The £52,000,000 Giveaway

The Star Spangled Banner

As a cool winters breeze...blew across a Colorado plain,
The Devils outstretched hand...left a trail of awesome pain.
A once quiet Community...with a typical American High School,
Was torn apart with anguish...by an atrocity...so cruel.

Two student loners arrived at the school...armed with rifles..bombs..and gun, And selected their victims to murder...ignoring the mercy pleas of everyone. Insane with jealousy...they singled out those with athletic prowess, Before executing these unfortunate souls...for whom they could not care less.

In a final act of cowardice...they shot themselves and died,
Leaving their parents distraught...whilst their feelings of shame they were unable to hide. Thirteen victims lost their lives...as a result of their heinous crime, Robbed of the love of their families...before reaching their prime.

Many others wounded...with both physical and mental scars,
Missing the friends that died that day...now living among the stars.
For whom a life of torment lies ahead...as each nightmare recalls the day, When friendships were torn apart in death...with no goodbyes to say.

Surely your children’s spirits...are now standing inside Gods Heavenly gate, Holding hands in peace and happiness...as a result of this twist of fate. Dreaming that the gun laws will change...so that they did not die in vain, With a hope that...that their parents will be the last to feel such awesome pain.

As the Star Spangled Banner...sounds a parting reposte,
We will pray for you all...and the children you have lost.
In the hope that we can relieve some of the anguish you are going through, Until God takes you by the hand and re-unites you all...with the ones you loved so true.

Composed in Memory of:

The Twelve Children & One Teacher
Who Died on April 20th 1999 at

Columbine High School, Littleton, Denver, Colorado,
USA.

Light fingered Larry…the leader of the pack, stealing to support an addiction…to heroin..cocaine and crack. This pied piper plays his tune…bewitching the growing throng, brainwashed into believing..that theft’s no longer wrong.

Violence..mugging and bullying…are the order of the day, an increasing pastime of teenagers…once happy at play. Verbal abuse…their only answer to the older generation, who gave them the chance to live in a free society…as part of a once caring Nation.

Schools have become a breeding ground…for cultivating lost respect, as teachers lose control daily…but what does the government expect. Detention may be more humane…than a few strokes of the cane, but it acts as no deterrent…compared to the stinging pain.

Childhood years…once the best years of human life, now a distant memory…that has been replaced with anger..greed and strife. Decent parents hands tied by the law…afraid of claims of child abuse, prevented from disciplining their offspring…now running wild and loose.

Gone are the Christian values…of loyalty..honour and respect, as children are allowed to run riot…a legacy we can no longer correct. Future generations…will eventually lose the biblical plot, and the family life once enjoyed…will be eternally forgot.

Just another failed parent…waiting for the day I die, dreaming of relief from the resulting strain…and all the tears I cry. For in death I hope to leave this epitaph…on my earthly grave, in order that sanity may return to this once proud Nation…which all decent parents now crave.

Published : Poetry Now 2000
By : Sue Marcuslee

This posting is not based on religion where catastrophe has been foretold but an observation by a simpleton who can see the writing on the wall for the whole of mankind.

In the media on a daily basis we have president Bush and other World leaders spouting on about how they plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.
They also talk at great length about cleaning up the planet and making money available to do so.

However I have to be honest and say they are blinkered by their own ideology of the problems that will confront all nations prior to this date, as despite their good intentions the majority of the Worlds inhabitants couldn’t give a toss about the future because they are only interested in making a fast buck.

This may seem a sweeping and hurtful statement to make but lets look at the facts:

Refrigerant CFC Gases

Refrigeration units were intended to be one of the breakthroughs of the 20th Century, unfortunately neither the governments of the World or the manufacturers allowed in their initial plans who was going to pay for the decommissioning of old/worn out units or how they would dispose of them.

How many normal citizens are aware that not only does the cooling system on a refrigeration unit hold CFC’s but also the foam lining of the unit is constructed with it. Therefore every householder who has a broken refrigeration unit and chooses to break it up is in fact helping to destroy the ozone layer the governments want to protect.

The perfect example of this is in the United Kingdom where scrap metal collectors trawl the housing estates looking for scrap metal, and when they come across a broken refrigeration unit they cut the cooling pipes releasing all the CFC’s into the atmosphere. Having started the process they remove the motor (Compressor) from the base of the unit and trade it in for cash with no thought of their future generations, just filling their pockets with money.

The local government department is to blame for this practice of releasing CFC’s into the atmosphere because of the £25 ($50) charged levied by them to remove one from each house. Also when you buy a new refrigeration unit the manufacturers never include in their information pack what they intend to do with it should it should it become irreparable.

Therefore in the UK alone there are approximately 1 million refrigeration units that no one can do anything with. In their defence there are a few decommissioning sites but yes you guessed it they all charge around the same fee for the service that they offer.

