The Super-Reluctant Builder/Bidder and Us

Apolgies if this has been raised before, but I've just got round to watching my recording of the excellent documentary series "The Super-Rich and Us" by Jacques Perretti.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xw4rw



It shows how the staggering rise in inequality that is paradoxically both a symptom and a cause of the last economic crash (and the possibly even worse one that is almost certainly on the way) was deliberately engineered by the banking kleptocracy.

Interestingly the architects of the deliberate get-filthy-rich-even-quicker scheme to make billions off the backs of the poorest, dreamt up by leeches who to this day continue to make hay while the workless and disabled are demonised by venal politicians, newspaper editors and their witless followers as "benefit c**t(s)" (as a wheelchair bound acquaintance of mine claimed to have been called last year) were none other than the delightful Citigroup.

Even more interestingly the scheme was cooked up at the same time as the Dear Leader who has brought such integrity, honesty, openness and transparency to the manor of Peverell was one of the most senior global executives at the aforementioned Kleptocracy Numero Uno Inc.

It's no longer available on iplayer, but I believe that by virtue of some new-fangled interweb thingy or other you can get it if you really want. Don't ask me how, but I'm told it would be at your own risk.


http://explore.bfi.org.uk/54ac6d1c134b9

"Jacques Peretti looks at how today's wealth inequality didn't happen by chance, but was started in the US by Citigroup as a business opportunity. He looks at the change in the financial markets in the 80s, when taking risks was being encouraged. In the wake of the latest financial crisis, after the US banking crisis of the 2000s, the super-rich have benefited the most from the government's bailout."




http://moggymilitant.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/notes-from-super-rich-and-us.html

"Peretti reported that soaring imequality (sic) was a business opportunity for the wealthy to make money out of us. Britain’s inequality has risen every year this century. 85 people now earn the same as half the world’s population.

Peretti reported that people are incensed but they would be even more incensed if they knew this inequality wasn’t an accident, it was a plan. The growing prosperity of the super-rich is directly linked to the austerity we’ve been suffering for the last 5 years.

The plan began ten years ago in New York with the Citigroup Bank. The people at this bank worked out how to turn it into ‘a business opportunity’. It was set out in a document for investors. Citigroup realized there was an opportunity at the bottom of society, a chance to make billions from poor people."



I'm sure Che would have approved.

Amazing what a play off defeat can bring forth.

It's amazing the shite that people will put up with before they kick off IMO. Don't forget the anti austerity march at the Bank of England on June 20th.

To be fair I did watch it a few weeks back, but given our respective fortunes you can hardly blame me for not wanting to read this forum then, let alone post.

Iggy wrote:

It's amazing the shite that people will put up with before they kick off IMO. Don't forget the anti austerity march at the Bank of England on June 20th.

If you ask me deep down people are scared and insecure. I suspect that something at the back of their mind is telling them that things are on a more of a knife-edge than their leaders are letting on, even if they are unaware that housing is just one of a number of unsustainable asset bubbles getting ready to pop. In that scenario people tend to be innately conservative and to lash out at scapegoats, whether that be benefit scroungers or whoever - its only when those fears are realised that they question more deeply.

Of course the situation isn't helped by the fact that most people don't understand the technicalities and tend to believe self-serving politicians and the like when they manipulate statistics in the cause of ideology. The mendacious treatment of macroeconomics as a question of which policy seems to be intuitively correct based on perceptions of "common-sense" is a case in point - witness the infamously moronic and wrong-headed Household/Business analogy that constantly gets parroted when cuts are defended ("Every Housewife and small business owner knows that if they spend more on Groceries/Stock than their income then woe betide them! If we trick you into electing us we will learn those lessons!" yada yada) instead of looking at the facts, the historical context and the way in which the behaviour of very large and very small systems is often counter-intuitive (funnily enough Quantum Mechanics is a very roughly similar phenomenon in terms of a microscopic system behaving counterintuitively).

This explains the swallowing of the ideologically-driven BS about the deficit and the debt by people who could barely define the terms, let alone give you the figures or compare the historic trends. Even the Labour Party have now comprehensively given up defending themselves in the face of ridicule from those who know better and  idiotic Question Time audiences who don't and have decided its easier to gain support if you pander to widely believed misconceptions and apologise anyway. (I can only hope that the new leader abandons the tedious pretence of the past two decades and renames the party "Capital").


Triumph Of The Unthinking  - The New York Times (Why the claims of a historic UK fiscal crisis is a deceit)

...nowhere was the triumph of inanity (i.e the fiscal crisis narrative) more complete than in (the UK) which is going to the polls as I write this... nobody with influence is challenging transparently false claims and bad ideas...every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis... was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency...

