I think I can

here's the kind of guts, bragadocio and lying to self
that you have to have in order to become a world-
beating businessman.

One Saul P Steinberg ,whose wealth exceeded
$600 million, used to tell the world:

' "You watch: Like the Rockefellers, I'll own
the world," he said in a late 1960s interview
with the financial writer Dan Dorfman,
according to a 2001 Vanity Fair story.'

---
It's interesting that he had so much self-
belief, to the point that he "ignored" the
fact that the Rockefellers were shot down
by Teddy Roosevelt because they were
stitching up the whole economy of the
US for rent-seeking, pre-1900.

I also wonder what makes a millionaire
get up in the morning and say "a million
is just not enough." Are they driven or
just money crazy?

walking backwards, while spitting, on a Sunday: Illegal

I wonder if the ConDem government are as prolific in the
creation of laws as New Labour were. I just read an
article which said that NL had added 1000 new
laws which were punishable by jail time.

I guess the government wanted to give new prison building
and management contracts to their hoodlum friends. The
UK does have a high incarceration rate for the EU, and
the "Corrections" sector is open for business.

From Philip Johnston:
"it is , however, shocking to find so many new imprisonable
offences when so many long-standing crimes, like assault
and theft, go unpunished"

New laws: (not all have jail time)
-Fishing without permission on the Lower Esk
-Importation of unauthorised veterinary product
-disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to
 by an authorised officer
-offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday
  or Christmas Day
-attaching an ear tag to an animal when it has previously
   been used to identify another animal
-landing a catch which includes unsorted fish at a harbour
  without permission
-selling types of flora and fauna not native to the UK

Granthamanian Devil

Upon reading a review of Karl Schloegel's "Moscow 1937",
I finally had an idea for how to put across two key, related
politicians, in the Obituary Wars:

Chavez vs Thatcher

We have here two opposing forces. One for more fairness
and society, and the other a neo-liberal "individualistic"
(when it suited her) piece of nasty.

BTW-Thatcher (it has been proved) was in favour of ousting
Chavez (democratically elected President of Venezuela),
for oily reasons.

BBC: "Chavez was a divisive figure. that is all"

BBC: "the lovely Margaret Thatcher will have psalms, and 

         songs and famous pallbearers who are preparing as 

we speak, behind our 'reporter' who should be nailing

Thatcher's spiv bankers to the wall, but that would be impolitic

especially since the lovely public funeral is only 3 days away.

We'd like to thank the British public for their license fee and 

for paying for this lovely funeral. Did we mention the types of 

flowers? BREAKING NEWS There will be chrysanthemums!"

So. I'll use this entry to label Thatcher a

Political revolutionary

explicitly in the mould of Stalin & Pinochet

I think she studied them both

The only difference between her and them is that Thatcher 

had a handbag/purse.

It was the way, the Chicago school way, of bringing in change

that the majority do not want, and that is likely not beneficial
in the long term. The way is to spin yourself into a tornado
that sweeps aside all barriers to your progress. 

Just look at how news stories say how Thatcherism changed 

everything, as if her cabinet were useless rich f%$^&kers.
(actually, that's not too hard to believe) Did they intentionally

make it seem as if Thatcher did it all, or was she truly

a whirlwind?

a destructive force of nature?

Stalinism (Soviet Union)

Chicago school neo-liberalism (Chile)

Thatcherism (UK)

The only one that is still alive is Thatcherism, even though its

wet nurse has just  done the polite thing and left us to clean up 

her mess.

Later, I'll post the key texts on Thatcher to help solve the puzzle
of this devil, for posterity.

The financial media are so numb

They even allowed an investment guru to imply
that the US Federal bank is manipulating the
price of gold, together with Goldman Sachs.

It didn't even register with them, probably
because they don't know the stock markets are
all fixed. and they didn't/don't realise that fixing
gold prices is part of the bigger mega-fixing
of stocks, bonds and everything else, investment-
wise.
Maybe they're just letting it pass, thinking the
brain-dead fans of the show will take it as
just another relativistic message and forget
about it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.

let's cut to the link:
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000160267

if you're gagging sb, don't forget to gag the news of the gagging

When will new UK ministers ever learn that if you're going
to be a democrat and yet stifle free speech, you
should at least be thorough and lock everyone's
lips shut, or else you'll get screwed by public opinion.

