Monday, July 13, 2009

[after the destruction] come the calls for the dismantling

Welcome to your future

Sorry to post again on the state of the economy but I couldn't let one particularly cynical piece of rubbish go by without comment.

This article by former Revolutionary Communist Party organiser James Heartfield was quoted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales. "Former" communist? As in former male or former female? Former breather of the air?

In summary, Heartfield’s view is that British capitalism is now so crap that it needs to be supported by the state. That is why the government is nationalising and privatising at the same time. Privatisation, he argues, allows the private sector to make money from state functions while nationalisation and state intervention is used to prop up failing banks and car companies. Both are a result of capitalism’s decreasing ability to generate profits in the traditional way; by creating products that sell in the marketplace. It is because capitalism is now so feeble, says Heartfield, that it needs propping up by state spending on outsourced services and bailouts.

What absolute bollocks and precisely what was expected as the next stage in the dismantling of the free state. Rick's contention is that today's managers are rubbish, "intelligent" cuts are necessary and that capitalism has failed. He's right on two of these.

With one or two words altered, by and large, this was my reply to his post:
As I and many others have been pointing out for some years now, the problem is not capitalism. It is the international socialism as represented in Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BIS, Round Table groups et al who advise and control governments. One key figure in this, in British terms, is Paul Tucker.

The immediate goals in America are different to in Europe – here it is tied in to post-Lisbon and the unsustainable Blair/Brown utopia which Blind Freddy could see was never going to work.
It’s hardly fair to accuse “capitalism” of failing when Brown’s treasury has snuffed out incentive to start up small and medium businesses and those which do have their hands tied by a punitive tax code and a range of stealth taxes are on a hiding to nothing.

It’s wonderful these calls for cuts which are going to be dumped onto the Tories plus the debt for two generations. And who will be cut first? The NHS patients least able to afford it and newly redundant middle-class employees.


Brown’s lot have crippled “capitalism” and then turned around and said capitalism’s failed. As Chesterton said, “it hasn’t been tried and failed. It’s been found too difficult and left untried.” Or in other words, turned into state and monopoly capitalism and imposed on a market which would like to be free please, thanks very much.


We haven’t seen unfettered capitalism for decades, the sort which gives the jobs, not the sort which is now losing jobs all across the country.
Heartfield would be expected to trot out that balderdash because it is part of the dismantling of the bourgeoisie that that lot have always subscribed to.

What's the difference between a communist and a socialist? In my book, it is that the socialist swallows the balderdash which the communist feeds him and actually believes in a state where everyone is forced onto the one wage, everyone is forced to be equal by Procrustean legislation, everyone is forced to become dependent on the omnipotent state and everyone lives happily ever after.

The communist knows it will never work but it's a good enough path to the totalitarianism which is their true objective - not the dictatorship by the proletariat but the state dictatorship over the proletariat. It has ever been so.

The sheer gall in suggesting that a system which can't even breathe under these circumstances and is at the mercy of Them, as named above, has somehow "failed"!

Wolfie points us to this article about Madoff 2.

Now, what should be done? Penalize the man in the early stages of his game and have him thrown out, as the regulatory body at the stock exchange used to do or to extinguish capitalism altogether?

What is needed now is for the socialist shackles to be thrown off, for government incentives to be given to start up small and medium businesses in terms of cranking down legislation, for venture capital to be available on terms from a plethora of small banks, for the managers of the large banks and all their bailed-out ilk to be prosecuted for their crimes instead of given pay rises, for them to be prevented from going anywhere near the trough in future, for the tax codes to be radically altered so that both business and the ordinary citizen can breathe again, for the cuts to be made to the ridiculous socialist programmes such as ID card legislation, CCTV and so on and so on and for representation at Westminster to be on the basis of merit rather than cynical preselection procedures.

The NEP men in the USSR, the PFIs and the like show categorically that the socialists are well aware that capitalism is the best model. Heartfelt above even acknowledges that. So it's time to allow it to show what it can do free of the touch of death of Mandelson, Brown and their ilk.