...this nonsense narrative (of the historic deficit/debt crisis)  completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win.But why?...

(The leading Ocford University economist, Simon Wren-Lewis)  suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. ...my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)

...The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.


The Centre For Macroeconomics Survey - The Importance of Elections for UK Economic Activity (Most economists reject austerity and the fiscal crisis myth).


"In the week before the dissolution of Parliament, the Centre for Macroeconomics asked its panel of experts about the effects of governments on aggregate economic activity.

The great majority of respondents (i.e prominent economists) disagree with the proposition that the coalition government’s austerity policies have had a positive effect on aggregate economic activity. And an overwhelming majority of respondents agree that the outcome of the general election (assuming a stable government is formed) will have non-trivial consequences for economic activity."




...

I would truly love a commentator on the mainstream media actually ask the question, who do we owe this deficit to? Can't wait to hear the convoluted way they explain that the central banks,IMF, world bank etc are run by the very same 85 vultures that own half the world!! It's all been rigged for hundreds of years folks and headed by the same stateless names!!

It's getting worse though Bandy, much worse, the lobbying of the parties by big business would have the participants banged up in minutes if they operated in any other sphere of business other than the top ten per cent of business who is bunging the government large amounts of cash to change and create policy. If it happened at a local council level the participants would be facing a twelve stretch.
In the seventies the labour did the old money aristocrats and I didn't hear anyone moan much when the wealth transferred to the chosen ones at the time. Since then the raids on wealth have been the middle classes (basically anyone who owns a house) and is unprecedented in scale. Whilst we suffer austerity budgets sales of Rollers are going though the roof and the food these people eat isn't worth the bother unless it's covered in gold, shat out the arse of a ferret and served by a eunuch with a Calvin Klein bag over his emasculated privates. Comparisons with the French aristocracy and the modern day gods of the capitalist system would amuse me more if I didn't get rankled by the fact that I have contributed approx. £24k for them to be able to enjoy unborn suveed rabbit feotus with Mongolian snow potato gnocchi, spring vegetables cooked in a colander and served in a plant pot with a foam lovingly de constructed from the failed dreams of 99% of the people who worked to provide the ingredients.

Iggy wrote:

It's getting worse though Bandy, much worse, the lobbying of the parties by big business would have the participants banged up in minutes if they operated in any other sphere of business other than the top ten per cent of business who is bunging the government large amounts of cash to change and create policy. If it happened at a local council level the participants would be facing a twelve stretch.
In the seventies the labour did the old money aristocrats and I didn't hear anyone moan much when the wealth transferred to the chosen ones at the time. Since then the raids on wealth have been the middle classes (basically anyone who owns a house) and is unprecedented in scale. Whilst we suffer austerity budgets sales of Rollers are going though the roof and the food these people eat isn't worth the bother unless it's covered in gold, shat out the arse of a ferret and served by a eunuch with a Calvin Klein bag over his emasculated privates. Comparisons with the French aristocracy and the modern day gods of the capitalist system would amuse me more if I didn't get rankled by the fact that I have contributed approx. £24k for them to be able to enjoy unborn suveed rabbit feotus with Mongolian snow potato gnocchi, spring vegetables cooked in a colander and served in a plant pot with a foam lovingly de constructed from the failed dreams of 99% of the people who worked to provide the ingredients.

I take it we are on about that obnoxious food for the rich prog last week - wife made me turn it off after 10 mins!! Sickening is about all you can say really especially when companies like Monsatan are creating frankenfood for us plebs - everything revolves about a central bank creating free money at interest, so simple really!!

Iggy wrote:

It's getting worse though Bandy, much worse, the lobbying of the parties by big business would have the participants banged up in minutes if they operated in any other sphere of business other than the top ten per cent of business who is bunging the government large amounts of cash to change and create policy. If it happened at a local council level the participants would be facing a twelve stretch.
In the seventies the labour did the old money aristocrats and I didn't hear anyone moan much when the wealth transferred to the chosen ones at the time. Since then the raids on wealth have been the middle classes (basically anyone who owns a house) and is unprecedented in scale. Whilst we suffer austerity budgets sales of Rollers are going though the roof and the food these people eat isn't worth the bother unless it's covered in gold, shat out the arse of a ferret and served by a eunuch with a Calvin Klein bag over his emasculated privates. Comparisons with the French aristocracy and the modern day gods of the capitalist system would amuse me more if I didn't get rankled by the fact that I have contributed approx. £24k for them to be able to enjoy unborn suveed rabbit feotus with Mongolian snow potato gnocchi, spring vegetables cooked in a colander and served in a plant pot with a foam lovingly de constructed from the failed dreams of 99% of the people who worked to provide the ingredients.

That is comedy gold (in a good way).

