[christmas] just around the corner

It has probably not escaped your attention that we are coming up to Christmas and winter.

Most people are worried about differing things - the employed with the prospect of that going astray, the unemployed with being able to eat and keeping a roof over the head. Householders are worried about mortgages and debt and everyone is worried about prices. The weather doesn't help either nor the seemingly increasing demands within each job - it's an employer's market and yet they themselves are deeply worried.

The two most sustaining things are one's family [if they exist] and the sheer beauty of Britain, in our case and your country in yours. A foreigner asked me a month ago how the British people came to saddle themselves with such laws, such debt and such spiralling prices. This post is for him.

The "people" did no such thing.

Everyone here knows that Blair and Brown did the bulk of the damage, following on from what went before. From the time of the 1991 Baden-Baden and 1993 Vouliagmeni conferences, the die was cast and the country was subject to a con job. In this, the people collaborated the day after Walpurgis, 1997 when the would-be President of Europe was swept to power but theirs was not true guilt unless ignorance can be considered guilt.

What we have here is the people being kept in ignorance by a captive MSM who direct their euphoria and disdain like playing a violin but the newly burgeoning blogosphere, post-2005, has tried to dispel that ignorance the best way they could. Long before that, the mechanism of power was well oiled and the people themselves were living an illusion of a democratic society where the locally preselected member appeared to be accountable. He is accountable but not entirely to his constituents.

Long ago, the banking system broke the nexus between prices and income and inserted credit into the breach, playing on the Thatcherite desire for the good life, to which all people are susceptible. Why not? People have a right to hope for a comfortable life for themselves and for their families.

I use the extreme adjective "evil" to describe the cynical process where someone plays on people's ignorance and susceptibilities to achieve personal gain or mayhem or both. This adjective is not thrown about with abandon but applies to any who know something is not right and yet they do it, to the detriment of other people, having foreseen and worked out the consequences long before. That is what evil means to me and in its milder form - "mischief".

Sub-prime mortgages were never going to be sustainable and the short-termism in those and in the way the market operated, exacerbated by the now irreconcilable price-income gap and given people's fervour to maintain the good life by hook or by crook - it could never have gone any other way. When the people finally woke up to that and to the state's tightening of the data collection and security screws, using a questionable bombing as a pretext, it was pure Hegel.

How to stop the juggernaut?

Look at the weapons - zilch. At least the U.S. and Russia recognize the principle of recall but not here. One waits for an arbitrarily announced date for an election and is then presented with a choice between two similar characters as one's leaders. And not even directly, unless one is voting within those constituencies. The system is rigged and has always been rigged to stymie any real challenge to the power structure. What then is the alternative?

The direst alternative of all - collectivization and nationalization of the means of production and distribution, held by the central government - the process is underway with the banks now. Do you really believe that the crisis occurred completely by chance? Do you really doubt that the ultimate solution has to be the declaration of extraordinary powers and a coalition government, just as it was in WW2?

There were powers that hoped all this would come to fruition at the end of the last century and for various reasons it didn't - everything runs past the due date on a macro scale. So we've been living on borrowed time since the early 90s, in fact.

The person who writes of the future is always on a hiding to nothing and leaves himself open to "conspiracy theorist" charges, to marginalization and resentment if the thing comes to pass. In 2002, it was so clear that Iraq would not see a troop pullout that I wrote emails to a friend about it. He thought this was another crazy idea I'd had. A couple of decades ago, I said that a friend's child would be captain of a prestigious school within three years and she was. Even a fellow blogger who runs an economics blog conceded that certain things which I'd written had come to pass.

It was so bleedin obvious - everything pointed to it. There is zero mystery in this - just a sense of history, a voracious appetite for research and an eye for a repeated pattern. Anyone can do it.

So where does that lead us? Well for most, battening down the hatches for the coming winter but for some poor souls, Tony Sharp was on the money with his touching post on the unemployed. He'd hardly appreciate being associated with a left field post such as this and yet ... may I quote some of his piece?

I know from past experience what it is like to be laid off not long before Christmas, in my case while having a mortgage to pay and having a baby less than a year old to provide for and only receiving a month's money in severance - which is more than a lot of these people will be getting. I feel awful for those people who are losing their jobs.

I identify with their fears and understand the pressures that have suddenly emerged in their lives. I was physically sick with worry about where the next salary payment was going to come from and how the bills were going to be paid. So I can imagine what it must be like for those who find themselves in this position through no fault of their own.

It is easy to look at that statistic of up to 164,000 losing their jobs and forget that we are talking about real people with feelings and emotions. Real people with families and commitments. Real people who may suffer difficulties in their relationships when they most need someone to stand by them and be strong with them.

I just want people to stop and think about what is happening around us and to spare a thought for those who will suffer stress, feelings of rejection and experience depressing hopelessness. Let us hope they get the support they need to find opportunities, grab them and take control of their lives again quickly, before any lasting damage is done.

Amen, Tony.