though fantastic announcements like the following go a long way to remind me that there really is no escape wherever you are...
"A mortgage partner for life"The really fucking depressing thing is that being down here in NZ/ Oz is like being transported back 10, 15, 20 years in the UK and facing the prospect of living through what happened to the UK all over again for a second time - the privitisations, the credit boom and dislocations and inequalities that come with it, the rise of the service sector at the expense or productive industry, bonkers property costs, the Culture of Fear, the shite, propaganda-laden media, all of it
...and what makes it doubly depressing is witnessing, with the benefit of hindsight gained in the UK, just how easy all this stuff is to pull off
No-one ever failed to control a population by understimating people's susceptibility to greed and fear
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3 comments:
Dear Stef.
Good to hear from you. Please do come back and crank things up again. I (and I'm think others) need your 'meat of the bat' postings to give us a sense of comfort when the ship piloted by the idiot captain we didn't vote for sinks, or their bubble wand breaks or runs out of soap solution.
Anyway last week a good friend of mine invited a group of us 'oldies' to speak to a bunch of 'youngies' about a bunch of things on the contemporary world.
Us 'oldies' shared a pretty pessimistic (yet, I feel, realistic) view of things.
Unfortunately, although I know the youngies had a few slices of conspirallonery inside their tight little bellies, I don't think the magnitude of what's coming quite made the inroads us oldies were pointing to.
Anyway, us oldies were discussing aspects of banking and one of the oldies said the bank is offering 3 GENERATION LOANS. I didn't quite get what he was talking about but he quickly followed up saying if you can't pay off the loan your child or grandchildren can pay.
I'm sure you can guess my feeling of being completely stunned.
I asked "Is it legal?, - surely you can't put a debt on an unborn child yet" after which one of the other oldies said if the bank offered it, then it would have already have been cleared by the central bank whuch in turn is just doing what the IMF said.
I have faith that the guy who said this was being sincere and likely to be correct.
I'll try and post some info here later if I come across it.
hi there ;)
that's been on the cards for a long time...
Homebuying Japanese-style
Globalization appears to be in the process of wiping out most jobs in the Western world. The process will take a while to go to completion. Services, obviously, are not so easily farmed out to the Asian plantations as manufacturing. But the challenge is not insuperable.
I mean, why pay tens of thousands for heart surgery if you can just airlift the patient to India, China, Vietnam, etc. and have the job done for a few hundred by a surgeon who considers him- or herself well off on ten thousand a year. Alternatively, you could bring the Asian surgeons to the West.
In the better Britain that we are all sure David and Nick will bring, will one not be able to have a dodgy heart valve or a leaky aorta fixed at a free enterprise clinic operated on the principle of Midas muffler or Delete-a-Dent?
You drive-in anytime, they put you up on the hoist, have the job done in twenty minutes by a highly skilled Indonesian immigrant and send you home with a bottle of tylenol: cost sixty quid, maybe, plus parts.
Either way, service workers of the western world, like those in manufacturing before them, surely face increasingly tough times. At present, there are something like eight million British workers on the dole, working part time when the need full time work or who have given up the search for work in despair. These people and their dependents, plus all those on the sick, live at the expense of society. How sustainable is that? How long will people want to sustain such a system?
Jimmy Goldsmith predicted the economic catastrophe unfolding in the west before he so conveniently died of a remarkably fast acting cancer. His solution was a world of trade blocks, where labor competed on equal terms (wage levels, health, safety and environmental regulations, etc.).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
But instead, large parts of the Western working class, blue or white collar, have been made redundant by competition from the cheap labour of the Asian plantations. They have become the equivalent of the white trash of America's southern slave states.
There are two obvious ways to solve this problem. One is outright genocide as advocated by George Bernard Shaw:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgpaKkrZex4&feature=related
The alternative is to undermine the reproductive potential of the population, while importing Asian labour that will more readily accept the convergence of western and Asian terms and conditions of employment. Currently, the ruling elite seem to be working on Option 2
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