Mainstream Conspiraloons #204 James Delingpole

Until recently, the single greatest contribution made to public discourse by Daily Telegraph columnist and professional tory irritant about town, James Delingpole, has been to help polarise the debate about alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming along conventional Right vs Left lines; making it a whole lot easier for the average Jane or Joe on the street to adopt a position on AGW without having to know or think very much about the scientific basis for AGW at all

Left Wing = AGW proponent. Right Wing = Denier. Simples

And when it comes to economic or foreign policy matters James can be most succinctly described as an almost perfect Melanie Phillips clone, but with a cock (though I am making unsubstantiated morphological assumptions here)

James Delingpole

That was until James' most recent column on the subject of the Goldman's coup currently underway in Western Europe...


"...We need to find common ground here, I think – those of us who believe (as the Occupy crowd do) that the current crisis is caused by the failure of capitalism and those of us who believe (as I do) that it is caused by the failure of corporatism, welfarism and – ultimately – the fiat money system. While we are busy being distracted by our particular ideological hobby horses, we are being shafted by a political bankster corporatist elite which doesn't give a stuff about us because we are the little people and we are of no consequence to the New World Order they wish to impose on us.

Beware the Vampire Squid: whether you are on the Left or the Right it will feast on your blood and suck you dry all the same."


My oh my, how those corporate journalists enjoy bashing internet-based conspiraloonery, yet are gradually finding themselves drawn to the language of net-based loondom as their own lexicon becomes less and less capable of describing the shit that's going down

though, obviously, James wouldn't want the Little People to become too focused on the crimes of the Big People at the expense of those distractive ideological hobby horses as, let's be honest here, they're a nice little earner

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He's mad as Hell as he's not going to take it any more

Nominations for Best Howard Beale Tribute Act 2011 are now open...




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"No. The real Black Swan Event is that people are not rioting against the banks in London and New York..."

The BBC's Paul Mason... rumbled

A few days ago, BBC reporter Paul Mason put up a well-written blog post on the demonstrations in Greece

It was so well written and vaguely truthy that I had the strangest sensation of having just read an actual piece of journalism after finishing it

A feeling I don't usually associate with reading anything from the BBC, or pretty much any other mainstream news outlet

An increasingly widespread opinion of mainstream news coverage that Mason himself acknowledges at the end of his piece...

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it's not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as "representatives of big capital", "Zionists", "scum and police informers" etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic - from balaclava kids to pensioners - should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The "mainstream" - whether it's the media, politicians or business people - is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

As one old bloke put it to me, when I said: "Don't you want us to report what's happening to you?" - "No."

He was quite calm and rational as he waved his hand in my face: "It's too late for that."

Nicely put

Though a cynic might suggest that Mason and the BBC are simply co-opting the tools of citizen journalism, such as blogs, to put out a minimal amount of truthiness in an attempt to scrape up some much needed credibility

Those would be the same tools of citizen journalism that mainstream media whores spend most of their time belittling and abusing

...and a small amount of their time trying to co-opt, covering their well paid arses, just in case

For an altogether much more informative example of citizen journalism on what is being done to Greece I recommend this article...

Democracy vs Mythology: The Battle in Syntagma Square

It opens with the lines...

"I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly"

...and the author is absolutely right

The banks and the corporations that have grown up around the banks are out to deprive the Greek people of all property until their children wake-up homeless in their own land

The Greeks are to become neo-feudal, pay-as-you-go serfs

And then, after the Greeks, the rest of us

A future which neither Paul Mason nor any employee of the BBC or any other mainstream media outlet is going to warn us about; 100% guaranteed, absolutely no way, ever

They'll report it after it happens, sure enough, and explain that no-one saw such an unfortunate, accidental turn of events coming, and so on and so on. They'll do that because that's their job. They're paid to sell narratives. Narratives that are constructed to instill passivity and acceptance of what is being done

And that is why the old Greek bloke said to Mason 'It's too late for that'

And that is why I despise Mason and his kind as much as any Greek demonstrator

The Battle in Syntagma Square article ends with the following paragraph...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the Lebanese-American philosopher who formulated the theory of “Black Swan Events” – unpredictable, unforeseen events which have a huge impact and can only be explained afterwards. Last week, on Newsnight, he was asked by Jeremy Paxman whether the people taking to the streets in Athens was a Black Swan Event. He replied: “No. The real Black Swan Event is that people are not rioting against the banks in London and New York.”

