fahrenheit451:009

One day soon ,they'll produce a motion picture about the demise of the European Union along the lines of the current expose-smash hit about the 2007/08 financial meltdown ," The Big Short ". In the meantime ,we the 99% have to live through this cataclysmic disintegration and upheaval as best we can under what are such parlous socio-economic conditions  that the only valid comparison is the 1920's and 30's. Corruption ,Stupidity and Hubris are the three core principles of the European Project -whatever the f*** that was supposed to mean in practice among the eurocratic elites of Strasbourg and Brussels. It's no coincidence that Transparency International , ( a kind of self-appointed  quasi-N.G.O. keeping a watchful eye on the levels of global  governmental corruption ) reported the other day,that ,in essence the further East and South you go within Europe the more their Index on publicly perceived levels of state corruption increase. Let's not forget that  three former Soviet Socialist Republics ,two former constituent republics of the NATO-extinguished Federal Yugoslavia plus the bulk of USSR linked COMECON are what is the Black Hole of a socio-economically destitute and culturally hindered sub-continent sucking the very oxygen of existence out of Great Britain and everywhere else here in what was  " The West ". Unlike post-1945 Western Germany that underwent,albeit at times a superficial de-nazification process ; none of eastern europe and the Balkans had a de-stalinisation programme. No-one was ever brought to account let alone subsequently removed from office . Hence all the vitriol,prejudice and irrationality surrounding the present on-going imbroglio vis a vis the US/NATO engineered and promoted series of debacles across the Middle East that have become a whirlwind threatening to flatten all of us.

fahrenheit451:008

By 1945 ,even the most ardent Nazi fanatic  realised that the game was up.Shortly after the War ,those leading figures who had escaped the Noose ,such as Speer claimed to have opposed Hitler's policy against the Jews and had in fact begun plotting to overthrow Hitler himself ! Yeah ,right ,whatever. The original Nazi inspired  " dream " of a European Union , ( yes it really was theirs first ) is even now going the way of the Third Reich.And what is clearly hastening its cataclysmic demise is the shibboleth " freedom of movement of labour. " A horrendously stupid and worthless idea let alone sentiment,but there they go getting all wiberally and multiculti as if it was somehow intrinsically  " better " or more " worthy " or expressed some innate,deep positive human condition. It never did. The make-belief " left " as much as the make-belief " right " have jointly wasted the past 70 years arguing the wrong question. And the smug ,kleptocratic Ruling Elites have profited from exploiting this divisive non-sequiter to the max. writing in the Daily Torynoncegraph  on January 24, Executive Chairman of Capital Economics ,Roger Bootle sums it up thus :- ( pay attention ,this is a capitalist telling you how the real version of The Big Con functions )

But the world has changed. The manufacture and trading of goods has become a smaller part of our GDP, while tariff barriers have come down dramatically around the world. The free movement of labour is now the most important of the three freedoms – and it poses serious issues for the EU.

It has become so important because of two major factors: first, the huge expansion of the EU to the east, including countries with much lower standards of living, whose people, therefore, have a strong economic incentive to move; second, the mass of people outside the union who want to get in.

The onrush of people from outside is due to the breaking down of states in the Middle East and Africa, the increased allure of the life apparently on offer in the EU, and the inexorable rise in the populations of these regions.

Over the next few decades, the population of Africa and the Middle East is set to soar.

As a result, today’s migration issue isn’t about the allocation of resources; it isn’t even primarily about economics at all. It is about the ability and willingness of people, cultures and institutions to absorb large numbers of people from the outside, often with very different values, beliefs and traditions.

What is the answer?

Clearly although the Ruling Elites could all comfortably relocate en masse to the Cayman Islands and no-one would notice ,they aren't searching for an answer right now or ever. To all those who have never experienced it and wondered what Schadenfreude is ,well this is getting to be as good as it ever gets. I'm loving it already.

fahrenheit451:007

A highly successful TV series in the '70s on BBC 1, " The Two Ronnies "  spoofed the TV news presentation of that era. Messrs Barker and Corbett a.k.a. The Two Ronnies would sign off the routine and the show with , " So,it's goodnight from me and it's goodnight from him , goodnight !" That catchphrase springs to mind whenever the increasingly frantic and desperate European Union attempts to debate let alone decide upon any course of action in response to the Western Ruling Elites' engineered " Refugee / Migrant Crisis ". France's Premier Vals pretty much borrowed the gist and the sentiment of the Two Ronnies the other day,as reported by the Daily Telegraph :-

In a further blow, Mr Valls said that France would keep its state of emergency, which has included border checks, until the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant network is destroyed.

