The IAAF Olympics Committee is worse than Adolf Hitler

Follow @JohnPlatinumG At the time of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow for political reasons, purportedly over the USSR's involvement in Afghanistan, Margaret Thatcher urged athletes not to compete in the Moscow Olympics and supporters to boycott the Games. One of the athletes who defied this advice was Sebastian Coe, who won a gold medal in the 1500 metres. I defied the advice too and went to Moscow where I was treated extremely well. Thatcher did not ban athletes from competing, she just advised them not to go.

The same Sebastian Coe who defied Thatcher has now, as President of the IAAF, spoiled the dreams of athletes, who like him in 1980, have been training for life for this opportunity. It is clearly a political decision and has nothing to do with the few athletes of all nations who choose to cheat by using performance-enhancing drugs. Sadly politics has ruined sport and sportsmanship as I demonstrated in my last post.

Ever since the west set up a puppet-government in Ukraine and imposed sanctions against Russia for following the wishes of the population of Crimea and its alleged military involvement in the civil-war started by Poroshenko, the west has not missed an opportunity to try to punish Russia. Blame Russia. Blame Putin. These are the slogans on the lips of every MSM mouthpiece.

It disturbs me that my country, and other western countries, have gone down the same road as Adolf Hitler in his attitude towads black and non-Aryan people including non-Aryan athletes. Thankfully Hitler was put in his place and Jesse Owens returned to the US with four gold medals only to be snubbed by President Roosevelt. Racism against blacks was the bigotry of the day replaced today by persecution of Muslims. The west in its xenophobic hatred of Russians is no different from Hitler in his belief that Aryans were superior, except he did not ban Jesse Owens from competing.

Sebastian Coe, no angel himself and in the middle of several corruption scandals, should be ashamed of himself for toadying to the US/UK attempts to discredit Russia. The US economy is on its last legs and this is a cynical diversionary tactic. As a lad I used to run, I was never any good, at the various clubs in the West Riding including Hallamshire (where Coe ran). Coe should think back to those days and all the work he put in building up the speed and stamina that made his dream come true. Then he should consider what this stupid decision of the IAAF has done to crush the dreams of good honest Russian athletes. Nobody from Russia will compete under any flag but Russian.

Can somebody with the knowledge please start a petition to support Russian athletes? I'll link it here and spread it. Thanks.

Pension revolution - or not!

Follow @JohnPlatinumG George Osborne's latest budget allows pensioners with private annuities to take all their pension in a lump sum. We have been here before. What it amounts to is another attack on our social security system. They know what they are doing. Margaret Thatcher started this by bribing people with £200 (quite a lot of money then) out of the national pension pot to take out private schemes. Private schemes are there to make money for insurance companies (of which many Tory ministers are stakeholders) and not for the benefits of pensioners. Many took this bribe, and many private companies, after having taken huge profits and bonuses, declared themselves bankrupt.

What happened to those left in the lurch through these bankruptcies? They were incorporated back into the national pension scheme. What will happen to people who take a lump sum and squander it rather than take out an annuity? The same. We, quite rightly, do not want our old people to have no income and die in the streets. So they will be incorporated back into the state pension scheme, thus diluting its payout potential. It is a Tory policy. They think because they earn unimaginably high incomes, and will never be in need of a pension themselves, that small savers, small businesses and small investors are in the same position. This foolhardiness is encouraging debt. I fear for society, if it continues to exist in its current state, twenty years from now.

Dishonouring public opinion - Thatcher's funeral costs

Follow @JohnPlatinumG People have protested loud and fast about not wishing to pay for Margaret Thatcher's funeral. In less than six days a petition achieved more than 10,000 signatures and was gaining impetus. A few hours ago the site encountered what CAUSES calls 'turbulence'. This is disturbing because the way the petition was going it could have easily reached 20,000 though 10,000 was a realistic objective over such a short period. As I write it is 2 p.m. on Tuesday 16th April. The petition-page has been down for two hours with a message:

CAUSES itself is not down because at the same time as I dumped the above screenshot I also dropped down this box where a search on the word Thatcher' brought up the following.

Who took it down? It shows that 10,124 signatures had been attained with lots of time left for this exponentially-increasing petition, which I only got to know about yesterday. Another one I would have signed had I known about it was an Epetition created before Mrs Thatcher had died called 'No State Funeral for Margaret Thatcher'. That reached a huge 38,043 signatures. Though Lady Thatcher can rest in peace this funeral business should not be allowed to rest in peace. And indeed it is not doing. Another epetition has just been started.

In her blatant attack on trade unionism one way Mrs Thatcher drove a wedge through the crotch of the union movement was to enable union members opposed to the political levy to opt out of paying it. So now as a taxpayer who does not want to pay for this pompous affair I should be entitled to opt out of funding her procession. The general public has not been consulted about whether those who make up its body wish to pay for a person's funeral who they may, or may not, have liked. What is more, each of us has to fund our own family funerals, out of our own pockets. If this show is not paid for by private donation I shall be asking for my funeral to come out of public funds. So should you. Most of us are much better people than Thatcher ever was

The great Thatcher divide

Follow @JohnPlatinumG It is hard not to want to join in the chorus on one side or another of the great Margaret Thatcher divide. In fact it is nigh impossible. Perhaps the adjective most bandied about since her death, and the one that best describes her, is divisive. She divided a nation. The capitalist system she supported, that most thinking people today believe is on its last legs, pursued a motto: "Divide and rule". The trades' union movement pursued a motto: "United we stand, divided we fall". These two mottoes faced one another across the great Thatcher  divide. A class-battle was waged whereby the trade union movement had a wedge driven between its legs until today it is still crying out from the punishment. Thatcher was responsible for this battle against the working-class which led to the society we have today of greedy go-getters and usurers.

