How this socio-economic model is changing things for the worse in 3,500 ways a year
This morning I kicked things off with yet another plea to re-examine the model of economics and fiscal management that we have. I tried an experiment yesterday that I’ve been thinking about doing for weeks, but never found the time. Now I think it’s time the important overtook the urgent for once.
The ultra-free, bank-driven, credit-fuelled globalist model we work with at the moment will do far more in the longer term than simply saddle us with an unreal and unimaginable debt. It will eat into the fabric, behavioural mores and grossly skewed inequality now present in our culture until – before anyone has really grasped what’s going on – there will be nothing genuinely civilised left. Perfect equality is a Utopian dream that always (without exception) produces a dystopia of control freaks….and worse inequality than one started with. But the same is also proving to be true of ‘perfect’ free markets: you will never get this, because markets are merely conglomerations of imperfect human beings.
Faith is fine up to a point, but absolute belief gave us the Spanish Inquisition, Communism and Islamism. It is currently giving us Germany’s answer to the Iron Lady, the Leaden Woman Angela Merkel. Absolute belief in herself and the way to restore EU prosperity will destroy the EU (big tick) but also take the rest of us with it….just as neocon global mercantilism will destroy civilisation if allowed to continue upon its inexorable mission to create tiny, permanent, and monopolistic elites.
But does this really matter for the survival of things beyond Mammon? Is there any way we can measure the effect? Well, one way is to use your eyes; but if one does that nowadays, an army of screaming banshees will tell a person that they’re driven by negativism, racism, sample of one, socialism, or any other bollocks they can think of in place of an argument.
So my idea was this: to take a mid-to-upmarket newspaper at random, and look for things traceable back to our economic system and its deleterious fiscal/financial effects. I chose The Times for this – because it was about to be thrown away – and sat on my exercise bike at the gym to go through it. This are the items I picked out:
1. Policemen getting second jobs because they can’t survive on frozen salaries. (The number doing so, following an FOI enquiry, has been found to be treble what it was just three years ago.)
2. Cameron calling for a football summit about racism, bad behaviour and on-pitch violence. While off-pitch violence has improved, since the Premier League was launched and foreign players imported in large numbers, onfield indiscipline has grown dramatically. A large part of this must be down to the pressure to perform, to get the result at all costs…to chop a player down if necessary rather than concede that vital goal.
3. Staying with Murdoch, while Sunday’s arrest of various journalists has been greeted by howls of outrage from the hacketariat, the power to ruin lives brings with it serious reponsibilities. It is quite clear – across the piece of what was once Fleet Street – that the profit/monopoly motive has ruined ethics among tabloid (and many other) forms of journalism. “Get the story at all costs” is a direct reflection of devil-take-the-hindmost economics – where competition becomes a euphemism for cheating.
4. Huge amounts of damage to property in Athens, and the development of anarchists demonstrating side by side with ordinary people sick to death of being the subject of Berlin’s mad salvation tableau. Nobody, but nobody, believes the Greeks can repay the debt and stay in the euro. Only Merkel’s conversion via hubby to neocon drivel – and the antics of its greatest supporters, the banking firms – have exacerbated this situation to a point where northern and French Europe do not have a moral leg to stand on.
5. A museum of Wedgewood treasures donated by the Wedgewood family is to close, and by law these revert to the Wedgewood pension fund….which, thanks to banker madness, has a huge deficit. So they will have to be auctioned off…probably to the private collections of odious little men like Lloyd Blankfein.
6. Allah will topple Assad say Syria’s Islamists. The choice in that country is not to go with the lesser evil, because personally in the evil stakes I think Assad and Islamism are close to being equal first. And of course, neocon capitalism did not create Islamism: that bizarre creed is merely the twisted output of some very sick men here and there. But a hatred of Western exploitation in the Arab world has drawn millions more to the Islamist banner than would normally have been there. The same is true of Islamist bombers in Britain: the vast majority are from poorly-educated and unemployed backgrounds – easily persuaded that the Infidel is to blame for their plight. The ‘Arab Spring’ as the bonkers Left called it a year ago is in fact the coming Fundamentalist Ice Age.
7. US Presidential Party politics have for decades been dominated by monied lobbying, media-baron support, and business interests generally. The current opposition in the US to the most ineffectual President since Gerald Ford is Mitt Romney, a multi-millionaire who wants, through his business contacts and interest-lobby supporters, to buy the White House on behalf of an Establishment elite that thinks the current arrangement of wealth in the America is just dandy….except that not enough of it has spurted upwards just yet. He will then, once elected, be unable to ignore their greedy demands. Neocon economics has concentrated the megabucks money into a small and politically influential elite controlling the finance, running and media coverage of the country’s gdp.
8. GPs in the UK are being bribed influenced to favour some private hospitals over others when referring patients opting to go private. The treatment of private and NHS patients in this country should be decided by clinical excellence alone…but this is merely a foretaste of what we will get if healthcare is completely privatised here. There is no place for – indeed, a brazen denial of – the benefits of mutual company models by the neocons.
9. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s new reseach study shows that private sector companies are planning to cut jobs this quarter at the fastest rate since the height of post-Lehman panic in 2009. The demands of bourses and remote shareholders come before both employees and R&D – because they will never give any company a ‘profits holiday’: they want it in full, and they want it now. (The privately-run and controlled BBH advertising agency opted instead last year to make everyone from top to bottom take a pay cut. Which is better for society: people in work earning a little less, or more idle hands on the scrap-heap of Milt Friedman’s Breakers Yard?)
10. The five big banks missed their small-business lending targets by £1bn last year. At Barclays – which charges out smaller business loans at twice the rate of Big-Fish companies like them – the CEO Bob Diamond is set to pocket a £3m bonus. Only enormous pressure stopped Stephen Hester of RBS from taking £1m in bonuses, despite being the worst offender when it came to small business lending….and costing the taxpayer another £38bn in structural reorganisations. There is little or no place in the neocon economic model for the SME sector: the obvious end result of such thinking seems to pass most fans of the system by – but the banks demonstrate their bias in every last thing they provide and do.
I got up to ten and then stopped, but I was only only two-thirds of the way through the paper. However, even if this was yesterday’s total, it means that over 3,500 of these effects are being reported every year. Some reporting will criticise these symptoms and effects, and some will…well, simply record them. And make more and more undiscerning readers feel that they’re normal.
Now I don’t doubt that some of these situations would pertain with or without a hollow economic model based on entirely disproved concepts of socially irresponsible wealth-creation. And equally, there are many cultural influences created by the Miliband of Hope and the Mad Hatties of an even worse nature than free-market Reaganomics: welfare dependancy, bad social science, denial of anthropology, low self-esteem, a false sense of entitlement and so forth. But what’s clear to me is that not only is our capitalist model making matters worse, it has reached the stage where it needs saving from itself. Even more precisely, it needs to be saved from its fanatical High Priests.
You might disagree with the starkness of that view, but think on this: human history is one of lurching from one extreme to another. Just as 1970s Union idiocy eventually brought us the worst excesses of Thatcherism, so now monetarist inflexibility could easily bring us the as yet unknown depths of Harmanite Bedlam. In the Athens debt context, for example, I was amused to hear the BBC wittering on about Greece’s Far Right – a splintered farrago of loons currently polling 25% of the Left there. Homo sapiens lurches from one direction to another…..not, following final disaster, further off into the same direction. Action tends to evoke reaction.
The Slog 