"It is a total and global war that we are facing with terrorism," he said.

"It's Europe that could die, not the Schengen area"

Manuel Valls, French Prime Minister

 He warned that without proper border controls to turn away refugees, the 60-year old European project could disintegrate.

"It's Europe that could die, not the Schengen area. If Europe can't protect its own borders, it's the very idea of Europe that could be thrown into doubt. It could disappear, of course - the European project, not Europe itself, not our values, but the concept we have of Europe, that the founding fathers had of Europe.

Well , it's adieu from him then. The insane folie de grandeur of the bureacratised,Corporate Capitalist compliant " Union " is finally meeting its nemesis. It was never ,ever going to go any other way.Once the immediate Post-War core founding conspirators let slip the reins of sanity and prudence at the behest of their US masters in the State Department ,who envisaged and backed a grandiose Cold war territorial enlargement / bulwark against Socialism, the Franco-German " European project " was in effect laid to rest.It was a still birth. And since 1975 onwards what the variegated ,sovereign national polities  across the geographic continent have experienced is the stench emanating from an rotting corpse. Unique and irreplaceable Liberties,Rights , Historic Customs , Ancient Affinities together with normal and legitimate concerns,obligations and civil and moral duties of individual and sovereign electorates have been curtailed,outlawed,traduced,defamed,slandered,betrayed - entire historic socio-economic and cultural inheritances have been bartered away in exchange for the proverbial mess of pottage. Which is precisely what the globalising ,Corporate capitalist Ruling Elites and their political class and media  commentariat hirelings and bootlickers wanted from the beginning. The freedom of movement for finance ,capital and labour , the three components of the lethal injection cocktail that so nearly did for us turns out to have had existential consequences for the EU itself. Good night !!

fahrenheit451:006

( Preface to this critique of Political economy.)

Just kidding. Kind of. I'd intended to base this blog entry on the current Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article in the Daily Telegraph.His analysis and commentary on the unfurling and convoluted developments of global stock market ructions and their underlying causes provide ammunition aplenty for any critique of the Global Capitalist hegemony. Providentially,a current motion picture release based on the novel , " The Big Short ",which deals with the events surrounding and triggering the global financial meltdown/banking crisis in 2008 more than adequately addresses all the otherwise complex and repetitive polemical points one would be expected to score in a diatribe against Capitalism. So,originally published at www.destinypoets.co.uk here it is ,in a poem.

The Big Short

Did they offer you a thought

for all your pennies ?

did they want your gold

in exchange for a goose's egg ?

did they swap your silver linings

for a sky full of clouds ?

Would you trade your last dollar

for their word of honour ?

Do you keep all of their promises

in a jar ready to use on a rainy day ?

and all of these things

they saw but they did not see ,

they heard but they did not hear ,

and they knew ,

they knew it all

but still they tried not to know.

fahrenheit451:005

Lutheran-Christian Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was/is and shall remain as my kind of Christian.While others fled ,he remained inside the German Third Reich and helped organise resistance cells against the Nazi Tyranny.He was quoted as stating , " Silence in the face of evil is itself evil " A bit harsh and way too rigorous for many of us ;but that's the exacting standard Bonhoeffer and those like him apply firstly to themselves -they do not ask,or rather challenge others to attempt a feat they themselves do not do . The Pastor's fate was to be executed by means of hanging by the Nazis two weeks before the liberation of Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945 ,one month before  Germany's Surrender. What  might then constitute verifiable proof of the existence and practice of  "evil " ?  Socio-economic injustices instigated by Corporate Global Ruling Elites and imposed by Governments whose policies have as their most immediate and visceral expression and impact :- mass unemployment ,empirically verifiable and continuing levels of poverty and structural disadvantage, economic marginalisation , effective social exclusion and increasing isolation of the most vulnerable in Society. Capitalism is the bacillus ,it is the existential threat infesting,infecting and inexorably debilitating and annihilating all Human Society.It's name is LEGION for it adopts many shape-shifting forms whilst always remaining essentially the same. It's current nom-de-geurre is AUSTERITY. Ba'al or Mammon would just about fit the same deceptive mask.It is THE purest and most effective ideologically totalitarian oppression and imprisonment that has the temerity to espouse such deluded and vacuous notions as " freedom " and " liberalism " and a whole myriad of stupefyingly audacious nonsense and non-sequiters that the desperate seek out and cling to like addicts to crack cocaine. And the Corporate Media exalt and propagandise this with relish ,as with the Daily Mail of 18 January 2016 :-

