While uber Kommisar Gordon flails and flops around in his vat of rapidly boiling financial crisis oil, a horse nowhere in sight, the flames lick ever higher across the battered shores of UK PLC. With HBOS dragging the once proud Lloyds into the pit of mire and corruption from whence sprang our one-eyed-and-purple-tied nemesis, the rusty penny has finally begun to drop on a middle England still smarting from the demise of Wedgwood and wondering when the garden center is going to close down:this is indeed no ordinary “cyclical“ crisis.
As apocalyptic prognostications leap daily from the pages of our national media, each passing week brings a new slew of grim tidings from the sludge pipe of national economic gloom. “British jobs for British workers!” cry some, “foreigners out,” others. But, alas, it is of no use in Mandy Antoinnette’s EU meat grinder, where the former nation of Great Britain is read the last rights by Global Corporate union busting wage arbitrageurs and their authoritarian political minions, busy scheming and plotting the final demise of Democracy in Europe on behalf of their kelptomaniacal banker puppeteers.
After the feverish and hysterical headlines of 2008, a certain sense of stunned aftershock seems to have set in, accompanied by a kind of mystified “what the hell is happening” pathology of mental docility. Well, let me make it plain for you, if anyone reading this is still confused about what is actually happening to our economy: As the Bank of England prepares to engage in their newly minted powers of “quantitative easing,” vast quantities of “toxic securities” (note the deliberate refusal to even use the correct terminology for what these “securities” actually are, namely derivatives - in plain English, gambling debts) are effectively being swapped for hard earned cash currency from the public purse, in the form of the tax revenues of you and your family. It is no exaggeration to say that the way things are going your great great great grandchildren will still be paying off the debts that are now being dumped on Johnny taxpayer, assuming any of your children survive to pay taxes under rapidly degenerating social conditions, and all this for the express purpose of keeping the doors of the global derivatives casino open for business.
So what does this actually mean? Well, pretty soon it will become abundantly clear that there are not enough tax revenues available to meet these obligations, and therefore a number of “politically unpopular” measures will need to be taken by the government. Firstly, taxes will need to increase, of which carbon taxes are clearly a major component. Next, what is left of our public infrastructure will need to be privatised to balance the national budget, which is what “road pricing” is all about (actually it is using PPI to “fund” public infrastructure, which requires a constant income stream to pay the interest on the bond financing – a massive boondoggle for the bankers and private equity pirates). And last but not least, social programs will need to be cut or abandoned, so pretty soon people can forget about the NHS because it simply will not survive the first round of such “rule by emergency decree” cost cutting in any recognisable form.
All in all, not a pretty vision of what is in store for the UK unless the activities of the financial establishment and their puppet "government" are not brought rapidly under control.
Meanwhile, across the pond, whereas the short term battle for votes over President Obama’s hotly contested “stimulus package” has been won, the political war of ideas rages on, with some Democrats openly touting FDR era “New Deal” proposals, as against the “free trade” fiscal conservatism of the Churchill worshiping GOP. We say some democrats of course, because the pestilence of top-down banker-induced corruption still infests the party leadership like a bad dose of herpes. As of writing, individuals such as Rep Barney Frank and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi still stubbornly refuse to even discuss the fact of the underlying breakdown crisis of the US and global banking systems and allow the available remedies to be put forward by the Presidency.
The stakes could not be higher, and the historical parallels no less significant in these fiercely partisan times, for let us not forget that while Churchill himself was lauding Il Duce as a great leader of the Italian nation, FDR was marshalling the arsenal of Democracy to prepare America to fight a world war and save Europe from its own perpetual folly. As any first grade history student will tell you, in a depression you essentially have two choices of economic policy: grow your way out of the crisis, or balance the budget even if it kills people. And so, stubborn ideological fetishes aside, have we truly learned nothing from history?
With the global political winds blowing in favour of a replay of depression era calamities, astute readers will recognise that the new "leader of the free world" faces dangers and obstacles every bit as serious as those of his adopted historical mentor, Abraham Lincoln. The fascist right wing and their Wall St cronies, smarting from electoral humiliation and facing a decade in the political wilderness as the most popular man to be elected President since the 1940s ushers in a new era of hope for the lower 80% of “forgotten men and women” in America, may be forced to take matters into their own hands before the aforementioned winds of change converge and blow them unceremoniously from the pages of history. Thus, in the spirit of friendship and goodwill, we say to President Obama, beware the Ides of March, for something evil this way comes.
But perhaps, after all, every evil cloud has a silver lining. We hear in dispatches that Trump Entertainment Resorts recently missed a $53.1 million payment to bondholders, and may close down casino operations in Atlanta. So let this be a message to those who want to use this financial crisis to further entrench the culture of gambling and speculation that has wiped out legitimate economic activity across the globe: organised crime never pays in the end.