Among a spate of "shut-yer-f%&*&kin-mouth" legal orders,
the NHS health service has been at the leading edge.

And so hospitals have actually paid large sums, like half
a million for one case I heard, to get doctors to not tell
the media how screwed NHS bureaucracy is.

The new Health minister, Mike Hunt said out of one side
of his mouth that gagging orders were a waste of public
money, and so we thought he was against shutting people
up. Actually, he was against paying them to shut up.

what we discovered recently was what Mike Hunt meant:

He could make NHS workers shut up, if he so wished.

and he does, because he's in the process of
dismantling public health care in the UK, but doesn't
want the media to know what a god-awful mess
this privatisation is.

I suppose the next thing we'll hear is that he will, like
Jimmy Savile, demand noblesse oblige in the
hospital mortuaries.

I can't believe this place. Just leak the info and get
on with the flaying of the minister.
forsooth:
The young minister forgot to gag the media and so
the message leaked out.
They should have done like Andrew Marr, the interview
guy on tv. He had an ugly extra-marital
dalliance and gagged the media, and gagged the media
 from even mentioning the gag. Thanks to
Twitter, that one snuck out.
UPDATE:
Just saw "Have I got new" rerun that discussed that
escapade. Marr often went over the line in asking
personal questions of public figures, so it was
really hypocritical of him to pull a
three-monkeys on the media about his own life.

Isn't gagging just fundamentally wrong? Look at the
hypocrisy and stupidity that is the only conclusion
one can draw once the gag gets out into the open. 
Isn't free speech important? Obviously not, in the UK.

I'll add the story from the Telegraph soon

Lanny Breuer- Being there is what counts

This is a tale of enlightened financial watch-doggery.

If you don't move, then the bankers can't see you.

Their vision works in that way. If they don't
see you policing their fraud, then you can get
a real job when you get back to the private
sector, cuz gubmint sucks, innit?

Let's cut to the video: Live on PBS
BEING THERE
Lanny Breuer: Financial Fraud Has Not Gone Unpunished
January 22, 2013, 9:42 pm ET


Part 2- the Sequel- Been There, got the Goldman t-shirt

RIP British economy

too much messing around with major tom
when you should be running a country
leads to your country becoming a
paper tiger. A joke.

If Thatcher did anything good for Britain,
she woke it up from its post-Empire
stupor. And turned it into a raging
angry country. That's the Conservative
modus operandi. Piss of the rest of the
country.




Well, Ha Joon Chang, Michael Hudson & Robert Skidelsky
each have an obit for this
time of national celebration:

check this:  The Guardian

Britain: a nation in decay

The UK's problems go far deeper than the cuts agenda. It simply can't produce enough to revive its ailing economy

Ha-Joon Chang

Friday 8 March 2013 21.00 GMT

Jump to comments (1148)

‘Despite the huge incentive to export created by a devalued pound, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.’ Photograph: Alamy

David Cameron's speech on the economy this week, and the reactions to it, have again confirmed that the British debate on economic policy is getting nowhere. The coalition government keeps repeating that it has to cut spending in order to cut deficits, no matter what. The opposition has been at pains to explain – as a teacher may do to a particularly slow or obstinate child – that trying to cut deficits by cutting spending in a stagnant economy is a largely self-defeating exercise, as it reduces growth and thus tax revenue. And Friday's astonishing letter from Robert Chote, chairman of the non-partisan Office for Budget Responsibility, contradicting the prime minister and reminding him of the ambiguous impact of spending cuts on deficits, has lent further weight to the opposition argument.

In reality, though, the coalition government isn't as stupid or stubborn as it appears. It is sticking to its plan A because spending cuts are not about deficits but about rolling back the welfare state. So no amount of evidence is going to change its position on cuts.

Lost in this cross-wired debate is the issue of the long-term future of the economy. Britain has been finding it difficult to recover from the financial crisis not just because of its austerity policy but also because of its eroding ability to engage in high-productivity activities. This problem is most tellingly manifested in the country's inability to generate a trade surplus despite the huge devaluation of sterling since 2008.

Compared with its height in 2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.