Duncan Smith bid to get 2million on sick benefits back to work: Work and Pensions secretary to call for shake-up of 'fundamentally flawed' system 

• Duncan Smith keen to slash the numbers off work with anxiety and depression
• The 2.3million claimants on ESA will be tested for what they are able to do - not what they cannot
• They will then be found work for around ten hours a week, or whatever is possible, to get them back into the workplace .

Slick and full of bullshit ,flawed in grammar and logic-that's journalism for you. I for one am speaking out against this  " evil " and will continue to so do.What anybody else is actually going to do about it is entirely their challenge. Y'all know the verdict already .

fahrenheit451:004

Is there a , " Crisis " somewhere ? is anything going awry with the global economy - y'know the kind of thing ;the life chances and future prospects of  hundreds of millions of ordinary people right across our planet. If there is something terribly amiss,let Ambrose Evans-Pritchard ,the Daily Telegraph's Economics and Finance guru non-pareil put you at your ease with passages such as this gleaned from his very latest zen-like meditative state :- 

It said a “big tradable multi-week rally awaits” but requires catalysts, above all a stabilisation of the Chinese yuan and oil, better PMI data and a halt to the rising dollar.

The risk is that this market storm drags on long enough to hit investment, regardless of what the economic data should imply. At the end of the day, market psychology can itself become an economic "fundamental".

Pessimists warn that unless there is a batch of irrefutably good data from China over the next two or three months, the sell-off could become self-fulfilling and quickly metamorphose into the next global crisis.

...              ...          ....          ...

And in case you didn't quite  " get it " , AEP's full article mentions Bunds and Treasuries ; why ? because that's what the savvy capitalist investor is into right now. Austerity is for Others. Other people are Poor,Marginalised,Excluded,Exploited,Sanctioned. Them clanking,whirring gears of the Usurer-Capitalist money machine just keep a rollin' on,yessuh ! Time to make plans for the Progeny of the socio-economically Elect to get them into the right schools,for the right education that will take them on the next stage of the invisible conveyor belt of immutable destiny to the right University etc.etc.ad infinitum ,amen ? Nah , Bollocks.

fahrenheit451 / 2 / 003

I just love it when Capitalists and their acolytes talk dirty. I respect them when they cut out all the bull about " fairness " and " social justice " and giving people a break or empowering some group or other ,or extending some kind of nebulous property owning democracy ,or helping start-up businesses, and giving a " hand-up not a hand-out "...blaherty,blaherty,blah . For the Supreme Global Usurer-Capitalist Ruling Elites anything and everything that isn't exclusively about  MORE PROFITS for themselves alone and concomitantly MORE MISERY,SUBJUGATION and a lifetime of abject penury for the 99%,simply isn't worth mentioning let alone thinking about.As far they and their system are concerned we can all go rot in hell and in fact they've prepared a hell for us in which can go and rot in at our earliest convenience. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a financial commentator non-pareil and his columns in the Daily we-do really hate poor people and their very existence Telegraph are a delight to read. His most recent missive speaks of " Temples " and "Secular " and orthodoxy. The very essence at the heart of the Worship and Adoration of Mammon and all its Works.

 

8:55PM GMT 06 Jan 2016

 

The world's monetary watchdog has thrown down the gauntlet. It has challenged the twin assumptions of secular stagnation and the global savings glut that have possessed - some would say corrupted - the Western economic elites.

It has implicity indicted the US Federal Reserve and fellow central banks for perverting the machinery of interest policy to conjure demand that may not, in fact, be needed, and ensnaring us in a self-perpetuating "debt-trap" with a diet of ever looser money.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) - the temple of monetary orthodoxy in Switzerland - has been waiting for this moment, combing through the archives of economic history to mount an unanswerable assault.

