Lies Are Now Told Without Moving Lips

It can seem we have no intelligent commentary on the UK economy. The story we are plied with seems to be:
the British economy makes an extraordinarily complicated picture. We have an economy which is either flatlining or going into an unprecedented triple dip, but is rapidly growing jobs (despite 30,000 government jobs going a month); we have brutal cuts in government spending, while government spending continues to rise; we have a country where things feel as if they’ve been bad for a long while, and yet on the figures, most of the hard times are still ahead. You’d think the banks had been thrown a few peanuts rather than £120K per household. Productivity, despite all the ‘thrusting’ private-sector created jobs, is down 15% on where it would have been on pre-2008 trend. We will soon have less crime because we got rid of 28,000 police staff and now have rank amateurs setting police budgets.

I salute the squadrons of flying British pork off to maintain Empire as they soar over the Pennines, counting them all out and counting them all back!

For similar on the US propaganda front see:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/new-york-times-article-tells-big-lies-on-impact-of-fiscal-cliff-deal-on-rich-v-ordinary-americans.html#PvSwVPe1LtHZ3Dy4.99

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The Greek Solution Isn’t (it is quantitative shysterism)

The real deadline in Greek debt is this afternoon when a private organisation, largely of banksters, decides whether insurance on this debt (collateral dervative swaps) has been trigger by the so-called credit event.  A number of vulture funds have bought Greek bonds very cheap in the hope of being either to cash in on the insurance or sue the Greek Government for the full price.  So the matter isn’t settled.  Argentina defaulted in 2002 and is still facing court action – a New York court has just ruled against a similar settlement by them.

The banks have sold us generally useless PPI that wouldn’t pay out anyway to people who needed it, we have ‘whiplash’ and other dodgy insurance claims putting our premiums up in the increasing compensation culture and all kinds of finance supposedly guaranteed by derivatives when it isn’t.  This Greek swap does mean some private interests have lost money, but the bonds in question were often held by banks, pension funds and such oddities at the French Post Office.  If the muck was ever really insured the insurer should pay – and the real insurer is us and we are paying by shifting it to public sector (i.e. taxpayer) debt.  All this quantitative shysterism is based on issuing insurance in order to take the fees involved, knowing the ultimate insurer (us) gave no permission.  I’d say this is the equivalent of TWOC or joy riding without a car and people should be going to jail.  There is no need for an intent to permanently deprive (though we have been) – insurance has been sold without there ever being any collateral to pay out, and guilty knowledge of who would have to pay out.  Our money was used (including our future money) to make bets until the point no wins were there to be trousered.

The quantitative shysters are borrowing money from us to make the same bets all over again.  The are shysters because we never get to know what bets they placed, who got paid out and where any of the money is.  Quantitative seems to fit because their excuses are expressed in complicated numbers that actually preclude us knowing the money trail.

Goldman Sachs did the quantitative shystering that hid real Greek debt in foreign currency exchange dealing.  They must have known what they were doing.  And where else has this process taken place?  What is the state of real value of any bonds sold under CDS insurance – the same as the 20 cents on the dollar Greek muck?  This even extends to stuff like student loans (thought to be 20% in default in the US) – loans dependent on future earnings in economies getting crappier.  These are about the same  in total as the sub-prime exposures allegedly behind 2008.

Greece is a pimple in current liabilities.  Even if it has been squeezed, expect an outbreak of acne.  Of CDS is triggered this afternoon, will it be just for the amount of bonds left outside the ‘settlement’ (mostly held under British Law), or have the hedge funds been in multi insuring for a much bigger sum through naked CDS and who might have been dumb enough to sell this for a few quid knowing the bill would be footed by taxpayers?

No solution has been attempted because there is no police investigation into how much money was taken and where that is.  The thieves not only don’t face criminal liability – they have also been in the position, through insider knowledge, to lay bets on the collapse they have caused.  It’s like a burglar being able not only to ransack your house, but also claim the insurance payout.  The Keiser Report may have elements of Radio Moscow about it, but I’m afraid it leaves BBC (Bimbo Broadcasting Corp) dead in the water on what goes on.

When you consider what must now be disclosed to the defence in criminal trials, the lack of disclosure required of banks, hedge funds and the rest so we can defend ourselves against them is Soviet.

 

 

 

Tour de Farce

In the last quarter of my life, I just hope the world is really changing.  The promises of childhood seem largely broken, and the world run by criminal bankers and some ‘mechanism’ like Michael Betancourt‘s ‘agnotologic capitalism and the aura of the digital’.  This latter phrase means something like ‘lying spin and insider trading’ to me.  Steve Bennett at thinblueline is on thew case to some fair degree in his book ‘Crime of the Century’.  Terms like ‘agnotologic’ pass most of us by and even as an academic I’m tired of such ways of speaking.  Honesty has rarely (if ever) been the real best policy; yet over my lifetime we have moved further and further away from any possibility of trying to live with the truth, or at least what we might call a ‘communicative’ rather than ‘systemic’ rationality (terms from Jurgen Habermas).  We might be able to live very different lives  if we could recognize and speak with honesty, rather than function through ‘manners’ (I have Norbert Elias in mind here).

One doesn’t have to read Betancourt, Habermas and Elias, or use the kind of language in the paragraph above to understand something is very rotten in the State of Denmark.  Indeed, the academic codes involved in citation do more harm than good these days.  Often, the real code is merely a statement that the writer is educated enough to be harmless, that she has read learned tosh and discovered how to reformulate it in the farcical text engine of small-world academic thieving.  I’m all for a better read world, but we have to shape up and remember a quarter of our people (in countries where education is free and compulsory) can’t read and write well enough to fill in forms.  Insisting on high, unachievable literacy and numeracy as a democratic solution to anything is fatuous, as is dropping standards to pretend we have a properly educated population.  Most people are not fitted to do well in the schooling we provide and pretty much insist on.

I wonder whether schooling could be redefined to ensure a greater recognition that human life is essentially repetitive, and that most of what we think has been thought before, recorded and yet remains well hidden to most individuals undergoing schooling.  Most of us will only learn in the very limited and selfish sense , and only a tiny part of this will be connected with what might be available to us all if education was not so entangled with the freakish madness of our lack of grip on human nature and our enslavement in pretension.   Greek and other traditions of thinking discovered ages back that argument does not produce answers, but rather lots of arguments that need to be worked on.  Pyrrho was a key figure in this kind of skepticism.  I can safely ask most audiences if they have heard of him, safe in the knowledge I could tell them anything I don’t know about him as though expert in the field!

To understand what I’m trying to put forward, I wouldn’t ask people to read up on ancient philosophers.  We have to move away from idiot notions of the philosophers’ stone, or stuff Indiana Jones might unearth.  The place to start is probably with arguments that clash with cosy common sense in our culture.  The Keiser Report is an example I use.  All episodes can be found at –  http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/ – and it is weird enough to generate other issues about argument that need to be closer to the fore.   One might say the broad message, often shouted by Keiser as though he is mad, is that terrorist bankers have taken over the world and are ass big a threat to us now as when they were funding Nazi Germany to force war upon us for their profit.  These days, they destabilize and manipulate markets through war and super-algorithms.  Goldman-Sachs and JP Thompson replace the term ‘global Jewish finance’.  The big question that should develop in watching alternative propaganda like Max Keiser, or any deep academic reading concerns why we have so little of any of the alternatives in our mainstream.  I wonder, as an academic taken to the road, why I find almost no argument in our mainstream media at all, let alone anything of interest.