I learn the interesting news that David Aaronovitch tweeted to Joan Smith and Jenny Jones that I am:
“an angry and dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left”.
I had no idea I was on the far left, though I suppose it is a matter of perspective, and from where Mr Aaronovitch stands I, and a great many others, look awfully far away to the left. I don’t believe you should bomb people for their own good, I don’t believe the people of Palestine should be crushed, I don’t believe the profit motive should dominate the NHS, I think utilities and railways were better in public ownership, I think education should be free. I guess that makes me Joseph Stalin.
But actually I am very flattered. Apparently I am not just angry – since the invasion of Iraq and the banker bailouts everybody should be angry – but “dangerous”. If I can be a danger to the interests represented by a Rupert Murdoch employee like Aaronovitch, I must have done something right in my life. I fear he sadly overrates me; but it does make me feel a little bit warmer, and hold my head that little bit higher.
Good, independent (Beirut-based) site.
http://english.al-akhbar.com/taxonomy/term/242
thanks for the link, Suhayl, Pepe Escobar is relevant, real, I like his type of journalism.
Nothing like this in the UK press:
‘Nadir’s company used as middle man for weapons sales to Iraq
Turkish Cypriot daily Kibrisli (13.01.12) runs a story that England has sold weapons to Saddam Huseyin’s regime through one of Asil Nadir’s companies. The paper reports that an experienced intelligence specialist, who worked for 20 years closely with CIA, has said to the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet that a new CIA secret document that has been revealed, shows that the British ‘deep state’ used Nadir’s company for an illegal weapon’s sale.
The documents which contain the details of USA-England cooperation, along with the cover for the secret weapon sale’s network, expose that the ‘deep state’ used a series of dirty paths, including murder.
The documents prove that Unipac, a company based in occupied Famagusta and which is connected to Nadir’s Polly Peck, was among a set of companies used for selling guns to Iraq.
According to the intelligence specialist, Mark Thatcher, son of ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, received a 12 million fortune from a weapons sale and Nadir’s company Polly Peck tried to cover it. This pushed the button for the company’s collapse under the British Serious Fraud Office.’
http://www.cyprusexpat.co.uk/blog/read/id:1035/asil-nadirs-company-used-for-selling-weapons-to-iraq
Though to be fair the Independent did write an interesting article on the same topic in 1993
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ministers-accused-of-making-profits-from-iraqi-arms-sales-1510650.html
“But some posters seem to want to shoot themselves in the foot by attributing everything – absolutely everything in the world that’s ever happened or ever will happen – to the Palestine-Israel dynamic.”
I was once discussing the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus with a Greek friend, and he told me that for many years he believed that it was Turkey’s NATO importance, which trumps that of Greece, especially having that long border with the former USSR, that allowed it to act & get away with its invasion & subsequent occupation. Then one day he met an American working for the US Governmant as some sort of diplomatic assistant, and they discussed Cyprus, and my friend was shocked to hear the American state that something even more important than Turkey’s NATO role had determined the US effective green light & non action iro the invasion, namely that Greece was perceived to be pro-Palestinian, as it had always expressed solidarity for the Palestinian cause.
The contaminating influence of the Palestine/Israel conflict can indeed reach into apparently unrelated matters, which is not to say that it is responsible for “absolutely everything in the world that’s ever happened or ever will happen”, but that for everything that does happen, the Palestine/Israel conflict will surely shape some of the reaction & consequences.
Armstrong: descendant of the ever squabbling Borders Reiver clans: the Armstrongs, once of great notoriety on the Scottish side of the East, West and Middle Marches, with their strongholds in the lawless ‘debatable lands’. Where few ventured and lived to tell the tale.
It has to be considered that these three ex-south-african nukes, allegedly stolen from Oman have found their way into the UK’s own WMD stockpile, as we can guess they didn’t end up in Iraq and no-one ever seriously thought they did, knowing full well their location at all times, past and present as Dr. Kelly could have attested. These being conventional, dropped from a plane, nuclear bombs of unsophisticated design, not missile warheads, they can only be of use as a ready made long shelf-life truly ‘independent’ nuclear arsenal, that is independent of the U.S. and for use without U.S. sanction, or as a contingency in the event the U.S. itself, and it’s satellite-based delivery mechanism were or defunct or missing.