The BIS believes it has found the "smoking gun" in a study of recessions in 22 rich countries dating back to the late 1960s. The evidence suggests that the long malaise of the post-Lehman era - and the strange episode that preceded it - can be explained almost entirely by the destructive effects of boom and bust on productivity growth.

Credit bubbles are corrosive. They gobble up resources on the upswing, diverting workers into low-productivity sectors and building booms. In Spain the construction share of GDP reached 16pc at the height of the "burbuja" in 2007, when teenagers abandoned school en masse to earn instant money erecting ghost towns.

Parasitical wastage creeps in. "Financial institutions' high demand for skilled labour may crowd out more productive sectors," said the paper, acidly.
The bubbles leave a long toxic legacy after the bust hits. This takes eight years or so to clear. "The occurrence of a crisis greatly amplifies the impact of previous misallocations," said the paper, racily titled "Labour reallocation and productivity dynamics: financial causes, real consequences".
Crippled economies have to make the switch back to healthier sectors against the headwinds of a credit crunch and a broken financial system, and typically amid austerity cuts in public investment.
The BIS has long argued that a key reason why the US recovered more quickly than others is because it tackled the bad debts of the banking system early, forcing lenders to raise capital. This averted a long credit squeeze. It cleared the way for Schumpeterian creative destruction.
The Europeans dallied, prisoners of their bank lobbies. They let lenders meet tougher rules by slashing credit rather than raising capital. Europe's unemployed have paid a high price for this policy failure.
Claudio Borio, the paper's lead author and the BIS's chief economist, said the "hysteresis" effect of lost productivity is 0.7pc of GDP each year. The cumulative damage from the boom-bust saga over the past decade is 6pc.
This more or less accounts for the phenomenon of "secular stagnation", the term invented by Alvin Hansen in 1938 and revived by former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Loosely, it describes an inter-war Keynesian world of deficient investment and demand.
The theory of the global savings glut propagated by former Fed chief Ben Bernanke falls away, and so does the Fed's central alibi. It can longer be cited as the canonical justification for negative real rates. The alleged surfeit of capital in the world proves a mirage. So does the output gap.
If the BIS hypothesis is correct, there is no lack of global demand. The world faces a supply-side problem, impervious to monetary stimulus. The entire strategy of global central banks is based on a false premise.
____________________________________________________________________________
and that is how come the capitalist economic system and its Ruling Elites,adherents,activists,supporters,acolytes and servile intelligentsia and all their infrastructure must be eviscerated,without compunction nor any show of individual mercy,from the face of our World. It's us,the 99% of human society or them,the 1%. We get to choose.

fahrenheit451 / 2 / 002

It is ever the mark of an Idiot ( and equally the true mark of such an individual's followers and acolytes ) ,that no matter how useless  or counter-productive that Idiot's actions and policies ,the Idiot themselves and more fervently their followers and acolytes will laud every failure and palpable disastrous consequence as some noble and heroic triumph of a visionary. Gleaned recently from the Daily mortgage-enslaved ,toadying lower middle class conformist Mail :-

 " From hubris to hell: In a courageous dispatch, PETER OBORNE reports from the Libyan city where Cameron was hailed as a saviour for toppling Gaddafi. He found bloody anarchy... and fanatics now bent on bringing carnage to the West "

• The Libyan city of Benghazi is still a struggling battlefield of violence
• Chaos has escalated since the country's demise and Gaddafi's death 
• ISIS militants have built a stronghold in the central Libyan city of Sirte
• The jihadi group now earns money through running the migrant boat trade 

PUBLISHED: 22:22, 25 December 2015 | UPDATED: 18:02, 26 December 2015

" Greeted as a hero while smiling to the cameras, David Cameron had flown into the Libyan city of Benghazi and was milking every last ounce of publicity from Britain's successful role in the fall of Colonel Gaddafi. 

Alongside the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he visited a hospital and travelled to Liberation Square to deliver a triumphant speech to cheering Libyans.

Cameron told his audience: 'It is great to be in free Libya. Colonel Gaddafi said he would hunt you down like rats, but you showed the courage of lions . . . Your city was an inspiration to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom.' He explained that he was 'proud of Britain's role' in helping to eradicate Gaddafi.

He concluded with this pledge: 'Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your country and build your democracy for the future.' Today, just four years on, Cameron's hubristic promise has turned out to be worthless.