Despite the devaluation, Britain's service exports have fallen – average annual service exports for 2008-11 were 8% lower than for 2005-07. This may be understandable, given the poor state of its financial sector – rocked by one scandal after another and hemmed in by a slow tightening of global financial regulation.

However, manufacturing exports, which were supposed to make up the shortfall created by the services sector, also fell by 8% after the devaluation. This is highly unusual. For example, back when South Korea had a devaluation of similar scale after its 1997 financial crisis (the won, its currency, was devalued by 35% against the dollar), the country's manufacturing exports were 15% higher (comparing the 1998-2001 average to 1995-97).

The only reason the British balance of payments situation has not been worse is the large increase in primary commodity exports – oil, minerals and food. These were on average 22% higher in 2008-11 than in 2005-07. In other words, since the crisis the British economy has been moving backwards in terms of its sophistication as a producer.

All of this means that, without addressing the underlying decay in productive capabilities, Britain cannot fix its ailing economy. To deal with this problem, it urgently needs to develop a long-term productive strategy through a broad-based public consultation involving not just the government and private sector firms, but trade unions, educational institutions and research institutes.

The strategy should first carefully identify the industries, and the underlying technologies, that will be the future motor of the economy and then provide them with the necessary support. This could be in the form of subsidies for R&D, loan guarantees for small firms, or preferences in government procurement, and should be targeted at "strategic" industries, although they could also be in the form of policies that are apparently not industry-specific.

For example, infrastructural investment needs to be co-ordinated with the broader industrial strategy. Infrastructure is by definition location-specific, so depending on the industries you want to promote, you will have to build different types of it in different places. Similarly with education and skills. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce, and for potential students to know what professions to study for.

John Maynard Keynes once famously said that in the long run we are all dead. But a lot of us have to live for a while yet. A series of short-run policies, whether based on the coalition policy of spending cuts and loose monetary policy or on the opposition policy of increased government spending, isn't going to address the challenges facing the British economy. It is time to think for the long term.

2  New Statesman

BRITISH DECLINE

Meeting our makers

 Robert Skidelsky

  | Thursday, January 24, 2013

In the early 1950s, Britain was an industrial giant. Today it is an industrial pygmy. Manufacturing was industry’s bedrock. In 1952 it produced a third of national output, employed 40% of the workforce, and made up a quarter of world manufacturing exports. Today manufacturing is just 12% of GDP, employs only 8% of the workforce, and sells 2% of the world’s manufacturing exports. The iconic names of industrial Britain are history: in their place is the service economy and supermarkets selling mainly imported goods. What happened? Was it inevitable? Does it matter?

Nicholas Comfort’s book is exactly what its title promises: a roll call of the dead and the dying. The broad outline of the story is well-known. Britain ended the Second World War with a technological edge in aircraft, aerospace, computers, and electronics which it failed to exploit. In the 1950 and early 1960s, British manufacturers dominated the home market and had about 20% of world exports, with some world beaters like the Comet airliner, the Mini, and the Harley Davidson motor cycle. Then a decline set in with increasing import penetration and declining export sales, till the trade surplus in manufactures finally disappeared in 1983.

In the 1970s many firms with household names went under. Governments, starting with Edward Heath, desperately tried to keep ‘lame ducks’ like Rolls Royce afloat by nationalizing them. Thatcher returned the lame ducks to ‘the chill forces of the market’, many of them drowning. Manufacturing went on shrinking under New Labour, with the manufacturing workforce fell from 4.5m to 2.5m between 1997 and 2010. ‘Financial and business services’, writes Comfort, ‘were seen [by the New Labour government] as the way forward for Britain, with manufacturing recognised as globally competitive only in aerospace and pharmaceuticals’. As immigrant workers flooded into Britain’s services and food processing sector, manufacturing jobs flooded out, mainly to the Far East. Flagship businesses were sold to foreign firms, notably the takeover of Cadbury’s by Kraft in 2010. No story, writes Comfort, is more poignant than the ‘fall of two of the giants of the 20th century British economy – GEC and ICI’.