For past their sell-by date Trident missiles and subs, it’s come in number 1, your time’s up.
@Suhayl re Neil Armstrong — I like Huffington Post’s headline yesterday: One Giant Loss for Mankind. I remember all of us gathered around the TV set when he walked on the moon. If you have a home movie, I wish you could post it online where we can see it. Moon walks and whales, what will the 30th century remember of us?
I hope.
Along with all the facts and some horrors which are subjects here, i submit an old tune for light brainwashing – the default mindstate of many, contrasted by stupidly sad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FaXmRWXLjM&feature=related
Thanks, all.
How the Neocons smeared whistle blowers in the run up to the Iraq War and more recently:
http://www.juancole.com/2012/08/plot-to-provoke-war-with-iran-thwarted-by-navy-analyst.html
@domesticextremist above – If our press doesn’t report on issues, or doesn’t report honestly on these issues, or accepts a central direction as to how to report, then we have a censored press and our democracy is a sham. Now I think Mr. Murdoch’s tweet about the UK not having a free press is a huge admission because it goes to the quality of democracy (or lack of) in Britain. Surely this is not a left or right issue; it’s just a fact – we have an admission from a prominent press baron that the press isn’t free.
Whether one likes him or not, Mr. Murdoch is in a position to know. Of course he has been operating in this censored system for decades but so have the other press barons – when it comes to admissions: better late than never. Time the other papers spoke out too and time they all did something to restore press freedom and our democracy.
Regarding leaked information. Plenty of it could be fabricated and fed to Assange.
All information is predominantely misinformation.
Facts are rarely translated.
The idiom is in complete control.
Gaze at it.
Glenn Greenwald’s latest.
Film highlights the temptations and perils of blind obedience to authority
Indie film Compliance recalls notions that the past decade’s worst events are explained by failures to oppose authority
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/26/compliance-authority-failure?commentpage=2#start-of-comments
His byline is ‘On Security and Liberty’. Over 200 comments there already.
Surely it was not a good idea to take very small children (aged 3 and 5) in a Canadian canoe out in a sea loch even though the conditions were good. Fair enough if the men wanted to take the risk. The reports are saying that life jackets were not being worn by the men.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/two-boys-dead-and-man-missing-1281755
Mary, huh?
On the OT: it’s interesting that NASA has widened its focus to this planet, and launched a ‘Beyond waste’ initiative:
“The LAUNCH program identifies innovations poised to create transformational change in critical sustainability issues, connects LAUNCH innovators to leaders and advisors, and provides resources and guidance to accelerate the implementation of the technologies, businesses and programs.
For NASA, LAUNCH draws parallels between resource challenges humans face aboard the space station and on Earth. With no natural resources in the hostile environment of space, astronauts must generate, collect, store, conserve, recycle and manage their resources wisely. LAUNCH offers NASA’s problem-solving expertise to crucial conversations on sustainability-related topics with innovative problem solvers from around the world. It enables the agency to promote emerging, transformative technology to sustain and enrich the quality of life on Earth. The engineering approaches needed to solve many of the development challenges facing Earth are similar to those needed to overcome the challenges of long-duration human missions beyond low Earth orbit.”
Obviously we just need less waste, but still.
Jay & others: if that policeman with the ‘secret documents’ wasn’t a plant, then I’m a campanula.
Me in Us; (sorry) Beluga whales in the St Lawrence river are so polluted that their corpses are often classed as toxic waste. Same with dolphins around the UK.
@Macky – The official story has blacked out US-Soviet detente, and now claims the ‘cold war’ ran from the late 1940s through to 1990.
Clearly Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and never allied with Eurasia, never at war with Eastasia. Talk about the memory hole!
But some still know otherwise. And it was Israeli considerations which wrecked US-Soviet detente: Yom Kippur war, Jackson-Vanik, the desired expansion of Zionist settlement using people from the USSR.
Then came ‘cold war 2’, which segued into the war on terror, spearheaded by Netanyahu.
