There are very clear signals that the 3% are about to put their designs on your deposits and savings into practice. Clandestine unofficial limits on bank withdrawals already apply across Europe, and guarantees on your deposits are to be dumped . The Greek template is being rolled out. The global heist is under way. Enforced caveat emptor is in play: those who demand more and more and more look forward with confidence to their final victory….and the muddled ideas of contemporary LibLeft activists unwittingly aid in the process. But there are still grounds for optimism.
It seems there are going to be quite a few personnel changes among the senior echelons of Asia’s banks over the next few months. The general conclusion of the business media, however, is that this “will not result in any change in policy”.
I’ve no idea what ‘no change in policy’ means, because I do not discern any policy that is anything beyond consistently inconsistent with the “principles” of neoliberal monetarist economics.
Neoliberal is supposed to mean the removal of unnecessary regulation and State ownership of business, allowing natural markets to decide and flourish in that context.
In fact, the price of money is rigged regulated centrally throughout the world, and the cost of capital has been manipulated by various brands of QE. Commodity and stock markets are utterly unnatural to the up or downside depending on what best suits the 3%, and currency valuations have little or no correlation with the economies of the sovereign States involved: they are merely weapons in the war that is mercantile globalism.
Real markets are not flourishing, they are tentative bordering on nervous. They have been destroyed by financialisation, insider trading and above all, speed of light algorhythmic bots with which no personal investor can hope to compete.
Monetarist means, at its core, sound financial management, avoidance of sovereign debt, keeping a close weather eye on the money supply, and a preference for austerity over Keynsian expansionism.
The Orwellian difference between that aim and the reality we’re living through is of such a distance, Evil Knievel would never have tried to leap it. The world of sovereign States is almost without exception in a level of debt that would be unsustainable with normalised interest rates. In the US, the deficit rises every year, nearly bringing State activity to a standstill; in the UK, the national debt has doubled in seven years.
Austerity has, in turn, failed throughout the EU. So between the borrowing and not borrowing thing with monetarism, it feels like a cul de sac. Especially as wealth is very clearly not trickling down. And as for the money supply, what use are M1, M2 and M3 when money is being created from zero real wealth increases every second of every working day?
This isn’t economics, it’s deception on a globally industrial scale. It isn’t global in that it benefits less than 3 people in a hundred; and it isn’t capitalism because first, you can’t get interest on your capital, and second, the obvious aim of every multinational company is the achievement of monopoly by fair means or foul.
Across the West, throughout Africa and over vast areas of Asia and South America, such wealth as the ordinary citizen had has been stolen in myriad ways.
Welfare and minimum wage rights have been lost. Cheap rental housing has been sold. Social weal supply has been privatised. State Pensions have been embezzled without compensation. Corporate pension funds have been raided to boost shareholder dividends. Mature citizen interest on savings has been commandeered to save a depraved banking system. Free Higher Education to benefit social mobility and invest in sovereign workforces has been removed and handed to private concerns motivated only by short term profit. Small business has been sacrificed on the altar of bloated bureaucracies and multinational lobbying. Tax monies have been wasted on Grand Designs and ego projects. Manufactured energy wars have emptied Treasuries.
The next stage is about to begin. Not content with making life savings the victim of hidden inflation and Zirp, the next stage is to change bailout into bailin. And so the Alchemy will continue…..demanding you sell your house to fund the aged care of your parents, foreclosing on your mortgage when multinational tax evasion forces local government to up your office rents and taxes, and removing your right to help with legal fees, the better to defend yourself against such pillage.
The last item above is but one symptom of how the Rule of Law is being rapidly eroded, and Equality before the Law already a distant memory. Although the emphasis of power differs by nation, one by one all the unelected élites have been placed above the law.
Corrupt police find themselves Not Guilty in kangaroo courts. Incompetent military strategists are never brought to book. Crooked bankers do not go to jail, they “set a sum aside”. Wasteful and bought bureaucrats are retired on full pension. Corporate pension pilferers have nothing to fear but their knighthoods. The senior lieutenants of media moguls receive obscenely light sentences or get acquitted. Judicial perverts slap 20-year gagging orders on the proof of their base desires. Government ministers are punished for lying to Parliament with bigger and bigger Cabinet portfolios. And of course, those same-gender bedfellows – the security services and the internet ISPs – enjoy a mutual interdependence of such power, their crimes rarely if ever come to light.