That wouldn't be as much to do with Black Swans as with a corrupt press and parliamentary system but, in spite of their efforts, I expect that there will be an upsurge in demonstrations and strikes in the UK later in the year. However, and this is where I may lose some of my leftist friends on top of any anti-Zionist friends I lost a few posts back, those strikes and demonstrations are likely to only make the situation worse

The only significant pockets of organised labour left in the UK are public sector unions and they have a poor track record of giving a toss about where their members' pay comes from. Any successes public sector workers have in maintaining their pay and conditons are, under the current system, simply passed onto ordinary private sector workers in the form of increased taxation and inflation. Many private sector workers I personally know are barely managing from week to week and they have biff all job security and pensions. If the cost of significant public sector settlements are dumped onto their laps they're screwed

Until strikers and demonstrators in the UK start talking about reforming the entire system for the benefit of all ordinary people and not just the protestors own immediate self-interest all they will be doing is fighting with other plebs for a share of an increasingly smaller trickle of crumbs from their Masters' table

The Greeks seem to be switching onto this, as do the Irish, and the Icelanders

But they had to get fucked pretty severely first

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Latest footage of Coalition forces implementing 'no fly'(ing tanks) zone just in!!

I'm guessing that once the French started shooting down tanks and military vehicles in the 'no-fly zone' over Libya members of the Arab League began to realise that they'd just been Tango'd and that they were being treated to an object demonstration of what's in store for them if they don't run their franchises more efficiently

Anyway, this latest round of 'just' slaughter serves the Libyans right for falling out with each other and threatening Western resource hegemony just before a monster earthquake hits Japan and initiates a huge unwinding of dollar positions

They won't be doing that again in a hurry

Michael Hudson gives me the horn pt.328

Curiously for a conspiraloon economician, Michael Hudson does not promote precious metals with every waking breath, he clearly believes that the megarich vs poor paradigm isn't a false one and he does not appear to be focused on engendering a sense of collapsafarian despair in his listeners...

Hudson isn't going to sell very many Krugerands or water filters with talk like that

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Listening to this latest dose of Hudson I was reminded, as I usually am when listening to Georgists, of the land ownership systems adopted during the Gold Rushes of the 19th Century.

Because the mining camps were set up in wilderness areas, beyond the reach of established governing systems or landlords, the miners got together and made up the rules for themselves.

The rules were simple enough; one person, or small group, could stake only one claim and the claim was no bigger than that person or group could work. If claimants did not work the claim they lost it

Whilst not a perfect system, it did restrict the scope for rent, speculation and generally poncing off people who actually worked for a living

Anyone who tried accumulating claims so that they could rent out or speculate with them, whilst sitting on their arse, ran a real risk of being hit repeatedly on the head with pick axe handles

Of course, this kind of thinking was suppressed as soon as the camps got properly civilised

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It always baffles me when people 'of the right' dismiss the very notion of social welfare as being an unworkable utopian fantasy because they believe it results in a system where people are paid to do nothing

As if spongers being paid to do nothing is somehow a pitfall unique to left wing systems

Whenever anyone plays that card I find myself thinking of people like this twunt...

The Duke of Twuntminster

He left school with only one O Level, in spite of the best education money could buy, has done nothing especially productive or clever in his adult life and yet is one of the richest land-owners in the country. He lives entirely off the labour of others and has done absolutely nothing to deserve that privilege. Thanks largely to the fact that he'll pay fuck all tax, in life and death, he and his progeny will continue to accumulate capital and increase the amount they leach off everyone else in a way that simply isn't possible for us paeons

Whatever your political persuasion, I believe it's pretty difficult to make a case for parasitism of this nature. Those who have 'left wing' sensibilities will see it as unfair. Those with a 'right wing' point of view should see it as a pretty shit way of allocating scarce resources or stimulating productivity. The fact that many ordinary people with right wing views don't get what's going on is one of the triumphs of the plutocratic class

Though, for the life of me, it's sometimes hard to put my finger on which of the members of that class are the ones who are actually smart enough to keep this charade going

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Michael Flatley is really from Chicago

Conspiraloon Round Up December 2010 pt1

So much going on in the conspirasphere, so little time to vent fully, but just enough time to place a few bets on some on-going stories...