Martin Kelly quotes these people:

Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued.

... and then comments:

This statement does not acknowledge that no electorate has ever been asked whether they wish their government to pursue a globalist economic policy, the Global North having had globalisation imposed upon them by elites, the South by a World Bank and an IMF in thrall to The Washington Consensus; and accordingly it does not and indeed cannot address the fundamental question of whether globalisation, whatever it actually is, can be considered to be legitimate.

Amen to that. Finally, tangentially to the main theme above, William Gruff brings us a ray of hope for the new week:

Thirteen 'specialist medics' have come together to allege that Dr David Kelly was murdered ...

New Kelly inquest required?

16 comments:

  1. What next? Big Brother forcing All to queue up for the flu jab?

    http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/Everyone-in-the-UK-to.5452124.jp#4214041

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  2. It's everywhere, HGF and good morning ... no ... let me see ... good night, sleep tight to you.

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  3. James.

    Triple A rating loss will be anticipated by the markets by several months.

    Rating agencies have rarely been pro active, despite the headlines.

    To return to the point.
    "They" have long acknowledged that proper capitalism will always out produce socialism, in whatever garb.

    That is not the point. They want control/power, for its own sake, and their route offers the least resistance to control.

    You could draw an comparison now, between the present and the commencement of The second Stuart King, the fledgling "Invisible college", and the insistence by the Vatican that the earth being at the centre, yada, yada, despite the daily evidence of the Churches own apparatus designed to predict eclipses. - eg,the current global carbon nonsense and non-science, which has now become a quasi-religion.

    Note that the replacement of feudalism and superstition took centuries, began in an extremely private manner, the founders being a cross-section of class and wealth, the product being scientifically logical, economically beneficial, and backed (briefly) by the monarch before his demise. Note that his demise was created by elitist Anglicans, and a Vatican prepared to finance his demise.

    Despite his demise, the invisible college prevailed. Because it was invisible in the early days, it appealed to REASON, with an element of patriotism, (the Dutch were a problem that partly motivated its creation) thrown in.

    Speaking of the invisible hand, Martin Armstrong now equates the "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations",that Xlbrl refers to, to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - equivalent in economics, given the international financial complexity, mixed with human emotions, and a host of other factors.

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  4. Armstrong:

    The stock market by no means predicts the economy. A stock market crash does not cause a Depression. The Crash of 1903 was properly titled – “The Rich Man's Panic." What has always distinguished a recession from a Depression is the stock market drop may signal a recession, but the collapse in debt signals a Depression. This Depression was set in motion by (1) excessive leverage by the banks once more, but (2) the lifting of usury laws back in 1980 to fight inflation that opened the door to the highest consumer interest rates in thousands of years and shifted spending that created jobs into the banks as interest on things like credit cards. As a percent of GDP, household debt doubled since 1980 making the banks rich and now the clear and present danger to our economic survival. A greater proportion of spending by the consumer that use to go to savings and creating jobs, goes to interest and that has undermined the ability to avoid a major economic melt-down.

    Interesting chap.

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  5. Herewith

    James, your quote...
    Yes, the man is a genius, - that's why he is where he is, his patented software allows him to see too much, that's why "they" want the source code.
    He brings "time" and other factors in, and shows them as part of a complex interaction of simultaneous sine waves. Sometimes the interactions increase, or reduce, the amplitude of the base carrier wave.
    That is his point, and the differences we feel in the world.

    Draw lessons from my historical comparison above, in your theoretical attempts to counter "them" in the present.

    A greater proportion of spending by the consumer that use to go to savings and creating jobs, goes to interest and that has undermined the ability to avoid a major economic melt-down.....
    And that is the whole point about carbon emissions, cap and trade, and green taxes everywhere, (£1.6 billion currently in our domestic electricity bills, and rising) Keep the serfs poor!

