afford to pay my actors £100 each night and still walk away with £500-1300 profit after the second show.

There is no reason why performers should be expected to use their skills for free under these circumstances!

There is also this second ridiculous notion that performers need to perform for free for a certain period at the beginnings of their career to somehow prove their dedication to the arts. This notion is absurd! Plumbers are not expected to plumb for free at the beginnings of their career to prove their dedication to their craft, neither are shop assistants, nor bakers, nor even the armed forces! It is simply part of the indoctrination into this scam.

Simply put, if you are working for someone and making them money, then you should ensure that you are not doing it for free.

Mr Magic

Evil has a name and that name is Joseph Kony

The Following is a letter sent to the UK's Foreign Secretary, William Hague, on the 7th of March 2012.
This Email have been reformatted and my real name has been omitted as well as some information changed to hide the number of private subscribers to this Blog (Mentioned in the original only to add some pressure to gain a reply faster).




Dear Mr Hague

I am writing to bring to your attention the brilliant work of "Invisible Children", A campaign to stop child abduction, sex slavery and abuse by the Militant African group "The Lords Resistance Army" (more commonly referred to as the LRA) who's crimes against humanity are so vile and shocking as to challenge our very understanding of the ethical paradigm we call Humanity.

The Leader of the LRA is Joseph Kony, he is currently at the top of the International Criminal Courts Most Wanted list above many War lords and Terrorists, not simply because of the number of deaths that he is responsible for, but because of the perversity of his crimes. From forming an Army of child soldiers (who are forced to kill their parents) to selling children as young as eight years of age into prostitution, Kony belongs to the very select group of people who, to define as human, degrades our species. However what separates Kony from this group, is not the crimes which he has committed but the length of time he has been allowed to commit them by the international community.

Kony has been actively committing these crimes against humanity since 1986! That means that he has now generations of soldiers, all of whom started out as child soldiers and many of whom are now Senior Commanders in his 30,000 strong army. We have allowed this atrocity to continue for 26 years and to allow it to continue for a single day longer could only be described as abominable. 

How was this situation allowed to develop? Simple, Kony and the LRA were both born in Uganda, Africa. There is no oil in Uganda, it is not part of the EU, NATO or any such body other than the UN. It is a very poor country and its inhabitants are Africans. If they were British, French, American, German, Russian, Chinese, Australian or any other nationality apart from African there would be international uproar but Africa has come to accept that in the eyes of the greater international community, they are simply irrelevant. Please do not mistake this as a claim of racism on behalf of the international community, this has nothing to do with the colour of an Africans skin, only the geography that persons birth. 

There is no argument against this point by the way. It is fact that during the last 18 years of Kony's rebellion over 1.6 million Ugandans have become internally displaced and a further 40,000 (over half of whom are children) walk miles each night to the nearest major city to try to avoid abduction in their smaller villages and towns, only to have to walk back to their villages at day-break. If over 20,000 children and their parents were sleeping each night in schools, hospital courtyards and Bus stations around London or Paris (or any city in Europe!) for fear of abduction it would be international news in seconds and it would be mere hours before we would be offered/be offering international aid. 

So far the only international aid that has been offered to the Ugandan Government to help stop the LRA is 100 US Military personnel, who are "consultants" to the Ugandan Government but are not going to be conducting any direct or indirect effort to try to bring to justice Joseph Kony, their remit is to "remove Joseph Kony from the battlefield".

This, rather token act, is the socio-political equivalent of giving someone a litre bottle of water to help fight a forest fire. Yes it will help, but a lot more is needed and its needed now! 

We need to find a way to limit and stop the activities of the LRA. We need to find a way of counselling these children and adults back into society after, what could have been, years of fear and forced atrocities. We need to find a way of making sure that this never can happen again. 