Wikileaks


Such is Julian Assange's new found fame, even my pensioner Mum who never reads newspapers and only watches Italian gameshows on TV asked me the other day if I thought Assange was kosher on the level a straight shooter or not

The fact that she was even asking me the question pretty much answers it

Aangirfan has put together a much more detailed list of reasons to have little faith in Wikileaks

He could have saved himself a lot of time by trying to come up with a list of reasons to actually have faith in Assange

The countless debates about whether Assange is what he claims to be or not remind me of the past antics of the Shayler Being. Fans of Shayler's work will recall that he bought credibility in certain Truther circles by revealing the startling news that, shock fucking horror, MI6 planned to murder Gaddafi at one point in the 1990s. In return for this completely underwhelming revelation he was given a free pass to trample all over UK Conspiraloondom for the better part of a decade. I was still debating with people who wanted to give Shayler the benefit of the doubt even when he started claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus AND King Arthur. Mercifully, the low cut blouse and lipstick was the final straw for all but the most open-minded and tolerant of folk. However, Shayler's ex girlfriend/ handler, who bought into Truther status at the same low low price, is still out there hard at work, playing a much longer game and with a slightly better hairdresser




To be honest, I'm a little nonplussed that so many on-line folk are willing to give Assange so much benefit of the doubt, given the nature of the official narrative friendly bullshit he's pumping out, the stuff he isn't pumping out, and the fact that he's getting so much coverage from the mainstream media.

In comparison, it's worth remembering how hard the mainstream press worked at trying to ignore, then downplay, the Climategate story last year. A leak which genuinely did piss in The Establishment's chips, a lot

When in doubt, it's always worth remembering the Golden Rule of State Broadcasting Portraiture. If someone is covered by the BBC and they're not lit, or otherwise presented, like Baltar from Battlestar Galactica they ain't threatening anyone of any importance



Eric Cantona's bank run

Fair play to Eric for calling for the collapse of the banking cartel...



...but a planned bank run ain't going to do it

Even if a mass protest did take place, managed to overcome daily cash withdrawal limits and actually killed a bank or two, how exactly would that beat the system?

The Fed in the US and other central banks around the world were actually created in the wake of staged bank crises

More dead banks and more chaos equals more consolidation and more centralised control

Sorry

Cantona strikes me as a decent man but one who doesn't fully understand how money works

Unlike a certain indecent man who does...


Max Keiser

Max, and his new best buddy and fellow precious metal salesmen Alex Jones, have been trying to whip up a viral campaign with the claimed objective of destroying JP Morgan by buying up physical silver. The story goes that JP Morgan has been selling lots of paper silver, so if Max's followers buy lots of physical silver they'll reduce physical supply, drive up the price and JP Morgan won't be able to honour its paper contracts

Curiously, in spite of all his ranting on the subject in recent years, Max seems to have forgotten what happens every time the finances of large banks go tits up, and who ends up covering all the losses. Buying a few poxy coins isn't even going to scratch a power structure that's been crafted over centuries and any immediate losses inflicted on that structure will be recouped, with interest

Max also seems to forget who controls most of the production and stockpiles of precious metals around the world. The last time I looked, I don't recall identfying many silver mines or bullion depositories that were owned and operated by anarcho-syndicalist cooperatives

Max also seems to have forgotten that there isn't actually that much physical gold or silver to go round and that if ordinary people did actually drive the price of gold or silver up to astronomical highs by buying a couple of coins each they wouldn't benefit themselves by very much but would benefit anyone who's already sitting on a few thousand coins to start with enormously

There again, maybe Max hasn't forgotten any of this

On reflection, I think he probably hasn't. I think it's more likely that he's trying to succeed where others have failed; through the power of the internet, lots and lots of bullshit and total and utter contempt for anyone who'll listen to him...