The FBI gave Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner, $1 million to frame Megrahi as the Lockerbie bomber. Gauci has been unable to recognise Megrahi as the man who bought incriminating clothes at his shop. But miraculously, the $1 million “restored his memory”. The US protects the real Lockerbie bomber to this day. I wonder what means of persuasion the CIA uses these days (eg to implicate people they want to destroy as rapists), and if its still financial, what the going rate is. Gauci was able to retire to Australia as a rich man on £1 million. But that is what Kobe Bryant makes in ten minutes. I imagine the rate must be somewhat higher now.
An excellent article from Glen Greenwald and his challenge to academia is particularly poignant, for they deal with young challenging minds.
But, as an ex mature student I also know that the conformity of young school leavers, their personal needs and wants, their upbringing, 2/3 of it in indoctrinating schools, has turned them into compliant ‘no demo thanks’ we’re students, supporters of whoever tells them.
Example, Essex university. During the 1960/70/80s it was the hotbed of political active young students, it has turned itself into obedient student land, a mixture of indignant compliance and head down must get a job best keep my head under the parapet sort of a university, most distrubing. UEA is no different and this from Glen
“One is academia, a realm where tenure is supposed to ensure that authority’s most sacred orthodoxies are subjected to unrelenting, irreverent questioning. Another is the federal judiciary, whose officials are vested with life tenure so as to empower them, without regard to popular sentiment, to impose limits on the acts of political authorities and to protect the society’s most scorned and marginalized.
But just observe how frequently these institutions side with power rather than against it, how eagerly they offer their professional and intellectual instruments to justify and glorify the acts of political authority rather than challenge or subvert them. They will occasionally quibble on the margins with official acts, but their energies are overwhelmingly devoted to endorsing the legitimacy of institutional authority and, correspondingly, scorning those who have been marginalized or targeted by it.”
applies to a particular philosophy Prof. I know, who loves to be seen as a politicians and doing stuff to change the overall equation, but, when it comes down to it, bows to the overwhelming urge to fit in and make his money from churning out oiks.
Cue Nexus.
“But, as an ex mature student I also know that the conformity of young school leavers, their personal needs and wants, their upbringing, 2/3 of it in indoctrinating schools, has turned them into compliant ‘no demo thanks’ we’re students, supporters of whoever tells them.”
Agree with you “Nevermind”. The rot set in during the Thatcher era, when thousands of students, formerly with curious and enquiring minds, were made to knuckle down to a compliance with the state and establishment for fear of being unemployable.
Nowadays whatever energy students have, they tend to pour it into “green” and “environment” issues and “saving the planet”, much of the misinformation about which is peppered onto our media by the most UN-green establishment institutions who are claiming a bogus concern about it.
The introduction of student fees in the western world has stifled debate and distorted the act of education into an apprenticeship for wage and debt slavery. It’s almost embarrassing how creative or radical political thought is now absent from the vast body of UK students. Moreover, you would have thought that the internet would have at least expanded the scope of curiosity of young minds, but in fact that is the preserve of only the few.
Most students have joined the narcissistic bandwagon of facebook and twitter, not for the purposes of illumination about what is happening in the world, but what they had for breakfast and entirely shallow subjects like celebrity and fashion.
This cannot entirely be explained by student fees, and to be fair it is as well to be aware of the need to earn and better oneself in a very competitive world. But what is very sad to see is that poor language skills, a lack of any depth of curiosity and a still blind belief in what the mainstream media prints and broadcasts, combined with the compulsion to pay back those onerous student loans, has had the effect of closing down the kind of lively debate that even the most straightlaced establishment institutions of the past considered perfectly normal.
In fact, pouring energies into ‘green’ and ‘environment’ issues is a considered reaction to the destructive nature of psychopathic corporate behaviour and its effects on our children’s futures. The rain forests are being devastated, arctic ice is shrinking, climate chaos is in evidence everywhere. The surge towards a future of renewable, non-polluting energy and sustainable consumption and away from a culture of excess and excess profit is a powerful one, and an understandable one, not something which has to be ‘manipulated’.