It was such a hilarious parody of the revelations contained in the new brand of "ooh aren't the super-rich fascinating" BS telly documentaries (softening us up for yet greater wealth inequality no doubt) that I nearly choked on my Sainsburys blackcurrant squash.

Mark my words - the coming attack on the BBC is laying the ground for the sort of deregulation that will pave the way for a FOX news type channel to help ramp up this message and add to the press pack screaming that the super-rich are only super-rich because they're somehow better than us and that benefit scum are a lesser form of life suckling at the teat of the mahoosive 5% of our taxes that prevents US from being super-rich too.

This might help to explain why things just dont seem right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0

Has the Argyle Talk site been taken over the David Icke fans all of a sudden? What a load of old bollocks.

Watch out for the lizard people.

pilgrimfather wrote:

Has the Argyle Talk site been taken over the David Icke fans all of a sudden? What a load of old bollocks.

Watch out for the lizard people.

Nothing to do with David Icke - I have no idea what his politics are.

The fact is that a giant confidence trick has been played on people by our right-wing politicians and Brent's ilk who have deliberately misrepresented the fiscal position over the last ten or so years in order to convince ordinary people that the policies which have allowed the former to amass obscene wealth is equally good for those who have to struggle for relatively little. The most ugly part of it is the classic and deliberate divide and rule that has seen one section of society which has been made to struggle under the current system fooled into turning on the most vulnerable section of society, instead of directing their ire at those who are really responsible for the mess. When people in wheelchairs are complaining that they're being abused on the tube as "Benefit c**ts", then something is seriously f**ked up in the state of Denmark.

I struck up a conversation with some middle-class PA girl on the train to Exeter a while back. She started bitching about poor people in council houses living in areas like Notting Hill when she wanted to live there (now its turned from a poor area to a rich one) and couldn't afford to do so. She thought the fair thing to do would be to double and triple their rents and if they were forced out of areas their families had lived in for generations in favour of wealthy yuppies moving in to colonise the place then that was just too bad and the market would be working as it should. This idiotic beggar-thy-neighbour spite which has been deliberately fanned by right-wing politicians and the right-wing media is the real load of old bollocks.

If you watched Channel 4 news today you would have seen a discussion about austerity in the UK and the Eurozone in which a prominent economist stated that nearly all serious economists believe that austerity is a bonkers policy which could bring disaster on all our heads if we're not very lucky.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to recognise austerity for the nonsense that it is.

As for that much-vaunted "long-term economic plan"... We now have delation.

Osborne will go down in history as the worst chancellor we have ever had. Even worse than Lamont.

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I'm glad I'm not the only one to recognise austerity for the nonsense that it is.

As for that much-vaunted "long-term economic plan"... We now have delation.

Osborne will go down in history as the worst chancellor we have ever had. Even worse than Lamont.

I see growth contracted during the first quarter. The lack of coverage this and how much the Conservatives have actually borrowed and spent given by the mainstream press is shocking. Having seen moderate growth in the first quarter of 2010, its was then stamped out by Austerity, yet now the Government proposes the same?

There is no long term economic plan, its cut and privatise as much as possible in the first 2 years of parliament, then turn on the spending taps in the second half of parliament to convince the electorate that things are getting better. There are still people out there that believe Gordon Brown spent all the money, although Labours efforts to refute this are equally feeble.

Saw on the beeb this morning that the RNAS is being replaced by a private profit driven business - nice to know people's lives are in the hands of businessmen rather than a service for the public.

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I'm glad I'm not the only one to recognise austerity for the nonsense that it is.

As for that much-vaunted "long-term economic plan"... We now have delation.

Osborne will go down in history as the worst chancellor we have ever had. Even worse than Lamont.

You remind me of Churchill's 1945 quote, " the people have decided, the bastards".

Are you seriously suggesting that a liberal/labour government would be better?

I can't think of a worse government than this - so yes.

We have a chancellor than doesn't understand economics, a minister for equality who doesn't believe in equality, a minister for the arts that thinks the BBC is an abomination, a home office minister who sees the SNP as being the biggest crisis ever (forgetting mere blips like WW1 and WW2), a justice minister (previously a failure at Education and as chief whip) in favour of the death penalty all over-seen by a PM in thrall to Murdoch who brought a soon-to-be-convicted criminal into the heart of government after deliberately avoiding him being vetted for security clearance more worried about fox hunting than food banks.

The long-term economic plan has already seen Mr Osborne borrow more more money than every Labour chancellor in history combined and who has implemented policies resulting in deflation combined with negligible growth despite having been in command for 5 years now.