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Economics 101 - Lesson #11 QE Explained

Economics 101 - Lesson #3 Supply and Demand

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FF15MP Spot the Difference Contest #51

A. Sir William Cubitt

"The prison treadmill was invented in England in 1817 by Sir William Cubit, who observed prisoners lying around in idleness and put himself to the task of "reforming offenders by teaching them habits of industry."

B. Ian Duncan Smith

"jobseeker(s) would benefit from experiencing the "habits and routines" of working life, an unemployed person will be told to take up "mandatory work activity" of at least 30 hours a week for a four-week period. If they refuse or fail to complete the programme their jobseeker's allowance payments, currently £50.95 a week for those under 25 and £64.30 for those over 25, could be stopped for at least three months."

And if your answer was 'I can't see much difference but IDS does look like he's having sex with a goat' you can write your name on a scrap of paper and stick it in the raffle box

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Compelling people to work for less than two quid an hour might, just possibly, bump into one or two small snags. The work has to be exceptionally unskilled, can't compete with work currently being done by people actually earning enough to exist, and it can't matter if The Compelled do, as is likely, a really shit job of it

Cubitt-style treadmills offer a tried and tested solution to these problems, especially when connected to a big windmill, or some rocks




This is an all-weather solution and doesn't involve much additional expense on stripey outfits, chains, shotguns, dogs, riding crops, mirrored shades or any of the other paraphenalia associated with managing reluctant groups of labourers in open spaces




And if any whinging do-gooders start complaining that this kind of enforced physical drudgery does nothing for upper body strength, you could always compel the feckless to alternate between treadmills and operating some of these wall-mounted bad boys...



...as once used in Dartmoor Prison, that's the one still privately owned by the Royal Family

Of course, if IDS were brave enough to be a true neo-radical he could use cranks and treadmills to interface* all of the unemployed with electrical generators, commoditise their output US prison style, draw up a few bonds and turn them over to our fabulous banking industry to make a market with.




* = something like a person-sized Skinner Box, but with an axle



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Time to go away now pt2

Cheers to Anon for the link to this series of presentations by Damon Vrabel entitled 'Debunking Money'

So far, I've watched the first in the series...

...and whilst it doesn't offer much in the way of new material for veteran Loons, Vrabel's delivery is 'concise and easy to understand'

Which might be handy, as we're now getting to the stage where those of us who have been grazing the Net for some time have a pretty good idea of what's going on with the Money thing and, rather than preaching to the choir and discussing this material amongst ourselves, we probably should be thinking about reaching out to the majority of people who are waking up to the fact that they are being rogered senseless but don't quite understand how*

Naturally, I reserve the right to pull the link to Vrabel's videos if and when I discover that he starts talking about Space Newts, dons white robes or instructs viewers to send otherwise worthless money to some bearded Loon and his followers in a compound in the Mojave Desert. That is, after all, a vaguely suspicious haircut he's sporting there



* = Something must be in the air/ water. Otherwise, how else could you account for a once unthinkable headline such as this...

Bank of England Head Mervyn King Proposes Eliminating Fractional Reserve Banking

NB Don't be holding your breath now

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Time to go away now

Once upon a time if you wanted to bomb the crap out of someone you used to have to use something like this...




The Avro Lancaster. An iconic aircraft viewed with respect and affection by the British people who lived through World War 2. Which, given the huge number of people who died in them and were killed by them, is a pretty strong endorsement for the effectiveness of wartime propaganada

Britain built 7,500 Lancasters at a cost of something like £50,000 each (£1,600,000 in today's money).

About 3,300 of these planes and their crews of seven highly trained men were shot down during the war. Total RAF Bomber Command losses of all types of aircraft was 8,500 planes and 57,000 crew

Which was fab news for the industrialists who sold the aircraft and the bankers who created the money to buy them but, still, not as profitable as it could have been.

Back in those days, building and operating fleets of bombers required masses of skilled labour that needed training and paying

All of which reduced the bottom line severely

Nowadays, thanks to improved technology, if you want to bomb the crap out of someone you can use something like this...



and one of these...


