G7 Meet To Quell Fears

We know S & P have downgraded the US to AA+.  This is a big deal for not very complex reasons far too hard for our highly schooled populace to understand.  The US has been bankrupted before by war (Vietnam), refusing to pay Britain £300 million in gold under Nixon (France got it’s gold) when we worried what might happen to the USD.  If the dollar collapses now, we lose the world’d reserve currency and the Yanks lose what has effectively been a free loan from the rest of the world.  The last country put in this position, more or less, was Nazi Germany, which had borrowed its way to re-armament and full employment.

The price of fish question is what the most heavily armed country in the world will do if we pull the plug on its finances.  In years gone by, Britain performed the US role and we have shrunk our military to an irrelevance.  The US could do the same and go to an insular self-sufficiency (protectionism).  The USA is still, whatever happens, a very rich country in terms of agriculture, natural resources and ability.  Only morons could screw it up – but they have plenty of them and the Tea Party.  Bachman sounds enough like Batman for most Republicans to vote for her and I could see her going down the war route.  Who with I’m not sure, but Iran is favourite.  They have her surrounded and under siege – including sanctions on her oil.

While we might see problems in credit because the US Treasury Bond is the root of much of it in the banking system, the worst case is that liquidity will dry up and no one will be able to pay financial bills, margin accounts and so on – this will lead to shares being sold in fire sale conditions and we’ll slump.  If I could wish it so, along with a world-wide revolt against the rich, I would.  The question, sadly, is what interests might want a slump and depression and whether they have been taking positions to benefit from such.  I believe there is a grouping who want to buy up the world on the cheap.  They are as dangerous as any Nazis, fascists and personality-cult communists we have ever seen (all these forms shared the millennial ‘wonder leader will lead us to heaven’ lunacy).  I’m not sure who they are and have no inside information on them.

G7 has no idea of what is going on.  The people there are so far removed from our interests (in the sense of me an my mates down the pub or you and yours) that they couldn’t give a damn – they know we are worthless unless we riot.  The people there would struggle to pass any science A levels and yet pose as intellectual worthies who understand economics and the ‘real world’ – yet would not last long in working communities or fare well in stuff like Army Officer testing if stripped of their ‘identity’.  History, away from hagiography, shows most of these votaries to be useless, self-interested turds (Lloyd George, Teddy Roosevelt, Kinnoch), sociopaths (Hitler, Genghis, Stalin, Mao) or narcissist lunatics (Churchill, Blair, Brown, Thatcher, Cameron, Clinton) and not people safe to leave your daughters with.  So don’t expect anything from them.

The question is whether the hidden groups who want depression and have already bet on it are smarter than G7 types – my guess is this is a non-starter at Ladbrookes.  The standard bets on a crash are in place – countries have been buying and hoarding gold (China, India) and the price per ounce along with silver is way up, land is being bought (often with Enclosure tactics to rid it of economically under-productive people) along with food production and the public sector is under threat of being sold off (suggesting some bastards have been planning to buy it – a strange position for thrusting capitalists to want to take until you look at the oligarchies running the US health care system at vast expense.

The notion of Britain as a safe have because we have done the austerity thing being plied by Vince Cable (once a man of integrity) is bull.  Britain is liable to domino collapse if other countries fail – our banking snouts are in the troughs of debt in Greece, Ireland, the USA, Italy and more – all thanks to pass-the -parcel techniques of re-insurance that were once just a bet with our money we didn’t know about.

Real answers to this problem world-wide include getting rid of the debts through jubilee and redistributing wealth on a large scale so we can invest in self-sustaining forms of work and a guaranteed quality of life.  G7 won’t do any of this.  I’d just ask if you have thought that these grand bodies seem to want us to live in fear.  If we don’t do austerity, then our country will crash.  If we don’t do what the boss says the company will crash.  If we don’t understand these special people need 1000 times more money to motivate them than the rest of us …  we’ve been had.

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What are our politicians really like?

We had an expenses scandal in the UK that led to a few scapegoats being offered up for imprisonment or shame.  It blew over pretty quickly and we really missed the point.  They were nearly all at it and couldn’t blow the whistle – this was done for money.  I know more about Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, who dominated their politics from 1994, than any British politicians. He has clearly been a disaster as a national leader.

The lurid saga of his “Bunga Bunga” sex parties has almost been written off in our broadcast media, though it involved sex with a minor.  The Italians admire an older guy who can still keep it up.  Blair was cosy with him before becoming a bag man for JP Morgan (whatever).  He has been tried more than a dozen times for fraud, false accounting or bribery. His defenders claim that he has never been convicted, but this is untrue. Several cases have seen convictions, only for them to be set aside because the convoluted proceedings led to trials being timed out by a statute of limitations. Mr Berlusconi himself changed the law for this purpose, something wider in western politics than we have recognised.

I’m not at all convinced that politics is any cleaner across Europe. The dodgy sex and the dubious business connections seem disastrous almost everywhere.  Berlusconi had total disregard for the economic condition of his country and this is endemic now in western politics.  Italy is a country in dire straits – but whither the rest of us?  It’s had tight fiscal policy and has so far escaped the markets’ wrath. Italy avoided a housing bubble; its banks did not go bust. Employment held up: the unemployment rate is 8%, compared with over 20% in Spain. The budget deficit in 2011 will be 4% of GDP, against 6% in France.  But these numbers are deceptive.  When Europe’s economies shrink, Italy’s shrinks more; when they grow, it grows less. Only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in the decade to 2010. In fact GDP per head in Italy actually fell. The public debt is still 120% of GDP, the rich world’s third-biggest. This is all the more worrying given the rapid ageing of Italy’s population.

