Christina Patterson: We can't let the monster of the markets rule the world
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-we-cant-let-the-monster-of-the-markets-rule-the-world-2361892.html
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=158172#158172
Eurozone crisis: It makes you really quite tired
of being told you can't do things because 'the
markets' won’t like it, even though the markets
only like things that make them rich
Independent - Wednesday, 28 September 2011
It's quite hard, when you're lying in the
dentist's chair, with a funny mould thing in your
mouth, to shriek. It's quite hard, in fact, to
make any kind of noise when your jaws are stuck
in what feels like cold clay. But on Monday, to
my dentist's surprise, I did. I shrieked not
because the mould was cold, or because being told
not to move always makes me want to. I shrieked
because a man on the TV monitor above me was
saying things you couldn't possibly hear and keep your mouth shut.
The man, who was wearing a pink tie, was an
"independent trader". He was being asked about
the latest eurozone rescue plan. "It's not going
to work," he said, "because this problem can't be
solved". The euro, he said, was "going to crash".
But when the interviewer asked what he thought
might work, he looked confused. "I'm a trader,"
he said. "We don't care whether they're going to
fix the economy. Our job is to make money from
it." And then he offered us all some advice: "The
1930s depression wasn't just about a market
crash," he said. "There were some people who were
prepared to make money from that crash. I think
anyone can do that. It is," he said, "an
opportunity!". His advice was simple: "be
prepared". This was "not a time" to think that
governments would sort things out. "Governments,"
he said, "don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world."
Certainly, as the euro crisis unfolds on our TVs,
it's beginning to look as though it's not
absolutely clear that governments do rule the
world, or at least that they're all that sure
what they're doing. Here's Obama, telling Europe
that it needs to find a "more effective strategy"
for dealing with the crisis. Here's David Cameron
calling for "leadership". Here are pretty much
all the world leaders, in fact, calling for other
people to lead. As models of leadership go, it's
less "be prepared", and more "after you".
On Newsnight on Monday, even Jeremy Paxman
admitted that he was struggling to understand
what was going on. In a studio full of flashing
screens, which made you feel that you were in the
control room of a James Bond villain plotting the
overthrow of the Western world (which now seems
like a touching, wasted effort) Paul Mason
explained how a group of "movers and shakers"
(but not world leaders) had taken part in a "war
game" looking at possible solutions to the euro
crisis. The "war game" was organised by a think
tank called Bruegel. The "movers and shakers"
went to a chateau in Chantilly. What they came up
with – in a document that is, apparently, now
doing the rounds in Washington – was a $3-5
trillion fund to be used to rescue European
countries, and banks. A $3-5 trillion fund
donated largely by the European taxpayer.
While some of us were still thinking about the
chateau, and wondering what exactly a war game
was, and worrying about how we were going to pay
the dentist the £400 he was charging for a tiny
bit of work, Jeremy Paxman asked various men
whether they thought the plan would work. An
American economist called Austan Goolsbee said
we'd had two years to raise capital, and it was
all a bit late. A Tory MP called Sajid Javid, who
used to be an investment banker, said it couldn't
work because the euro was "a bankruptcy machine,
and a fiddle". And Jim O'Neill, who's the
Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said
that "to work all this stuff out" was "not easy".
We were, he said, "talking big numbers".
When one of the top people at the company which
some people think "rules the world" thinks that
you, as a European taxpayer, could be paying for
something for the rest of your life that might
well not work, it doesn't really cheer you up. It
makes you think of the way that the company they
work for helped to create the global economic
crisis by selling sub-prime mortgage debt, and
how that company made even more money by betting
on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and of how
it made money by underwriting bonds, and later
advised other clients to short those bonds. It
makes you think of the $60m it agreed to pay to
end an investigation into unfair home loans in
Massachusetts, and of "fabulous" Fabrice Tourre,
and the "highly leveraged, exotic trades" he
created and said he didn't understand.
It makes you think of Greek debt, which is a very
big part of the euro crisis, and of how some
people said that Goldman Sachs helped the Greek
government hide the true scale of it for years.
And it makes you think of all the Goldman Sachs
people who have become very senior advisers to
governments, or even very senior members of them,
or even Secretary of the Treasury of the most powerful country in the world.
What it also makes you think is that you're
really quite tired of being lectured by these
people, and being told that you can't ask them to
pay even 50 per cent tax on annual incomes that
are often paid in millions, and that you can't do
things because "the markets" won't like it, even
though the only things that markets like is
things that make them rich. And it makes you
think that when a shadow Chancellor gives a long
list of apologies that don't sound at all like
apologies, and says that his party "didn't
regulate the banks toughly enough", that that
(although you've never heard the word "toughly")
is certainly true, but doesn't begin to do
justice to the monster that has been created, and unleashed.
Now, we all live with this monster, which gobbles
up jobs, and hopes, and dreams. We all live, as
the shadow Chancellor's boss said yesterday, with
the "fast buck economy", a "fast buck economy"
that seems to be destroying the Western world. We
didn't need to. We didn't need to make finance
Britain's biggest industry, and Britain's biggest
net export. We didn't need to live in a bubble
made out of debt. But we did what we did, and the
banks did what they did, and the traders did what they did, and here we are.
Unlike that "independent trader", I hope that the
euro bail-out works. I hope that we don't have
another recession, or a depression, or a crash,
and I hope that we, and the other countries that
have made the same mistakes as us, get the chance
to build an economy that's made less of hot air,
and more of things you can see and touch. It was
Brueghel, by the way – the painter not the think
tank – who painted Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus. He knew all about flying too close to the sun.
+44 (0)7786 952037
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"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
<http://www.elementary.org.uk>www.elementary.org.uk
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that
shall not be made known. What I tell you in
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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