...coming in at a higher unit cost than an Avro Lancaster, a much lower labour component and the operators pay to train themselves whilst they're still children

It would be lovely to think that all those labour savings mean that people who would otherwise be fabricating and operating machinery of mass death would consequently be employed fabricating and operating other, less unpleasant things

Unfortunately, our current System does not require their skills anywhere else either

For something like 100-150 years that System required an educated, skilled workforce to tend machinery and manage empire. Thanks to advances in technology, most of that educated, skilled workforce is now surplus to requirements and the System would like Us to, thanks for everything, go away now

And before We go away, that System would like to hoover up whatever crumbs of capital We managed to collectively accumulate over those last 100-150 years

All of which should be bleeding obvious but a lot of people just don't seem to get it and insist on believing that news like this...




...is somehow an unfortunate consequence of the harsh economic times we live in and not part of a Systematic eradication of a class of people that is now surplus to requirements

It would seem that, by some completely unguided, stochastic process, our colleges and universities are being transformed from institutions which produce educated people capable of productive work and critical thinking into factories which produce dumbed-down debt bitches primed for a lifetime of shitty, service sector jobs and neo-serfdom

Which is just what our establishment needs and wants

What a marvelous coincidence

At which point one could argue till the cows come home whether this marvelous coincidence is...

a) the result of deliberate planning by a shadowy cabal of finance capitalists conspiring away on a little island somewhere

or

b) the natural consequence of finance capitalists acting in their class interest without much in the way of deliberate collusion

But to be honest, as with most of these debates about whether or not a conspiracy is at work, when you are on the receiving end the motivations of the people fucking you are largely academic

Your first priority should be to relieve your tormentors of the means by which they are fucking you

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It's cartoon time

GI Joe c. 1985 -

I've been looking for a fair copy of this episode, without the additional titles and comments, for a little while but no joy. So, the edited version it'll have to be...

It's a damned shame that Cobra Commander isn't a regular commentator on Newsnight

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Still Bill

Great news for people who enjoy watching videos that explain Fiat Currency and Fractional Reserve Banking for the umpteenth time

Not one, but two new video presentations of monetary truthiness are now available on-line

The Secret Oz

(Keepvid is your friend)

Not so much a sequel as a reworking of Bill Still’s Conspiraloon classic, The Money Masters.

Bill has stopped fiddling endlessly with his biro whilst explaining how we’re all being shafted by the Hidden Overlords of Finance Capital but the shonky camera work and Stillted delivery style we’ve all grown to know and love remain

Bill does a nice job of explaining why reverting to a Gold Standard would be playing into the hands of the Shadowy Overlords (They control its supply) but doesn’t half talk some bollocks when romanticising periods of history when people weren’t subjects of the bankers

I also particularly enjoyed the part where Bill makes reference to the eradication of mutual, non-profit savings institutions across the Western World in the 80s and 90s (which helped pave the way for the current upsurge in global financial larceny) as if it were something that ‘just happened’, like rain


The Money Fix

(I haven’t found out how to view this off-line, short of forking out some hard-earned Fiat to buy a copy, which is a pain)

Featuring the usual run through of the principles of Fractional Reserve Banking and the increasingly mandatory praise for the creation of local currencies.

This film does include a nice touch of drawing parallels between the exchange of goods and services between people and natural ecosystems of mutually supporting organisms. As such, the result is just a teensy wee bit Marxist in its analysis of why our current financial system is fucked

Marx, as I keep reading on the Internet, was a paid tool of the Zionist Bankers. I am also frequently being informed by the same sources that the current financial crisis and associated bail-outs (thefts) are nothing less than part of a Communist plot to finally secure world domination once and for all

I have one or two problems with this particular world view

There are many competing definitions of what constitutes ‘true’ Communism, or Free Market Capitalism, and the ones that seem to have been adopted by right wing loons go something like...

• Free Market Capitalism = A system under which I personally make money

• Communism = A system under which I personally lose money

Personally speaking, I think this is misguided, ever so self-centred, and plain wrong.

Just because the same kleptocratic system which bought the acquiescence of the Middle Classes with a little bit of illusory wealth creation and 3rd world rape is now evaporating that ‘wealth’ that does not mean that this kleptocracy was somehow magically and seamlessly transformed into a Communist system

If it’s Communism today then it was Communism back when Reagan and Thatcher were doing their thing and beyond. The fact that the previously unreamed are now being reamed does not mean that the system has changed, just its victims.