As in the UK, low average unemployment disguises some sharp variations. A quarter of young people—far more in parts of the depressed south—are jobless. The female-participation rate in the workforce is 46%, the lowest in western Europe. A mix of low productivity and high wages is eroding competitiveness: whereas productivity rose by a fifth in America and a tenth in Britain in the decade to 2010, in Italy it fell by 5%. Italy comes 80th in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” index, below Belarus and Mongolia, and 48th in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings, behind Indonesia and Barbados.  It has a two-tier labour market with protected insiders and exposed outsiders, and too few big firms.  Young people are leaving, infrastructure is getting shabbier, public services are stretched, the environment is suffering and real incomes are at best stagnant. Few Europeans despise their pampered politicians as much as Italians do and their elite is old.

Everywhere the claim that his kind of business leader is essential to the changes we need has been hot air. The euro crisis is forcing Greece, Portugal and Spain to push through huge reforms in the teeth of popular protest. Standard economics will claim Italy needs to do the same.

In fact we all end up ‘needing the same’ as the books unravel and we discover what has been ‘off balance sheet’.  The question is whether we now have any politicians who are or could act in our interests because none of them appear to be asking any real questions about what is going on.  The world is mad.  Houses were built in droves in Ireland for no one to live in.  The Italians hosted an obvious crook.  We are at war in countries we know nothing about, including (for the UK) a large set of rocks not fit for sheep.  1984 can’t match the lunacy.

The ‘shape’ that fits much of this well is that of puppet governments, with strings pulled by the Bilderburgers – certainly some dark politics.  Do our politicians know or are they jobsworth dupes worried about ‘mortgage payments’ and their own libido?  Do we all somehow know whatever this is about, realise there is nothing to do but play the game with heads down?  If it is like this how could we fight it and win?

We have failed over millennia with argument – corruption is as endemic as Plato predicted.  In public argument, however crap the media is, the cause is lost because most can’t grasp argument and we have almost no proper idea of disinterestedness – a poor word as it has nothing to do with lack of passion.  In the UK, our politicians couldn’t even report the dismal and petty corruption around themselves – but more importantly commissioned no work to look into why and what this meant about them.

Instead of work like this we get polls of what we generally think about our public figures, which only tell us how we answer poll questions.  It would matter if we actually knew our politicians, but we don’t.  I believe they are chancers with no moral fibre, but that hardly separates them from the rest of us except in degree.  Their morals and ethics are those of lawyers, so more or less nonexistent.

What we want is a system that works that we hardly notice and this is where we have gone wrong.  We are hence again on the path to war and the end of the hopes of democracy.  Most of us don’t even know the famed Athenian Democracy was always at war, committed genocides and spun fine words.  No change then?

The Greeks are now ‘indignant’ and this may be where the hope of a real politics lies.  The idiot view I hear in little Britain is they have somehow been profligate and brought their current position on themselves.  Instead, what happens there will come to us all, before whatever war is being planned for beyond the professional ones being fought that no one fears their own being drafted into.

I was born, like our politicians, after the second war to end all wars.  These were both imperialist wars about parts of the world where big profits could be made.  My country has never been at peace and is now bombing part of the world it planned to take over with the French in 1956.  We killed at least 28,000 Indonesian combatants in a war most of my fellows don’t know happened and I meet no one who knows how many Iraqis have been killed and maimed.

I expect the shift to the really revolting war to be heralded by some tub-thumping by the likes of Cameron or whoever the ‘Blair in place’ is at the time.  Our politicians won’t resist as they failed to do over Iraq.  All I know about what our politicians are like is that they aren’t fit people for office because they preside over this inevitable drift to war.

When it comes to high wage high productivity jive, think of someone like me with years of varied experience and a couple of others with similar abilities in university teaching.  Three of us could teach a large number of students across, say, a business studies course.  If we paid ourselves £100K a year, we’d be ‘making’ £600K a year in profit from fees from only 100 students, less expenses.  Only red tape stops us doing this.  And these days one can think of a home and electronic based service, with students doing sports and social stuff more or less organised themselves.  It would be a bit like on-line banking.  No rocket science – but it ain’t happening.  Of course, most of the current non teaching jobs would go.  The truth is we nearly all rely on inefficiency and most of the jobs we do are already redundant.  I know of no financial services that are really needed either.

Our politicians never speak of any of this.  What sort of people are they?  I have no wish to make any money from teaching.  It saddens me to play any role in taking hard earned money off those who pass through my ‘care’.  I would be something other than a functionary.  I would teach other than the road to serfdom and this is all politicians offer.  We could already have a university of the air, free to all.  Instead, ejukation is just part of the road you must pay for to be a better class of serf to those who take it on themselves to rent us the Earth.  They have been tribal, feudal, capitalist and communist.  Politicians – we know them in history like an Undead.  They expect me to teach their history.  All that’s left of me is auto da fe – fuck them all.  I have waited in vain for the return of language and must hunt them on my own.  We need another kind of war.  They are already winning, destroying easy availability of jobs where some decent work will do.  Now you must pledge your soul.