Having said that, I also agree with Nevermind, but it is not because children have changed: it is that the culture of bullying and blackmail which starts in the government is reflected in the government controlled schools and universities, and the increasing lack of opportunity for parents and children to have any influence on them. Adults everywhere increasingly behave towards children as though they are the enemy, and treat them as they would not treat a dog. We have not officially returned to the Lawrentian days of beatings and forced child labour, but we have found other ways to control and scare children – CCTV in schools, fingerprinting, attacks on morale and self-esteem, utter lack of jobs, mandatory free ‘work experience’ – instead.
John Pilger
The Pursuit of Julian Assange Is an Assault on Freedom and a Mockery of Journalism
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2012/08/23/the-pursuit-of-julian-assange-is-an-assault-on-freedom-and-a-mockery-of-journalism/
The British government’s threat to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London and seize Julian Assange is of historic significance. David Cameron, the former PR man to a television industry huckster and arms salesman to sheikdoms, is well placed to dishonor international conventions that have protected Britons in places of upheaval. Just as Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq led directly to the acts of terrorism in London on July 7, 2005, so Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague have compromised the safety of British representatives across the world.
/…
The Malthusians behind radical environmentalism – Webster Tarpley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbFidTH06i0&feature=related
Sorry, SB, computer not doing youtube at the moment – do you have an argument of your own?
On topic: comments on this Assange piece are generally rather warming:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/19-0
I wish to say that the visit to Palestine did not take place./ Gish Shalom report:
At the Jordan Bridges border crossings, Israeli authorities prevented the entry of more than a hundred international activists
Gush Shalom: “The country’s border crossings are wide open to the international friends of the violent settlers”
About 7.30 pm, more than a hundred activists from all over the world arrived from Jordan to the Israeli border crossings at the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge, telling that they were on their way to Bethlehem at the invitation of its Palestinian governor and of civil society organizations there, and that they were carrying with them notebooks and school equipment for Palestinian pupils about to begin their school year. However, their entry into the West Bank was denied. In the Israeli-controlled area of the Allenby Bridge was seen a major alert of military forces, and journalists there were told that the area had been declared “a closed military zone”.
“They did not even let us get off the bus,” said Olivia Zemor of Paris, one of the organizers of the visit. “They collected our passports and a few minutes later returned them with each and every passport stamped ‘Entry denied’. The soldiers refused to give any explanation, they just said – that’s it, your entry is denied, go back to Jordan.” Zemour noted that last year, when she and her fellows tried to reach the Palestinian Territories through Ben Gurion Airport, they were told, “Why don’t you come through the Jordan bridges?”. “So we did try to get through the Jordan bridges, and now we got a definite answer from the government of Israel.”
“Violent settlers, those who under the name of ‘price tag’ set olive trees and mosques on fire, are all the time getting reinforcements from abroad. For the settlers’ friends, Jews and Christians, Israel’s border crossings are wide open. From the airport they go to the settlements” says Adam Keller, Gush Shalom Spokesperson. “When the Palestinians living under Israel’s rule try to invite guests to come and visit them, the government of Israel instructs the army and police to block their way. The government has the power and the ability to act in such a belligerent and arbitrary way. But by so doing, the government ends up emphasizing and demonstrating to the entire world that – despite the so- called ‘judicial report’ which the government commissioned from Judge Edmond Levy – the territory is indeed under an oppressive occupation”.
A Press TV report also:
http://presstv.com/detail/2012/08/20/257291/propalestinians-mission-children/
@Technicolour
Not an argument just a few facts eloquently put by Webster Tarpley that back up Leonard Young’s observations.
e.g., John P Holdren, Obama’s “Science Czar”, who believes inter alia that trees should have legal representation, has written that the optimum human population of the planet should be 1 billion.
Well worth watching for anyone interested in the globalist agenda for depopulation that is misreprepresented as “saving the planet”
Ruth,
You have obviously misread the article or it has been badly translated. According to the CIA report(and other sources) Nadir’s companies were being used by UK/US spooks without his knowledge.
Michael Hadden-Deering·
Comments section clarifies the issue further, which explains the current circumstances of Nadir, who is facing some serious jail time, post him getting lulled into a false sense of security he will be getting a “fair trial” (ie get away with it).