As for the Marx thing, all I can say is that the more I learn about Marx the more I find myself agreeing with his analyses. The people who make connections between Marx and the Banksters generally leave their criticisms at the fact that, yes, there were connections but they don’t actually tackle the meat of what Marx had to say

That’s not good enough

This may come as news to people who push the ‘Marx was a tool of the Banksters’ meme but every idea that looks like it is going somewhere is, with varying degrees of success, co-opted and turned into a tool of the plutocrats

and that most certainly includes Free Market Capitalism

as well as Communism

and Environmentalism

and Secularism

and Theism

and pretty much any kind of ism that looks like it’s going to make its mark on the world

The give-away moment normally comes when non-compliance with a particular ‘ism’ results in state-sanctioned theft and violence against the individual. It's about then that you can be pretty sure a bunch of fuckers has hijacked a decent or interesting idea with a view to robbing you at gunpoint

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The Financial Con Of The Decade Explained So Simply Even A Congressman Will Get It

Essential Reading from Zero Hedge if you still don't get what's been happening with the bank bailouts and subsequent austerity narrative...

"The Financial Con Of The Decade Explained So
Simply Even A Congressman Will Get It"

"The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk."

The amounts that are being stolen are so huge, the timescale so rapid and the eventual likely impact so pervasive that I cannot believe the plutocrats behind this think they can get away with it indefnitely

Unless they've got something quite nasty up their collective sleeve

And if anyone has the cheek to tell me that there isn't an enormous conspiracy to keep Joe Public in the dark about this enormous scam they can go fuck themselves

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Announcing FF15MP's new Property and Investment supplement

One thing this blog has always lacked is its own Property feature.

I'm going to rectify that right now and inaugurate my new UK Property supplement with a high quality investment opportunity that's only just come to the market...

BUY NOW!!!

Ordinarily, I wouldn't publicise the existence of such a screaming bargain and would hope to quietly snap it up for myself but a) I do not have 250 Large to spend on a cell, and b) I am not insane

In its favour, as well as being in a desirable (sic.) part of North London and close to a railway station, when the time comes, anyone shrewd enough to invest in this compact and bijou residence can have their executor shovel a few spadefuls of earth on it and have it double as their grave

Only the chances are that whoever buys this place will die still owing money on it. So, their corpse would have to turfed out and dumped on a tip and the property put back on the market for the next smart cookie to buy it

Assuming a 10% deposit, a loan of £225,000 at a 5% mortgage rate, this slave hutch can be yours for £1,350 (repayment) or £950 (interest only) per month. When the banking industry decides it wants to take some more money out of your pocket and mortgage interest rates go up to 8% that will be £1,750 and £1,500 respectively. At 10% that will be £2,050 and £1,850

The really insane thing is that I know people who will tell me how much sense this makes. People who have made a *lot* of money flipping properties in the same area that are even more ghastly than this one

The trick is the flipping part

Millions of people in the UK have been playing a nationwide game of financial pass the parcel and as long as they're not the ones left holding the over-priced property with the eye-watering mortgage when the music stops they've won

Only they won't have won, because the economic lives of millions of people left holding over-priced properties with eye-watering mortgages are going to go tits up and everyone is going to have to bear the cost. People who played the property game and those who stayed out of it, all of them.

(As an aside, I understand typical mortgage rates in the UK to be currently in the region of 5% to 6% whereas the savings rate on a typical bog standard deposit account is 0.25%. That's a 20 fold gross profit on the banks' cost of funds. An absolutely eye-watering level of usury by any measure. I suspect that there isn't much outcry over that as most people don't have much in the way of savings and those who do made them off the back of property inflation. However, the banks are getting a lot of that 0.25% money from the government (i.e. the citizens of the UK) and then charging people 5%+ to borrow it back. So, one way or another, people are funding their own debt slavery, whether they are conscious of it or not)

And whether you smell the whiff of conspiracy, or plain stupidity, it's worth asking yourself why virtually no-one, actually I believe no-one, in the mainstream press or government ever questioned the sustainability of house prices rising three, four, five times faster than wages indefinitely. The insane and ruinous inflation of the cost of a fundamental requirement of life, as necessary as food or water, was trumpeted to the heavens

Why are all of those fuckers claiming the Crunch was an unpredictable surprise?