Looming in front of us we are committed to 2 years of "negotiation" with the EU which will be unable under any circustances to deliver anything vaguely agreeable to either side followed an in/out refernedum that will rip the Tory Party asunder no matter what the result, which don't much matter, but which will also probably lead to the disintegration of the United Kingdom, which does.

To be honest I don't think it could be much worse. History will look back at these last two parliaments and wonder how an entire country could be so stupid. Twice.

We are now a country built on division and a country that is hopelessly divided. Still... as long your doing alright that's all that matters, innit.

I think top of a very challenging list though is Sajid Javid's plan for a 40% of the electorate limit before a strike can happen. He seems to have forgotten that the government only hit 24% itself.

Oh! And the abolition of Human Rights Act... Did anybody ever wake up one morning and think "you know what's wrong with this country? Too many human rights. That's what. We should be like Belarus and scrap it".

Since you quote Churchill at me it is worth noting that it was Churchill himself that signed us up to the ECHR.

One might accuse Tories of misguided stupidity and incompetence but they can hardly be accused of being guilty of joined-up thinking, can they?

I've looked at the arguments regarding Brexit. Basically it boils down to making it easier to fire employees.

Jeremy Hunt. I forgot that twonk. We have a health minster that hates the NHS.

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I think top of a very challenging list though is Sajid Javid's plan for a 40% of the electorate limit before a strike can happen. He seems to have forgotten that the government only hit 24% itself.

Oh! And the abolition of Human Rights Act... Did anybody ever wake up one morning and think "you know what's wrong with this country? Too many human rights. That's what. We should be like Belarus and scrap it".

Since you quote Churchill at me it is worth noting that it was Churchill himself that signed us up to the ECHR.

One might accuse Tories of misguided stupidity and incompetence but they can hardly be accused of being guilty of joined-up thinking, can they?

It's 40% of the membership of whatever Union is in dispute. Is that unreasonable. Clearly in your mind it is. Oh, and the government secured 36.9% of the electorate.

It was a conservative government that introduced the ECHR. Like all laws it needs restructuring. I don't see the problem.  

You mention incompetence. That is, at least in my lifetime, the sole possession of Labour's socialist dream. From Wilson's forced devaluation of the pound, Callaghan's winter of discontent and Brown's prudence and the abolition of boom and bust. Truly disastrous for the country. And let's not forget Foot and Kinnock. Both millionaires of course.

Labour always was the politics of envy. Glad to see you're keeping the tradition going.

Good post Rollo, could even be enough to tempt comrade Iggy out of retirement.

Rollo Tomasi wrote:

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I think top of a very challenging list though is Sajid Javid's plan for a 40% of the electorate limit before a strike can happen. He seems to have forgotten that the government only hit 24% itself.

Oh! And the abolition of Human Rights Act... Did anybody ever wake up one morning and think "you know what's wrong with this country? Too many human rights. That's what. We should be like Belarus and scrap it".

Since you quote Churchill at me it is worth noting that it was Churchill himself that signed us up to the ECHR.

One might accuse Tories of misguided stupidity and incompetence but they can hardly be accused of being guilty of joined-up thinking, can they?

It's 40% of the membership of whatever Union is in dispute. Is that unreasonable. Clearly in your mind it is. Oh, and the government secured 36.9% of the electorate.

It was a conservative government that introduced the ECHR. Like all laws it needs restructuring. I don't see the problem.  

You mention incompetence. That is, at least in my lifetime, the sole possession of Labour's socialist dream. From Wilson's forced devaluation of the pound, Callaghan's winter of discontent and Brown's prudence and the abolition of boom and bust. Truly disastrous for the country. And let's not forget Foot and Kinnock. Both millionaires of course.

Labour always was the politics of envy. Glad to see you're keeping the tradition going.

Completely factually wrong.

The Tories got 36.9% of the votes cast. Only 66% of the elctorate voted. The Tories got approx 24% of the electorate.

That's why the 40% of all union membership level is so absurd and hypocritical.

It's not a hard concept to grasp.

Nor is it in any way, shape or form wrong - unlike your assertion which is pure baloney.

A couple of years ago the National Union of Teachers held a vote on whether to strike or not.

The turnout was 27%. So therefore 73 out of every 100 teachers either chose not to vote because they didn't want to strike or couldn't be bothered.

And even then only 4 out of every 5 that voted wanted to strike.

Doubtless you never questioned the legitimacy of that particular vote.

I'm not sure why I should. 80% is an over-whelming majority compared to the 36% (which isn't even a majority at all by the way) that the Tories got.

The point being, of course (and I can't believe that I have to spell this out yet again) is that if you need 40% to go on strike how does 24% give you a mandate to form a government?

Obviously it doesn't.

If they press on with this legislation then by their own, arbitrary it has to be said, benchmark they should do us all a favour and resign en masse as a government.