The housing divide

Who knows, perhaps she naively and seriously thought that everybody, by following the capitalist dream, could be rich. Anybody can see, die-hard bankers especially , that such a society under a capitalist system could never exist. There need to be factors of production to make the capitalist system work. Robert Tressell clearly shows how this system works in The Ragged-trousered Philanthropists in a chapter called 'The Great Money Trick'. It is why there is a 1% super-rich sector and the other 99% are destined to make their way through life as best they can. Many working-class people bought into the dream, buying their council-houses below market value and quite probably thought this is great when they came to sell them at a more realistic market value. This conjurer's trick can only be worked once. It left in its wake a vast shortage of social-housing and a populace of young people unable to afford a house together with councils in debt because they had been robbed of their assets.

The financial divide

Likewise a dream of Thatcher's, nightmare might be a better word, was to privatise pensions. People were bribed with £200 (paid from the state pension scheme) to contract out and invest in private pensions, because capitalists know better how to make your money grow. Most of these private schemes failed. So those without a proper pension came back into the state pension scheme. They did not pay £200 plus interest to get back in. The state pension scheme however had remained solvent. It was not run by shady capitalists whose main motivation was how much profit they could screw you for and contributions paid into private pension schemes lined the pockets of the capitalists. The state pension scheme saw none of this. However pensions paid to those returning, who would otherwise have been without a pension, are today paid out of the state pension scheme. Similarly when banks go bust taxpayers, who all economists know, provide most of the liquidity that enables banks to operate, are forced to bail them out. That is, unless there is a chance they might recover and provide profit to the rich. Even when banks continue to fail, at taxpayers expense, bankers are paid disgusting bonuses.

The military divide

Thatcher was the first post second world-war prime minister to take us into war. It was an unnecessary war. A peace deal was on the table but she chose to have Argentinian and British troops killed to bolster her flagging popularity. Because collectively the electorate is stupid, there can be no other word for it, she sailed back into power on the tidal wave created by the loss of these young lives. Every single prime-minister since, of both main parties. and the coalitionist Clegg, have taken us into unnecessary wars. Thatcher showed them the way. None of them has been big enough to say "No". The electorate continues to support these wars. The world is in debt. The wars, which can make capitalists rich, have caused this debt, which the rest of us will have to pay.

A fitting epitaph

Margaret Thatcher is dead. I shall not be dancing on the day of her funeral, another pompous affair aimed at brainwashing those sheep who have never read "Animal Farm". I shall not be having a street party in remembrance of her divisive policies. Instead I have combined the two mottoes given in the introductory paragraph to provide a fitting epitaph to the old lady who did so much harm to my country.

She divided the united and they fell.

The Big Society – Cameron’s love of charity

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Atlantic Bridge was a Conservative charity which it seems was laundering money to fund a neo-con Zionist reorganisation of the world order. The Charity Commission closed it down for purporting to be a charity when in reality it was a political organisation and, as we all know now, its money was being used in expenses for the despicable, non-vetted, self-promoting, defence buffoon Adam Werritty, an issue over which the Minister of Defence, Liam Fox, was forced to resign.

With Margaret Thatcher as its honorary president all the leading lights of the Tory party, William Hague, Liam Fox, George Osborne, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling have served on the charity’s board. Cameron himself managed to keep his nose clean but it will be noted that Lord Astor of Hever was on the board and met Werritty at a defence meeting in the Middle East in December 2010. Lord Astor just happens to be Cameron’s father-in-law. It would be surprising, even remiss of him, if Cameron did not know what was going on.

Considering these defence issues brings into the spotlight the circular flow of big money. Charitable donations are made to the Tory party by people, like Tony Buckingham, in exchange for favours in the newly-conquered oilfields of the Middle East. Taking care to protect this circular flow there is nothing in writing to confirm how it works. The super-rich Buckingham, who claims to be a former-mercenary, with his company Heritage Oil, has oil-interests in Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Kurdistan and elsewhere. He describes himself as a former mercenary, but to my mind he is still the aggressive mercenary he was but now having private armies to defend oil interests stolen from the legitimate owners before we (NATO countries) waged war on Islamic regimes.

Goodbye to the canal system

Further demonstrating his love of charities and charitable works this morning Cameron announced that canal waterways of England and Wales were to be handed over to the charitable sector in line with what he calls his Big Society. What the Big Society really amounts to is working for nothing. Over the next 15 years the canals will only get a third from government funding of what has been spent on them previously, and the rest will be paid for by charitable donations and maintenance by dedicated canal enthusiasts, who might start off enthusiastically but when they realise it is just them the enthusiasm will wane. This scheme, like the hot or cold pasty tax, is doomed to failure. The eighteenth century pioneers of our beautiful canal network will be turning in their graves.