How dumb would you have to be not to see it coming? At the very least this demonstrates that the entire existing system of financial regulation and education needs razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch

That is if you assume our system of financial regulation and education was put in place to protect and nuture the ordinary muppet on the street.

I've worked in finance so I don't

So, we can't afford our own homes, mum and dad are both working to pay the bills, mum and dad are also maxed out on debt, deposit interest rates have been reduced to virtually zero, most of our shit is manufactured by 3rd world slaves, the UK's sold all its oil, most of the infrastructure has been sold off, the financial future of the next few generations has been mortgaged to the hilt, a bugger load of spend has been hidden temporarily in PFI deals and the government has written a lot of bad cheques. Like a junkie or a gambler with an incurable addiction the UK, and the rest of the West, has sold, pawned, borrowed or stolen everything it can just to get through each day, with no thought of tomorrow

Now what?

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The Death of the Middle Class Proletariat

a (slightly) oldie but a goodie...

Elizabeth Warren gets a lot less coverage in the Conspirosphere than Catherine Austin Fitts but I think she does a pretty good job of documenting the death of the American and, by extension, the British, middle class

Because her presentation is based on US demographics it does include elements, such as health insurance, that aren't directly relevant to the UK but the core of her analysis is sound and relevant to people on the other side of The Pond

Another weakness in Warren's presentation is the lack of any analysis of the reasons why the changes she's identified have come to pass. She does an excellent job of demonstrating the size of the hole a typical double-income family finds itself in in 2005, compared to a single income family in 1970, but she doesn't even start to explain where that hole comes from (edit: she does a slightly better job here)

You could, of course, simply shrug your shoulders and say 'shit just happens' but then you probably wouldn't be reading this blog...


(I'd love to claim the expression 'Middle Class Proletariat' as my own but we have the Ministry of Defence to thank for that little pearl)


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edit: of course, as a commentator pointed out underneath one of my posts a little while back, James Goldsmith nailed this subject years ago...



Goldsmith was a peculiar chap. The analysis he presents in this video is perceptive and essentially anti-elitist. Yet, this same man was a robber baron who looked more like a Bond villain (complete with a Bond villain's multi-zillion dollar tropical fortress lair) than anyone else alive and whose family has bumped uglies with the Rothschilds and who are now leading players in the ongoing eugenic global eco-scam

I'm fucked if I know what he was playing at

He doesn't seem to be taking the piss in that video

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edit#2:

and, on the subject of the Fucked Middle Class Consumer, this warms up nicely towards the end...

Hmmm, the Power of Nightmares...

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New BP Logo Contest

Would you like to see more?

Of course, the really entertaining thing is that all these people getting onto the 'Kick BP Whilst It's Down' bandwagon could be playing into the hands of some very ruthless people indeed

Welcome to the mindfuck that is Advanced Conspiraloonery...

Trust no-one. Not even yourself

Blaming the oil companies for the world's ills is so 90's.

It's like blaming the gun when someone gets shot.

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Ghosts

Ireland...

Spain (I've linked to this one before)...

Detroit (a long video but a good one)...

.

It's business as usual and full steam ahead

Would you like to know more?

I got excited for a minute there and thought that the new government was going to give everyone a house.

Unfortunately, the State's definition of home-ownership is a little different from mine and involves a huge fucking mortgage, tailored to meet the full extent of what you can afford; provided you don't get sick, lose your job, have a kid, get married, get divorced...

There again, 'Renting directly from a bank - not renting indirectly from a bank via a landlord - at heart of government housing strategy!!' doesn't have quite the same ring to it

-

edit: some of the commenting underneath that Grauniad article is awesome. I particularly enjoyed

"Brilliant, we could do part-time ownership as well.
For example people who do a night shift could share with people on the dayshift.
This way we can double the returns on housing.
Another way to sort out the house market could be renting out shops
on a part-time shop/ part time accommodation basis.
Workers could live in the factories where they work and cab drivers could
live in their cars.

This way we can assure that there will be enough space for some more
Russian billionaires in London."

It warms the cockles of my heart it does
.