🎩 When Thieves Rob in Broad Daylight
A true story about a scam involving a king, a queen, a prime minister, and an emerging wifi monopoly
So here’s a short and juicy story for you, with lots of twists and turns you won’t see coming…
I sat down at my laptop this morning and opened my email to receive a message from TalkTalk, a random and very crappy wifi Internet provider, informing me that they would be automatically taking money out of my account next week.
There were two problems with this email:
It was 55% more money than the already-overpriced contract I was forced to sign six months ago.
TalkTalk is not my Internet service provider.
So how did this happen?
Well, it all starts with a vampire named Martin Brian Hughes:
Martin’s nickname is “The Bulldog” and he’s the founder of Toscafund Asset Management.
Martin does not work for a living.
Martin does not work for a living in the sense that he does not create any new useable wealth for others.
Instead, Martin takes money from hyper-rich people — he currently manages $5 billion — and uses it to devour companies run by actual working people.
Private equity firms like Toscafund then strip the companies they acquire (firing staff and selling off assets) and load the companies up with debt.
Doing so is wildly profitable —despite not creating any new useable wealth for others, Martin has amassed himself a Smauglike hoard worth around $1 billion.
In March 2021, the Toscafund vulture swooped in and bought TalkTalk for more than $1 billion, delisted it from the London Stock Exchange, and went to work making it absolutely awful.
And the bar was already awfully low — TalkTalk had already allowed a data breach to compromise the personal data of up to 4 million customers and left hundreds of thousands of customers without Internet after a router malware infection. Plus a half-dozen other controversies.
Since buying TalkTalk, Toscafund has purchased at least three other British internet providers, clearly aiming to build a monopoly.
In case you’re wondering how I ended up being an unwilling customer of the price-jacking data-breaching TalkTalk… they purchased a company… that had purchased my Internet provider… at some unknown point in the past few months.
So naturally, I complained
The few remaining British internet providers are all raising rates well beyond inflation, and there’s nothing people can do about it, because British internet contracts include the corporate right to raise your rates without having to tell you by how much, exactly, in advance.
Sounds a lot like banksters and land-lorders and energy monopolies, doesn’t it?
In a righteous and moral society, there would be zero legally binding contracts where one party is legally forced to pay mystery amounts.
Upon receiving my new bill, I tried to contact TalkTalk, and while I’ll spare you the boring details, no talking with a useful human ever took place.
Imagine a hedge maze where the end result is a wall of silence.
That’s TalkTalk’s new “customer service” department.
Should I complain to the government?
I thought about it… but then thought I’d better check first, to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time.
Which brings us to the unbelievably douchily-named Sir Charles William Dunstone.
This knight in rusty armor is the executive chairman of TalkTalk.
The son of a BP executive and educated at posh private schools, Dunstone is a billionaire who made his money through various finance shenanigans, including hiring a convicted fraudster as a business consultant.
Yacht length: 210 feet.
He’s also a director of:
Daily Mail (one of the UK’s largest papers)
HBOS (a holding company for one of the UK’s largest banks), and… wait for it…
A council member of The Prince’s Trust.
That’s right… he works for the wicked Windsor crime family.
So naturally, he’s a winner of the right-wing Daily Telegraph’s Business Person of the Year.
As a cherry on that rotten cake, the Queen knighted him and appointed him Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.
Then Prime Minister David Cameron appointed him to the board of the Royal Museums Greenwich.
Of course, he donates political bribe money to both of the right-ring corporate parties, the Conservatives and Labour.
For fun, he’s a member of the Chipping Norton set, a group of ultra-rich conservative media types, including a bunch who were involved in Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking scandal, and… wait for it… former Prime Minister and current Secretary of State, David Cameron, the same buddy who appointed him to the board of a posh museum.
Clearly, no one in the UK government cares a hoot about Dunstone’s thieving company because the inmates have taken over the asylum.
Notice what has happened here
My Internet service hasn’t changed, and I’ve lost any semblance of customer service, yet now my wife and I must earn an extra 289.36 post-tax dollars per year, or make a cut to our family’s wellbeing somewhere else.
I have zero recourse.
I have taxation and monopolization, but no representation.
This is what happens when evil elites take over society.
It’s the same with all the parasite industries — land-lorders, banksters, and shareholders add ZERO new usable value to your life, but they extract compounding gains at the cost of our compounding hardship.
This parasite anti-economy is rapidly gaining ground, devouring more and more of the world around you.
Capitalism is just another name for colonization, and you will be colonized.
When they own all the assets, you will be their corporate slaves.
Sadly, 99% of people are deeply invested in this corrupt system via their 401ks, RRSPs, ISAs, mutual funds, index funds, and retirement plans.
They’re silently benefiting from the very system that will leave us all in chains.
Welcome, dear friends, to the parasite anti-economy.
Watch Jared A. Brock’s documentaries about slavery and trafficking and read his myth-busting biography about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.