I will not claim to have the answers, I do not know whether removing Kony will just lead to a new leader of the LRA or whether as it was born with him, so it would die with him. What I do know is that Kony must be brought to trial, he must be seen by the world as the vile filth that he is and most importantly we, Europe and the rest of the world must stop ignoring the internal issues of African nations. It was mostly our ignorance which facilitated the growth of the LRA and so it should be mostly our attention which leads to its ultimate end.

I eagerly await your reply as to what you plan to propose in parliament, to aid the plight of the Ugandan people and to bring to justice Joseph Kony.

Yours Sincerely

Mr Magic

The Economy solved... do I have your attention? Good.

At current the economy is a, shall we say, confusing entity. Like the facts surrounding the middle-east conflict, there seems to be just as much misinformation as there is truth and because of this, whenever we hear the words "economy", "fiscal" or "monetary",whilst we may not understand what is being said, but we can be reasonably certain that its not good. 

So allow me to simplify the issue with a very brief history of the economic crisis, leaving out all of the hype and ridiculous words such as "fiscal" which means "money", or "monetary" which means... "money"! or "quantative easing" which, though it sounds like it should have something to do with making an obese man's trousers slightly bigger round the waist, simply means printing money.

Basically what happened was that we (and by we I mean bankers) borrowed lots and lots of money at a certain interest rate price (this we will call "loan 1"). This price is paid annually yearly until the borrowed money is returned. What the banks then did was invest lend this borrowed money to businesses and individuals at an even higher interest price (this we will call "loan 2") and in so doing, reaping the profits money left over after paying the first, lower price. Now this sounds like a very clever scheme, and it would have been had they not become over zealous with there lending. Not only were banks lending to other banks (which they assumed were doing all the necessary checks to insure that they could pay back the loans which they were taking out and so often neglected to do the necessary checks themselves, which in and of itself is not that bad because everyone assumes that the one thing banks know how to handle is there own monetary affairs money... or at least back then they did) but they were also lending more and more recklessly to more and more high risk ventures people who may have not been able to pay the money back.

It is often at this point in the explanation that bankers say that it was the borrowers fault for borrowing more than they could pay back. This is not true, if you are loaning out other peoples money then it is your responsibility to ensure that the people whom you loan the money too are reputable and have the income ability to pay it back plus the interest on top price. It is double your responsibility if loaning lending money is your JOB and you are paid to do it!

So then the inevitable happened and people could not pay back the loans ("loan 2") so now banks were accumulating adding on month by month and year by year, the yearly interest price which they had to pay on their loans ("loan 1") which they took out to fund them lending out money in the first place (I know this is a bit confusing but basically the banks are now getting in debt). A lot of these loans ("loan 2") were being secured against properties (if they couldn't pay back the money the back would take the persons home as payment) however because prices of houses were so high, people were not buying them so banks had to keep reducing and reducing the price of the houses which they were selling meaning that they were not getting back the amount of money they were expecting (banks now getting into even more debt). Moreover, the lowering of the house prices at market level meant that house prices in general started to decline and as such the mortgages on them money borrowed to buy them became more than these houses became worth (these "mortgages worth more than the houses" are referred to as "sub-prime mortgages"). 

To compound the issue even further, bundles of these "sub-prime mortgages" were being sold (yes that's right, they were selling debts, as in "if you buy this off me, then they will owe you the money which they owe me") in a shop called "wall street" (its a shop where you can buy and sell industry specific banking and investment products and ventures stuff that is so detached from reality that it is questionable whether or not it even exists) under the new title "structured Investment Vehicle" (SIV) and these SIV's were being bought and sold as if they were an independent entity from the debt which they are made up of (brings to mind an image of playing pass the parcel with a bomb). Whoever ended up with a SIV which they couldn't sell on, when looking inside it to try and claim the debt money owed, often discovered that it was in fact a lot less money than what they had paid to buy it in the first place. Moreover, the people who owe the money often couldn't pay it back and repossessing selling the house it was secured against would be pointless as the house is worth less than the money owed (are you still following? basically the banks are really really in debt now!)

