#Occupy_Quality_Street!!
Don’t Mention the Chocolate War. I was Mention It Once, But I Think I am Get Away with It.
Unless you have been living in a yurt (which is a tent containing pro-biotics), you will have by now have heard of the assortment of people, made homeless by predatory borrowing, who are making themselves at home on the various streets of the Western world, in imitation of the homeless Arabs in the Israel/Illuminati-inspired Arab Spring Surprise, which, coincidentally, was take place last spring. These actions are being called occupations, which is ironic because all these people involved do not have occupations, being generally unkempt, hairy, unable to get out of bed on time, having a bad attitude, talking back to their boss, probably Humanities graduates types of people. Of course, these are always the first types to get hit when a recession takes place; it is a myth that the poor take the big brunt of economic crisises, and the reason is because they are always poor, and therefore they have inbuilt stalwart coping mechanisms already in place to deal with their powerlessness and poverty, such as alcohol, bingo, cigarettes, and church. They do not have any espectations whether the economy is shit hot, or just shit, of any improvement in their lot, whereas during a boom time even Philosophy graduates can find work of some description, even if it is just in the fashion industry, where their feeble bodies are regarded as ideal and their feeble minds regarded as genius.
Now, as you are well know, I am by no means a fan of modernism, modernisty or modernart, but one of the top best things that modernisty ever produced was something called the public square, an idea nicked from the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, who also invented modernisty. The public square is a place, or a Place, usually in the middle of the city, where can be concentrated all the ne’er-do-wells, the moaning Minis, the carpers, the pikeys, the breamers, and every, Tom, Dick, Harry, Sam n’ Ella, thereby keeping them out of the way of hard-working decent ordinary apolitical and non-political people, the so-called backbone or cervix of society, who can therefore get on with their lives of quiet desperation undisturbed by rabble-carousing hordes. In Germany, always ahead of the herd, they went one better: Rather than a Public Square, they have instead the Public Sphere, invented by the Frankfurt School of Design and named after the famous and brilliant Nazi architect Sir Albert Sphere. This not only concentrates the city’s malcontents, it is also sound-proof, so nobody can hear them scream. In Morocco, on the other hand, rather than a sphere, they have the ram’s bladder cup, which contains all the piss and vinegar but is open to the sky, where their Gods live.
These present-day malingering occupants, however, either have not realize that they are meant to use the public square, or else they cannot read a map. Or also, a further possibility is that they are like the zombies in the Evil Deadmovies returning to the shopping mall, but instead of the shopping mall they are returning to the places where they use to work or where their money use to be, namely, banks, offshore covens, golf courses, the pockets of short-armed bondtraders and cetera. They are milling about aimlessly, not knowing at all where they are going or what they are moaning about, also like zombies. This, incidentally, is what happens when you have a leaderless movement. In the old days, when there was things like useful trades unions, well-disciplined communist parties, reliable propaganda mechanisms, the idiot proletariat could be relied upon to march properly, all in a line behind their smarter but still idiot leaders, through the weekend streets when the offices are all shut, and all the way to the public square, where they was then entertained by tedious speeches from the platform, vacuous polemical haranguing, and Bono. Then they would go home and try to spot themselves on the news. When the cold war was ending, however, and capitalism no longer had any use of the useful idiots leading the useless idiots up a back alley to nowhere, then the unions and communist parties was all put into cold war storage, like the delivery boy inFuturama, only perhaps to be brought out again in a time of crisis when it looks like the peoples are starting to get ideas above their station. Or even next to their station.
Thus, no doubt soon you will probly hear soon some business leaders or pretend potential self-appointed communist leaders lamenting the lack of organization of the #Occupy movements, describing them as “in choate” (which is a kind of wide penis with no head), or “udderless,” or “lacking discernible goals” (like Sporting Gijon). What they are really mean is that there is a ferment of new ideas that therefore could be dangerous and must be curtailed, or at least curtopped. After all, nobody has any idea where a march that goes nowhere might end up. If these peoples weren’t too feckless to emigrate we could at least lure them onto a ferry with the promise of jobs in Australia and transport them there. We would never hear of them ever again! But while they are there, in the midst of ordinary, heads-down, knees-back God-fearing punters, fermenting theories without limitations and trying out new processes, such as democracy-never a positive development-they constitute a threat to our docile, passive, obedient way of life. They must be stomped on by square-headed baton-wielding riot police, preferably from up the country, before any new ideas seep out into the public body at large, like a ball of ideological pus.
The one advantage of having these malodorous obnoxities stay in one place for the time being is that the virus which they represent cannot spread. What is more, it will be actually possible to sow a virus amongst them themselves. Not an ideological one. A proper one. I am not wanting to imagine for one moment what the sanitary conditions must be like on Wall Street, for instance, but it will only be a matter of time before the first spores of anthrax ripple through the throng; there must still be some of them left over from the biological research programs carried out by those involved in Farm Warfare (the CIA training facility, not the band from Liverpool). I have already been told that there is a cockroach cluster assembling in Battery Park which has been trained to sneak into protestors’ sleeping bags and deposit there a cough and cholera strain (possibly I misheard and it is a “cuff and collar” strain, equally deadly to these workshy recalcitrants. Or perhaps I am confusing it with the Tie Flu.
You would naturally espect that countries like Italy and Spain, with their soft-centred atheist anarchist cosmopolitan populations, would soon fall for this sort of protesting. So far, Paris, home to the crunchy Frog, has not surrendered, but it is only a matter of time. Saddest of all is the news that even in Holy Pissing Ireland they have a couple of #Occupy sites. This is the sort of thing you can see and hear if you go to the one in Dublin. Is a big disgrace! I am mortified. I think.