    "Some years ago Mr. Bill Gates traveled to China, and liked what he saw. This was the model of capitalism which he favored: a small but powerful elite centrally planning an economy peopled by semi-feudal serfs, and living large on the backs of the many".

    Remember Gates tie in with Rockefeller in the Arctic grain store!!!!
    A future fee payable on everything.

    Herewith

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  6. It will be the bond market that sees the loss of AAA.

    Herewith

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  7. Bond prices falling, given this gov't track record, could well create more demand for QE from the gov't, (pressure on the MPC), such is the lunacy prevalent. (There are current rumours of pressure on Bernanke for more QE)

    QE in the UK sustains Broons current slash and burn policy.. - it would be economically better applied to corporate bonds.

    IMF intervention in the Autumn may be replaced by ECB intervention after your projected Lisbon implementation.

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  8. Why can't you be a "former " communist, James?

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  9. Anon - thanks and shall follow them.

    Welshcakes - an excellent and fair question. A communist is far more hard line [you've no doubt read Georges Sorel - yes, I know he was pre C - and Trotsky].

    He generally knows what his game plan will lead to. Call it semantics but I see the socialist as softer, having been duped through a general 'love everybody regardless and let's all be equal' mentality which is very persuasive for nice people.

    I know an academic who contributed to the Euston Manifesto and I'm still deciding which he is. I suspect he might be the former and be well aware of where the thrust is currently going.

    I think if the left liberal, say, can be shown, even in these comments in this section, what is actually happening, there is some room for compromise. With what I call a communist, there is no room whatsoever - he is the enemy.

    Just my point of view.

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  10. Calm down dear boy!
    At least for long enough to read what I said not what you think I said. I didn't say capitalism had failed and I didn't say today's managers are rubbish. Managers today are no worse than they were 20 years ago. It's just that in today's environment there are more obstacles to managing performance, which give crap managers more excuses for doing nothing.

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  11. PFIs and the like show categorically that the socialists are well aware that capitalism is the best model

    No all that proves is the government didn't have enough money and were trying to balance the books!

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  12. Oh dear, Cherie.

    Why didn't the government have enough money then? Could it have been because they squandered it, e.g. in selling off 400 metric tonnes of gold at rock bottom prices, robbing the pension funds and sending eveything they touched pear-shaped?

    Could that have had anything to do with the dearth of money? :)

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  13. Now maybe this dearth of money was setting for quite a number of years before that ;-)

    But yes all those things contributed.

    My comment on your previous post indicates that we have suspected this for years...

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  14. Cherie, this is Labour's attempt to shift the blame.

    The country was not bankrupt for two generations at that point and didn't have the vast dole receivers and defaulting businesses with no incentive for any new business to set up which we now have.

    Black Wednesday and all the philandering were black marks but don't forget that after 1992, the country came back under Major's stewardship and he handed Britain over to Blair in reasonably good nick.

    If we accept your thesis that it was all Maggie's fault and the debt was already there, then why didn't they fix those problems? They've had twelve years to do it.

    Instead, they've created disillusion and gloom which were reflected in the last election results, have criminalized large numbers of people through 3000 new laws, have let Health and Safety run amok and have put us into a totalitarian state or do you think ID cards are a good thing?

    I'm aware that the believers in the movement think all is well and that any problems came from the Tories but unfortunately, the electorate as a whole does not share that view.

    If you'd like a catalogue of Labour blunders, there's a site called Burning Our Money, with a blogger called Wat Tyler. It goes into great detail.

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  15. Cherie, dear, here's one from today about the lightbulbs mailed out to people:

    The Department of Energy and Climate Change admits that it is "concerned" at the mailings – described yesterday by campaigners as a waste – and has agreed to ban them.

    But it has decided not so do so for another six months to allow even more of the bulbs to be sent out - even though every home in the country has already, on average, received at least eight of them.

    That's why there's no money in the country, along with other "intelligent" schemes.

    In all honesty, hand on your heart, would you use the term "competent" for the public sector today?

    I ask only for information.

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  16. No James I wouldn't call the management of them competent these days.

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