The result is that refrigeration units are left outside houses, in the streets, in gardens and even worse dumped down country lanes because consumers just don’t want to pay.

Auto Tires

It has been reported in the media that there are in excess of 200 million scrap auto tires of all shapes and sizes in the USA and despite the crumbing of some of them, the government is unable to contain or reduce the growing numbers every year or come up with a practical solution to the problem.

In the United Kingdom they also have this problem as they have 2 million scrap auto tires that they can’t do anything with. At one time they used to put them in landfill sites but the government have called a halt to this solution as all the landfill sites are now full. Some of the scrap tyres are crumbed to make children’s playgrounds but this is not a long-term solution as the tire mountain keeps growing and more and more are being dumped.

Where is all the money that the tire manufacturers have made down the years, but more important where is all the technology to reverse their invention safely. Maybe the tire manufacturers should be made accountable and forced to come up with the solution at their cost.

Because if you can’t burn or bury them, they need to find a solution before they swamp us.

The Digital Revolution

Firstly I have to applaud the inventor of the television for his obvious foresight of improving the World for those simpletons such as myself.

Having got that out of the way, I now feel I must burst a bubble or two as whilst technology advancement is a good thing on the whole I feel that we could be heading for further disaster in the near future.

Digital TV is fast approaching, but at what cost to you/me and ultimately the human races future on this planet.

Do I really need to spend £1,000 ($2,000) on a Digital Ariel, a Digital TV, a Digital Channel Box and a Digital Video Recorder.

UHF TV has served the World so wonderfully well since its invention why do we need to change now, I appreciate the picture quality will improve and the sound will be better but at what cost once again to the planet.

In the United Kingdom there are currently in excess of 20 million homes, lets assume that they all have 2 TV’s in each home on average. That gives us 40 million UHF TV’s, Ariel’s and VHS Video Recorders that will be of no use to anyone after 2013.
That is without counting the thousands that are broken or replaced for any other reason.
As everyone knows the UHF TV tube is filled with gas during the manufacturing process and because I am not a physicist we will assume it is Ozone depleting gas that is used, how many litres of gas will be released into the atmosphere when they are scrapped.

In the United Kingdom the scrap collectors I have referred to before break the tube to remove the copper wire element thus releasing the gas, currently if my figures are to be believed all this gas will be released without any thought for our future.

Currently no one has come up with a solution to the mountain of TV’s the United Kingdom will have in the next 5 years, other than what I have described. Once again the fat cats who dreamed up this wonderful idea should be made to come up with a working plan on how they are going to dispose of the mountain they are creating.

What they must include:

1) Plastic Disposal
2) Gas Extraction
3) PCB Board Decommissioning

Conclusion to The Facts

Now is the time to either face facts and force the superpower nations of this World to act on the above information or prepare ourselves to be overcome by the steadily increasing amounts of shit that technology advancement has caused.

I am not saying that technology has caused all these problems, but what I am saying is that someone is making a fast buck in all of this.

All I can say is good luck to them, because very shortly the World they are now creating is going to bite them on the ass shortly as the World as we know it descends into a metaphorical black hole from which we will have no escape.

Look out George Bush & Gordon Brown….we are coming after you!!!!!!!!

Not many people are aware of the fact that the UK Government giveaway in excess of £52,000,000 every year in lost taxes which could be used to improve the quality of life for all its subjects.

You may be wondering how this is possible in this day and age of technology which monitors the income tax returns of the nation as a whole.Unfortunately there is a loophole in the system which allows the loss of such a quantity of money which only the minority of tax evaders exploit to their own benefit. I refer to a situation where it is possible to earn in excess of £200 a day tax-free without detection by the benefits agencies or the tax office.

We have all read in the media about the amount of scrap metal which is being stolen and traded for cash on the so called black-market for vast sums of money. Let me firstly inform the reading public that a black-market doesn’t exist as it is part of normal daily life where scrap metal is collected on a daily basis from homes or business premises and taken to scrapyards and exchanged for cash.

This is not in itself a crime to trade in this manner as in some areas it is classed as a traditional past time by the Police as in the case of The West Midlands.

The beneficiaries of the £52,000,000 giveaway are the following:

The Unemployed, Gas Engineers, Electricians, Plumbers & Builders

It would be wrong of me to accuse all of the trade’s persons aforementioned of tax evasion as I don’t have access to their personal accounts but I am only generalizing in this instance. I apologise unreservedly to those of you who do pay your taxes on the scrap you trade from your daily business as I only wish to highlight what is gained by those who don’t.

Currently there are reported to be 10,000 scrapyards in the UK which allows the following example:

Lets assume for arguments sake that 2,000 traders deliver on any give day 1 ton of light iron to 2,000 scrapyards and are paid £100ton (current rate of exchange). It doesn’t take a mathematician to workout that £200,000 is paid out in cash to the traders, multiply this by 5 (days a week) £1,000,000, multiply this by 52 (weeks of the year) £52,000,000.