Rather than bequeath Libya a prosperous and democratic future, Britain turned away and the country lies in chaos.   "

Of such stuff then are our contemporary  " Leaders " in the West composed . Meritricious ,venal ,stupid . The same ilk that barely two years ago were on course to instigate a Third World war against Russia after the West's ( NATO ) botched coup d'etat in the Ukraine . The same retinue of Usurer-Capitalist Ruling Elite clowns who are seeing the remnants of their own nation states drowning in the Deluge of " refugees " brought about by NATO's decades long  insane policy of inflicting carnage and chaos on everyone and everything they take strategic dislike to.  The Global Monopoly Usurer-Capitalist economic system is simply the most humongous pile of shit ever to have existed on our planet and the political class are its shovellers.

fahrenheit451 / 2 / 001

There is nothing new under the sun. The object of Capitalism is economic exploitation.The fact that most of us are not physically coerced by  a bayonet jabbing into our backs whilst we perform our economic function ,is mere lucky happenstance. In order for the capitalist mode of economic development to even exist ,let alone flourish ,according to its own brutalising logic ,certain things must happen in order for it to operate. Our present day " Austerity " is but a mere detail in the vast ,unfolding ,albeit unwieldy panoply at the heart of Global Monopoly Usurer-Capitalism. And therefore every and any act of resistance to the System's infernal dynamic ,anything at all that impedes its progress or slows it down or causes delay and disruption whether for a short while or longer historical interlude constitutes a Victory against the very nature of Capitalism. If  Capitalism was the only way of organising economic activity and basing all surrounding human societies on its principles ,then clearly there would be something terribly wrong with the Cosmos and our fundamental existence on earth. I mean ,what kind of sado-megalomaniacal psychotic would envisage  and then implement  neo-liberal free market economics as the organising principle for an entire planet let alone a child's Monopoly board ?  Einstein has been attributed with the observation  that , " God does not play dice with the Universe " . Neither should we stand idly by and permit our World and our Human civilisation to be subject to the spins on a roulette wheel in a Casino managed and operated by the Usurer-Capitalist Ruling Mafia. Democracy is in this respect more than just a useful ,occasional tool ,it is an effective means of shutting down the Casino's operations with negligible collateral damage and cost to the Resistance itself.  Ambrose- Evans Pritchard ,ever the Financial Commentator non-pareil ,fulminates in the Daily Telegraph of 21 December against the latest ,promising incursion into Capitalist hegemonic territory by Oppositional forces and their Liberation agenda ; savour this:-

Spain risks months of political paralysis and a corrosive showdown with Germany over fiscal austerity after insurgent movements smashed the traditional two-party system, leaving the country almost ungovernable.

The electoral earthquake over the weekend in one of the eurozone’s ‘big four’ states has echoes of the shock upsets in Greece and Portugal this year, a reminder that the delayed political fuse from years of economic depression and mass unemployment can detonate even once the worst seems to be over.

Bank stocks plummeted on the Madrid bourse as startled investors awoke to the possibility of a Left-wing coalition that included the ultra-radical Podemos party, which won 20.7pc of the votes with threats to overturn the government’s bank bail-out and to restructure financial debt.

Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of the Podemos rebellion, warned Brussels, Berlin, and Frankfurt that Spain was retaking control over its own destiny after years of kowtowing to eurozone demands.

“Our message to Europe is clear. Spain will never again be the periphery of Germany. We will strive to restore the meaning of the word sovereignty to our country,” he said.
...............                        ..........................                ..............................................
Clearly ,the sovereign electorate and democratic expression of its will is at best a nuisance and mighty inconvenience to the capitalist Ruling Elites ,it messes with their plans and their fantasies over 10 year Bond yields and whether or not to " invest " in stuff. And when the People of Great Britain vote and vote decisively ,just for the hell of it , to leave the EU in 2017 , then we shall see one helluva reaction as to make this one pale into insignificance. It really is The People ,Das Volk who make History,but not in the circumstances of their own choosing.Obviously ;when was the last time anyone can recall  any people anywhere making a History-shifting decision in circumstances which they chose ? Precisely , Capitalism ab initio denies the People and makes it impossible for the People ever to be able to " choose " anything. It has never been about choice ,it has always been and always shall be about Necessity. After all ,no-one in their right mind would conceivably choose capitalism .