Almost all of this happened because, over a period spanning maybe seventy years, a loosely affiliated and completely unelected range of élites worked assiduously to create a Dictatorship of the Oligarchy that stood Marx on his head….and fooled billions of people into believing that their homeland was still a liberal democratic State.
There have been many concerted conspiracies along the way, but the course of history itself was not a fully worked-out Elders of something or other Big Plan. Regardless of what dialectical analysts think, events simply do not unfold like that: multi-generationally ordained history is bunk. In retrospect, I would argue that what we have seen is the rise and rise of power élites who, to put it bluntly, simply share the same selfish desires and egomanic tendencies. They tend, therefore, to work for the same ends.
I think historians and political analysts could argue forever and a day about how the process began – and when. For me, the best one can ever do from this distance is point to pivotal events along the way. The one that still stands out for me is November 22nd 1963, when a truculent and compassionate President was murdered in public, following which a Congressional Commission was ordered to say what a few privileged power brokers wanted the public to hear.
Another big step involved the lies and skullduggery perpetrated by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in relation to the invasion of Iraq: technical assault on an Attorney General, lying to the Commons, and the mysterious death of an anti-Bush Jr whistleblower inside the UK Civil Service.
The EU years between 2010 and 2013 were, I think, another swing of the pendulum towards dictatorship. Greece was beaten to death and Cyprus robbed blind because a guilty Athenian clique and a Wall Street banking firm deliberately misled Brussels to make money; bondholders in EU debt were subordinated to save the ECB’s skin; and genuine default in Spain was illegally denied using a musical-chairs-money fraud steered by the people round Draghi.
The same period in Britain was also a turning point: faced with blatant evidence of withholding incriminating evidence of his corrupt relationship with Newscorp over the BSkyB deal, Jeremy Hunt stood up in the Commons and claimed “I have done nothing wrong”. Not only did he get away with it, he was promoted to the position of Health Secretary.
During a conversation with Oliver Letwin in 2009, I offered the opinion that the Rule of Law was being destroyed in favour of corporate desires, and internet abuse of the Data Protection laws by ISPs was both rife and obvious. He smiled indulgently while delivering a lecture on Britain “being open for business” and added, “Look Mr Ward, you use Google search services for free. You can hardly expect the company to work for nothing, can you?” It was one of the rare moments in a long and gobby life when I was struck dumb by the amorality of the reply. (Ollie went on to aver that “the British people will never become dangerously angry about membership of the European Union”).
In the last fortnight, we have seen what I suspect is the start of the next stage in the Anti-RobinHood approach to wealth distribution. Alerted to the existence of an ECB answer to MEP questions about EU policy on bank deposit guarantees, I posted to ask if DraghiBank was recommending that the €100,000 protection plan be dumped. Three days later, various media sites declared the intention to do just that.
The following Monday, I went into my local French bank to withdraw cash funds from the ATM. I asked for €600 and was bluntly told I could have 400. The debit card I used was that of a British Bank. Not only is the bank based outside the eurozone, I have the right to withdraw funds at any time up to a figure very much in excess of what I wanted. I took the sum on offer, and used my French debit card to top up the amount. I was told that my withdrawal limit on that one had been halved from €300 to €150.
“Shifty” would I think sum up the performance of the branch manager when I tackled him about it. He is an arrogant idiot anyway (the two features are nearly always joined at the hip) but his blithe response was “I cannot comment on the arrangements you have with your UK bank” and “We always inform customers when limits are either lowered or raised”. They were statements not answers, and made no attempt to address the questions I asked – why is a distributor bank interfering with my supplier bank? And why did you not inform me of the limit reduction?
The case continues, as they say. I’ve chucked a grenade at the British bank concerned. But my point remains the same: the general response of élites these days – right across the piece – is an infuriating mélange of “how dare you accuse us!”, obfuscation, denial and clandestine preparation for something even worse.
A key question to direct at this point is this: why is citizen reaction and opposition to being boiled alive one degree at a time so muted….given that, allegedly, we are a lot brighter than the average lobster?
There seem to me to be eight major factors involved in the docility of the general population; doubtless you have more from your own observations of the last thirty years:
- The Western mainstream voters – family rearers – are too busy trying to make ends meet in a deregulated employment market, but still have their wallets largely intact. They have fractious children, homes to maintain, gardens to work on, and mindless telly to get them through the evening. To paraphrase Timothy Leary, it’s a case of “Turn on, drop off and cop out”.
- Those left desperate by austerity, robotisation and welfare cuts are sick and tired of trying, and apathetic towards a political class they know is no longer there to help them. They are also, in some cases, not very bright, frequently drunk and usually disorganised. (The pattern of drink abuse today is 40+, but still primarily downmarket.)