Every advanced economy has been affected by the shift from manufacturing to services but the sheer scale of the industrial decline in Britain demands a special effort at explanation. After all, Germany has kept a much larger manufacturing capacity, and its workers work fewer hours. France, too, had maintained world class manufacturing companies like Dassault and Peugeot. Why did Britain fail to emulate them?

Quick note on Amnesty's warmongering

I always grab stuff to read , no matter where I go.
trains are a great place to get a free newspaper

From a students' newspaper at Queen Mary
QMessenger, 
comes a strong article in the 11 Feb edition
which makes clear the massive hypocrisy
of Amnesty International being a pressure
group with a history and yet having been
taken over by the US S-t-a-t-e Department.

The article was titled No Peace with Amnesty
International

One of it points was how it mixed women's
rights with the US army's role in the
Middle East, pushing for the US to stay
until women have full equal rights.
In other words, invasion under false pretenses,
mass murder and theft of oil, if nothing else,
is stamped APPROVED because the
Amnesty wants to change the fate of
the middle eastern woman.

War Bitches.

Amnesty, that is

And I don't think it was Hillary Clinton's
influence (recently retired For. Secr.),
but there is a rule against
Amnesty workers being propositioned
for fellatio, by the executives of AI or any
past or present Presidents.

BTW
I've previously mentioned the effect that Amnesty's
jokey Pussy Riot has had on Russia. Look it up 

air tube sucks the life out of your community

I was standing in a supermarket cash-out
line, recently and realised what I was
looking at was the now
ubiquitous

supermarket money tube system

at each check out point.

I guess I realised what it symbolised for us, the 

humble consumers, who are labelled by 

what we do, in this economy to add to GDP,

namely consume.

I saw that in the same way that the tube takes money 

from the till and sends it to the office, thereby

limiting the FINANCIAL damage of a robbery,

it also takes local people's money and sends it to

the bank account of the supermarket conglomerate

in the far-away capital city, never to return.

In fact, that money may in part go to tax havens

because that is how international conglomerates

operate, outside the law, without paying taxes.

[Sale: Radiactive Fukushima Sushi in Aisle 3]

So, we empty our pockets for them, because

our ignorance has killed off the local grocery

store. They take whatever money we managed 

to create with the offer of our labour to our 

bosses, and the big boys take it away

and leave us to also fund everything 

else in the country, like education and health.

Meanwhile the conglomerates pressure farmers

into penury, line the pockets of their executives,

ruin the environment of the Third World countries

that they sometimes use for supply sources, 

and then they walk away , paying no taxes.

They use the country, produce wealth for themselves

and leave. Oh, and they pay minimum wage to most

of their employees because of labour supply and 

demand, and because a monkey could do the job.

And so we've got a class of businessman who behave
like Far West desperadoes:

[most of them don't even stick around for a coffee]

They are not part of the community. If they can afford

the tube system, they're probably not local people,

but instead a conglom.

I know why austerity is locking down welfare and PS pay

because governments know that inflation, real, massive inflation
are coming down the pike and they don't want their
expenses to go up.
They know it's coming because their banker friends
are telling them, off the record.
Those, like me , who read the right alt media know
it's coming.

Making the unsuspecting, faithful , law abiding public
pay for the massive government f£%6k up that is
the post-2008 world, is the newly revealed plan.

It was decided in 2010 at the G20 ho-down,
according to Barnaby is Right.


They know what their unlimited QE that opens
up the liquidity sluices every time another
stoopid bank runs out of options.
They can come crying to the government. We ,
the public , have to just suck it up and brave
the inferno.
 Forget that QE is free money (fake, electronic) money
for the banks who will invariably squander it or
pocket it in bonuses.
We didn't cause this mess, despite what some
positivists feel is our fault for having the temerity
to vote.

That's all governments want. To control their costs.
They want to get elected again and they think this
is the way to do it.
They have no sense for the tidal wave of human
misery that will cause the MSmedia to not leave
their offices ever again.
They would be begged, mugged, attacked or
at the very least , they would need to see and ignore
all the people who will needlessly have their lives
splayed and displayed in the nearest square, that is
until the police can take them away and jail them.

Sorry for the apocalyptic vision, but I keep having
these and I can now connect the dots.
Austerity is stoopid, and governments know it's
stoopid. They just have no brains and they are
political bitches to the banker pimp.