Bend over and take it bitches!!

Hardly seems worth fighting over ...yet

For those of us with a less, um, stochastic view of how the world works and who believe that shit doesn’t always ‘just happen’, mainstream media accounts of what’s going on in the world are often frustrating and, occasionally, amusing – but only in a very dark way

The coverage of the state of the British and World economy being the most immediate example that comes to mind

The British media has recently finally woken up to some key economic trends which have been noticeable for some time now but there has been far too much other, much more important stuff to report on. Those key economic trends include...

• The price of oil is going up lots
• The price of rice is going up lots
• The price of wheat is going up lots
• The price of gold is going up lots

• The value of the dollar is going down lots
• The value of the pound is going down lots
• The availability of retail credit is going down lots

And not only has the British media been rather slow in reporting these movements it is also meticulous about reporting these movements as unconnected events and giving some frankly bollocks explanations as to the causes

Last night, on Channel 4 News for example, we were treated to appearances from representative jackals from both the World Bank and the IMF; in two scrupulously separated news items, lying through their fucking teeth about why the British/ European/ World economy is going to go tits up and why people can’t afford food in a growing number of regions of the world

What neither owned up to is that the underlying reason why all these things are happening is that a massive re-balancing of the world’s already unequal distribution of wealth is now well under way

Re-balancing is, of course, a euphemism for naked theft

-

UK interest rates have just been cut by another 0.25% and even before the cut the media whores were warning people that this cut, as with the previous cuts, would probably not be passed onto ordinary borrowers and that banks would continue to cut back on the volume of mortgages they are lending to people

Which is all very strange when you think about. Central banks have been creating and pumping money into the global economic system but the stuff is, so we are told, still thin on the ground

Where’s it all going?

I’d suggest a good place to start looking is in the markets that speculate in the price of things none of us can do without. Right now, borrowing made-up money at 5% to punt on and drive up the price of food or oil another 20, 30, 40 or 50% is pretty much a one way bet

...only your average person hasn’t got the resources or the means to buy their food six months forward. So, they’ll just have to take it up the rear end when the prices rise won’t they?

We are repeatedly told, from cradle to grave, that the cost of the things we need is driven by supply and demand. For example, the price of houses in the UK and the US was driven by population pressure, the increase in the number of households and a failure to build enough new housing

Bollocks

That’s only half the story – and not the interesting half

The other key driver for the £ or $ price of a commodity is the supply and demand of the money used to pay for it. And if you can force up the price of something by flooding a market with money, whilst restricting increases in what people earn, you end fucking those people big time

and you can flatten the price of anything just as easily

The need for housing in the US or UK didn’t suddenly drop overnight

In the same way that the need for rice or wheat didn’t suddenly leap up overnight either

There are some very, very evil fuckers manipulating both the supply of the essentials of Life and the money used to pay for that supply. Those of us on the demand side are currently at their mercy. A quality that oligarchs are not exactly renowned for

.