In fact, you know what? I think you should go down there right NOW if you are in Ireland and tell them what you think. And tell them Manuel sent you!
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EU Should Admit Greece is Bankrupt | Christian Rickens
The unvarnished truth - the second Greek Bailout should not have happened.
The mistake isn’t the size, but the construction of the bailout package. It isn’t geared to the requirements of the people of Greece but to the needs of the international financial markets, meaning the banks.
How else can one explain the fact that around a quarter of the package won’t even arrive in Athens but will flow directly to the country’s international creditors? The holders of Greek government bonds are to get some €30 billion as an incentive to convert their old paper into new bonds. The aim is to keep alive the illusion that Greece isn’t bankrupt — after all, the creditors are voluntarily forgiving part of the debt. The financial sector is cleverly manipulating the fear that a Greek bankruptcy would trigger a fatal chain reaction.
That leaves €100 billion. But that too isn’t geared to what Greece needs in order to get back on its feet. It’s linked to an estimate of how much debt the Greek economy can bear without collapsing. International technocrats agree that with debts amounting to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the country can just about go on servicing its debt. That’s the level at which the cow can go on supplying milk without dying of exhaustion. So 120 percent became the goal.
Collaboration, with our European partners | Cunning Hired Knaves
The European project was supposed to be a bulwark against the dangers of fascist ambition, but now it is the instrument used to dismantle European democracy in the interest of the risk adverse looking for a steady income stream from the provision of the social net by those who cite the words and actions of old fascists while doing so.
The post Collaboration, with our European partners by Richard of Cunning Hired Knaves summed up in one sentence. For much better sentences and many more urgent points read the post.
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations throughout the Spanish state, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was undertaken.
S.P.A.R.K. protest at cuts to lone parents, Dublin 18th February 2012
Many families were cut in the last budget but lone parent families were particularly hit by the Fine Gael/Labour Party government.
The key elements are that single parents can’t take advantage of training such as Community Employment (CE) Schemes and when the youngest child turns 7 years old, the parent is declassed as a lone parent but treated as an ordinary worker even though there are few affordable creche places. There is a bill coming up in March which will copper fasten some of the worst elements of government plans.
There is particular anger directed at the Labour Party because they are associated with women’s rights and a more progressive society.
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Exiting the euro | Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts argues that those in Greece who cite the example of Argentina when suggesting that Greece should leave the Euro are not necessarily looking at the whole picture. The situations are not the same, Roberts points out, citing Argentina’s former central bank governor at the time, Mario Blejer and his recent piece in the Financial Times. He also points to research based on the the experience of five recent devaluations of economies in crisis (including that of Argentina) which “shows that they lead to a 10-20% fall in real GDP and take five to ten years to recover to previous real GDP levels. But that is not to say that there is no alternative to “lowering wages, privatising the state sector, reducing taxes for the corporate sector (especially big business) and ‘deregulating’ labour markets i.e. the super-exploitation of the Greek people to raise profitability.”
But the left could also find an alternative policy to exiting the euro where Greece negotiates a full default on its debt to private and foreign bondholders; takes over the banks; and uses the savings from bond and interest repayments (€17-20bn a year) to start state directed investment in jobs, technology and funding small businesses, while staying in the euro to protect the savings of the people from destruction, keeping down inflation and avoiding a rise in foreign debt. The question of exiting the euro then becomes an issue for the Euro leaders to impose (and to be resisted by a campaign within Europe), not as the main policy plank of the left.
Corporate tax avoidance: where are the worst offenders?
This table comes via the Tax Justice Network (and Richard Murphy). It’s from a table produced by U.S. researcher Kimberly Clausing and as TJN notes “demonstrates which countries are working hardest to wage economic warfare on the United States (and, by extension, on other countries,) via the global tax system”.
Solidarity campaign to support the people of Greece
Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, have issued a call for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity. We have decided to support this call and work with trade unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. We will organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.
Chris Dillow | Capitalism against freedom
[...]
During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
Today, though, this seems wrong. Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom.
Ian Stewart | The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash
In The Observer, Sunday 12 February 2012
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Greece: a Sisyphean task | Michael Roberts
In a Eurozone that is unwilling to share its surplus with weaker, hardest hit economies there is no other option for those economies but default. Despite the agreement of Greek politicians to shorten their political life and accept the deal all that they have done is simply postpone this eventuality once again. However, even that postponement might be shortened by the Greek elections in April where the smaller leftist parties outside the coalition currently have 40% of the vote. Or so says Michael Roberts:
Whatever the Greek coalition leaders agree to and try to implement, such is the weakness of Greek capitalism, it will not be able to meet its fiscal targets or get its debt down to reasonable levels. Before the end of the year, the Troika will have to report that Greece is not delivering. Then the EU leaders will have to decide whether they ‘let Greece go’ or not. The EU leaders have agreed to more money for Greece (or more accurately its bondholders and banks) in return for draconian cuts in living standards in order to provide more time to try and ‘ring-fence’ other vulnerable Eurozone states like Portugal and Ireland (where they are preparing extra funding). So when Greece goes down, it will not affect the rest (or so the EU leaders hope). Of course, the Greek people may force the issue earlier if they vote in an anti-Troika government in April.
As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose | Maria Margaronis
Do we really want to live in an economic union that must destroy the future of millions in order to just tick along? Maria Margaronis points out that the situation in Greece today says little about Greece and everything about the EU.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what’s really at stake here is not Greece’s identity but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
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