- Ideology on the Left insists that the only thing on offer to the Resistance is purist socialism opportunistically packaged up with minority politics and narcissistic identity obsession. As part of this, it asserts that our problems are wholly driven by capitalism’s inner contradictions, innate greed and racist mysoginy. The stratae of society that simply don’t go along with that – young families in work and older traditionalists – shy away from pc and cloth cap syntax. It is a very dim elector indeed who thinks the answer to failed neoliberal greed is failed State collectivism. That may sound like an assertive truism, but even a cursory glance at the archetypal Leftist/Feminist/IDpol behaviour on Twitter proves the statement beyond any reasonable doubt.
- There is a professional class immediately below the élites that collaborates with the Dictatorship of Mammon because they either believe the tosh the 3% put out, and/or can see from a mile off that the services they provide – health, legal advice, accountancy, investment, image management, credit, policing, surveillance, bureaucracy, and security – are certain to benefit hugely from such social treachery.
- Just below them are the large connurbation, property-rich conformist Smugistas who would regard most of the prose here as swivel-eyed conspiracy paranoia. Sad to relate, most of them are of my generation and social class; it will suffice to say in addition that they swallow the government line of the day lock, stock and barrel….including all the bent data available to support their denial. Even more sad is how the antics of the Labour and Democratic Parties feed such naïve belief systems admirably.
- A massive shift in the nature of Western education systems is unquestionably at the heart of the social obedience (bordering on Huxleyesque Soma dosage) that has typified the limp acceptance of Thought Correction in the US, UK, Germany and now even Canada. The bureaucratic hand applied to educational practice is as cold and cadaverous a grip as one could possibly imagine. The discouragement of independent, personal critique in favour of manipulated targets and narrow study is one of the great abominations of our age. Equally bad has been the neglect of history, social anthropology, empiricism and linguistics…..subjects that underpinned every civilisation created by Homo sapiens.
- Media owners have capitalised on the dilution of compassion, discernment and considered thought that robotic education brought. Equally, concentration of such ownership – and it really is now at a frightening level – has only exacerbated the ideological opposites under which we all toil. Be it the Guardian and New York Times on one side, or Fox News and the Telegraph group on the other, media centres on and offline have become so many Izvestias claiming absolute Truth for their side plus condemnation of all dissent. Such diametrics are the stuff of fascism in all its many forms.
- There can be little doubt that discord is being sown via the use of what Lenin called “useful idiots”. For unelected oligarchies, discord is good: those we divide, we most assuredly conquer. One suspects that this motive drives International Man of Megalomania George Soros to put money behind every last unnatural belief system he can find: his aim appears to be an equalisation of opposing cultural armies in every Nation State – in order to maximise division, and pave the way for global corporate dictatorship. The man’s innate disdain for independent and individual human intelligence is evident in every brainlessly dissonant slogan he supports: we are hateful, let’s say #LoveNotHate; we hate Whites, let’s say #BlackLivesMatter; we hate strong national identities, let’s say #Strongertogether; we hate objectivity, let’s say #ThinkCriticallyAndDemandEvidence; we want conflict, let’s say #ReligionofPeace; we hate liberty, let’s say #BoycottHate. It is all too redolent of the Nazis’ Arbeit macht Frei….an obscene distortion of the nationalist work ethic with which he – as a Jew in Warsaw – collaborated during the Second World War. It is the nihilistic creation of all things equal and opposite.
Now you could be forgiven for seeing this post as The Slog in Cassandra mode, but bear with me: for like all groups where the driver is psychopathy, we can observe two things. First, the all-consuming ego of such people makes any long-term level of cooperation within the group impossible; and second, their barely disguised lust for power ensures a constant level of paranoia about threats to that power.
In short, sooner rather than later, they turn on each other.
I have been ridiculed at every turn since 2006 for insisting that the future is not globalist. On the contrary, I think devolution down to local level is inevitable, because as a pack species we cannot relate easily to rule from distant, faceless alphas. The process has already begun: more and more citizens seek the acceptable face of tribalism: that is, the mutually beneficial community. The driving force at ground level in Europe now is opposition to the Imperial designs of the EU. With a national government doing less and less, local communities in the UK from Yorkshire to Dorset have begun what is being called ‘bridging the gap”: that is, if Westminster won’t help us, we’ll help ourselves.
So I hope on that note I have not acidified the digestion of your Sunday lunch.
The Slog 