In the above example I have used light iron as a tool to highlight what potentially is collected for remuneration as the following higher scrap value of the various metals collected would confuse this issue still further:

Copper £2000 ton, Brass £1900 ton, Stainless Steel £800 ton, Lead £900 ton,

Household Wire £1000 ton, Aluminium £600 ton, Irony/ally £180 ton, Electric Motors £350 ton & Nickel £14,000 ton.

You are probably wondering where the loophole is in the system that allows the £52,000,000 to be lost, I will now explain. As I have already stated the loophole is exploited by The Unemployed, Gas Engineers, Electricians, Plumbers & Builders. So lets take them individually and access how it is done.

The Unemployed

The majority of scrap metal collectors that we see and hear trawling the streets of the UK are unemployed people who go to the Job Centre every two weeks and claim JSA, Income Support, Disability Benefit having done so to supplement their income they jump in a vehicle and collect scrap metal from households and business premises.

Having collected a vehicle full of scrap metal he/she takes it to a scrapyard who accepts a fictitious name, address and a vehicle registration number without being asked for ID in order to be weighed in. After unloading the vehicle he/she receives a weight ticket displaying the weight value and collects the money from the cash office.

Having received the cash for the load the weight ticket is filed in the nearest dustbin and he/she walks away with his/her tax-free cash with no trace of his/her identity. This system of collecting/unloading is employed by him/her as many times a day as possible and up to 6 days a week which can result in earning over £1000 per week in tax free untraceable cash.

Gas Engineers, Electricians, Plumbers & Builders

Scrap metal to these guys is classed as a tax-free bonus at the end of a hard weeks work. The prime example is a customer who has an old copper boiler in the airing cupboard which no longer functions properly. They ring the engineer who calls and gives a price for a new one to be fitted including new pipe work.

He gets the job and calls around a few days later and installs the new one, then he assures the customer that the old one needs to be taken away for one reason or another and disappears with a scrap boiler worth £20 plus the old pipe work but doesn’t include it in the price.

The council workers are the same they too see all copper/brass items as their divine right to a tax free bonus as if you notice they don’t leave taps, pipe work, boilers or immersion heaters when the finish a job on your house. They take them home and save all their ill-gotten gains till the end of the week. When they feel the need they too visit a scrapyard of their choice and offload their scrap items having given a false name and address and collect their tax-free untraceable cash having binned the weight ticket.

£52,000,000 is a conservative estimate, as you then have to take into consideration all the JSA, Income Support, Disability Benefit, Housing Benefit, and Council Tax Benefit that is being paid to the unemployed collectors on a weekly basis.

What is the UK Government doing about it?????????

Basically Bugger All!!!!!!

That is not exactly the truth as in December of 2005 they legislated that it was a criminal offence to carry someone else’s waste (Scrap Metal) without a waste carriers licence.

According to the Environment Agencies Website (Duty of Care) the penalty for carrying someone else’s waste is an unlimited fine & upto 5 Years in Prison if you are caught carrying it without a licence and the same penalty for the provider of the waste.

It also elaborates who needs to have a licence:

Anyone who transports someone else’s waste including people who obtain waste through the course of their normal day to day business affairs (Gas Engineers, Electricians, Plumbers & Builders).

I bought one, but I have to say that it was a complete waste of money as the scrapyards and the householders who supply the scrap metal couldn’t give a toss.

Unfortunately the authorities are under the impression that scrap metal collectors don’t have a brain cell between them and have decided to instigate roadblocks to check the vehicles. What they overlooked was that most people now have a mobile phone and that if they stop one vehicle a call is made and word goes around like wildfire, others avoid the area or stop work altogether.

It has been reported in the local press that the West Midlands Police have apprehended 500 thieves of scrap metal since August 2007 but I have to ask myself what they propose to do with them in court. All the prisons are full, so I suppose a slap on the wrist will be in order and a fine of some description.

Does this serve as a deterrent, I don’t think so as we have already seen what fine could they impose that couldn’t be earned tax free by trading in yet more scrap metal which makes it a vicious circle.

Is there a solution to the problem???????

Of course there is, I have the solution but unfortunately the powers that be are not available to listen (Letters sent to Home Secretary, Environment Secretary & West Midlands Police). They already have the keys in place, they just don’t know how to use them to their advantage and solve the following in one foul swoop:

Scrapyards bought into line

Benefit Fraud

Tax Evasion

Metal Theft

Unlicensed Traders

I think it was the £50,000 I asked for which put them off, but if you look at it as a percentage of the £52,000,000 a year they gain it isn’t a great deal of money.

I hope you find my imput interesting and await any comments you may have