Now, the question is raised, who do the banks owe? And the answer is us! Its our money which we are putting in current accounts and savings accounts which is being loaned out and gambled on by the bankers. As such, it isn't directly them who are accumulating building up debt, but the company which is the bank. If the bank invests lends poorly, it isn't the bankers who lose their money, but us whose money they have been playing with. It is this knowledge which led the banks the turn to the Government to ask them to pay off the banks debts ("loan 1") on the basis that it would harm the general economy because millions of people would lose lots of money (neglecting the fact that it was entirely the bankers fault that millions of people would lose lots of money, and in so doing ensuring no negative repercussions for the bankers). The Government agreed and used tax money to pay off the banks debts (which basically means we paid money to the Government, to pay money to the banks, to save our money... confused? you should be.). Now this would have been Ok had the Government had enough money to do this... but it didn't, in fact the Government were one of the organisations which had been borrowing money off of the banks in the first place! 

This massive climate of debt triggered what is referred to as a "recession" which is basically when people stop spending. This meant that people were not buying products so companies were not making projected profits so there share value was declining on wall street which meant value of the company was declining which mean wages and jobs were being cut which meant people had less money so they stopped spending which meant products weren't being bought... and round and round it went. To end this vicious cycle, the government injected billions of pounds into the economy, which it of course didn't have and so had to borrow, which increased its debt even more. 

This recession was not limited to the UK but was a Global recession which affected Europe and US just as much. This is because banks were borrowing and lending internationally meaning that bail-outs (governments saving banks) were being made Globally not just in the UK and all government were borrowing and thus getting in debt.

Because of the annual price put on this debt, for every year that it goes unpaid, its cost increases. In the UK this has got to a point where we now owe 2.2 trillion pounds, which is nearly 5% of all the money that there is in the world! 

So how do we solve this horrible situation? The answer is actually very very simple. First you pay bankers by commission with a five year deferred gratification period. If the investment's which they make prove profitable, then after five years (whereby sustained profitability can be determined) they get paid a percentage of the profit of the investment. This means less risk for our money and more incentive for bankers to make cautious and yet profitable decisions with our money. We also need to put in place regulation which states that any investment losses are shared equally amongst the investor (us) and the investing banker (the bankers) this way they are held accountable, in an appropriate manor, for the decisions they make.

secondly, to pay off this massive debt build up we need to do one very simple thing which we should have done a long long long time ago...

LEGALISE CANNABIS! 

The cannabis trade in the UK is currently estimated to be worth £85 a week for over 3 million people, thats £255 million a week and £13.26 billion a year! current policing of cannabis costs £50 million a year meaning we could save £13.31 billion a year if we just stopped saying cannabis was illegal and started growing it here instead of farms abroad. More over it would destroy the drug cartels and dealer networks which is estimated to save the police a further £2 billion a year! The regulation of the drug would also meant less dangers to the users and an estimated saving to the NHS of a further £500 million a year! That's a total saving of £15.81 billion! or in other words, £15.81 billion is how much it costs to keep cannabis illegal! 

Thirdly, you bring every troop home! Every single troop that is stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, it doesn't matter you bring them back. We can't afford war on a moral or an economic basis. If people choose to attack us then we retaliate but until then why aggravate foreign sovereignties? We can leave america to do that!

These are just two of the very simple things that can be done to help the UK out of this financial crisis. They are not radical, nor are they new ideas... in fact they are very old ideas which have been mentioned countless times by numerous people. I am not radical, nor am I trying to be radical by advocating them. I also advocate having a maximum wage per employee so that if you own a company which employ's only ten people, then you as the owner/CEO can only earn so much until you employ more people. This way it is ensured that where money is being made it is also being distributed in a fair manor. This is not so much socialism as responsible social capitalism.

Remember, the more people earning, the more people spending.

Mr Magic