If Nadir was in the know, he would never face any kind of reprisal for his incompetence and misdemeanours.
,
,
Monday afternoon,
An extra day of rest, so turn the TV on there is “SS” on the
HistoryHitler Channel, peppered with lots of German words (foreign words to the English ear are the whispers of the very devil itself, cuz all God’s angels speak English naturally), talking about a tosser who has been dead for what seems to be aeons yet his groupies are oh so preoccupied by his memories.Turn onto another channel, and here is the Day Earth Stood still! The thought experiment is Earth will no longer be turning, some mad bastard finds the handbreak and pulls it, and Earth then comes to a halt. I am paraphrasing and putting my own interpretation on this weird program, because I just could not be arsed to watch yet more doomsday scenarios. It started with al Qaidy and now we have progressed to think about a planet that has come to a halt, fuck knows what will be next: the last days of family Robinson on the chunks of mount Everest turned into asteroids wandering through space and falling into the Sun.
Oh yeah that was after news that was about the prices of the grain, corn, and veg. all tripling and doubling and it was all to do with the rains that never stopped or never came. Funny the same wanker during winter gone was informing us all of a drought and a hosepipe ban before the water rates were hiked up.
However what the little informed man on the telly never hinted at was the fucking huge amounts of money that has been pumped into the banks for free, and these bastards are now speculating on commodities, ie the grain, corn, veg. etc. which is helping the rising prices.
Now that my day is totally fucked and I no longer have will to live, I am left with only one alternative, if only it was tomorrow and I could be back at my miserable work to have a bit of respite from all this doom and gloom.
Cheer up fella.
forgive me if I am wrong is the term liberal .democrat an oxymoron
SB: That doesn’t sound like environmentalism, it sounds like genocide.
“….@Leonard Young
“But, as an ex mature student I also know that the conformity of young school leavers, their personal needs and wants, their upbringing, 2/3 of it in indoctrinating schools, has turned them into compliant ‘no demo thanks’ we’re students, supporters of whoever tells them.”
Agree with you “Nevermind”. The rot set in during the Thatcher era, when thousands of students, formerly with curious and enquiring minds, were made to knuckle down to a compliance with the state and establishment for fear of being unemployable.
Nowadays whatever energy students have, they tend to pour it into “green” and “environment” issues and “saving the planet”, much of the misinformation about which is peppered onto our media by the most UN-green establishment institutions who are claiming a bogus concern about it.
The introduction of student fees in the western world has stifled debate and distorted the act of education into an apprenticeship for wage and debt slavery. It’s almost embarrassing how creative or radical political thought is now absent from the vast body of UK students. Moreover, you would have thought that the internet would have at least expanded the scope of curiosity of young minds, but in fact that is the preserve of only the few.
Most students have joined the narcissistic bandwagon of facebook and twitter, not for the purposes of illumination about what is happening in the world, but what they had for breakfast and entirely shallow subjects like celebrity and fashion.
This cannot entirely be explained by student fees, and to be fair it is as well to be aware of the need to earn and better oneself in a very competitive world. But what is very sad to see is that poor language skills, a lack of any depth of curiosity and a still blind belief in what the mainstream media prints and broadcasts, combined with the compulsion to pay back those onerous student loans, has had the effect of closing down the kind of lively debate that even the most straightlaced establishment institutions of the past considered perfectly normal…..”
Leonard, I don’t go for this general argument that young people today are somehow less engaged, have unrealistically high expectations of their futures, or are somehow more fickle than previous generations
Sure enough, they have a few more toys to play with than previous generations. But, so what? From those young people who I have met and known, they know well enough that these toys don’t represent real economic advancement or security. In terms of those more fundamental variables, young people of today have it far, far worse than any generation since the war.
People who were born in the West just post the 2nd world war were the luckiest generation alive, ever. This is not to castigate them for their good fortune. I am merely stating facts. They bought into our economy at the very bottom in terms of asset prices. In particular, house prices. In real terms, even when you take into account monetary debasement due to inflation, house prices were fantastically low for this post war generation.
On top of the above was the “job for life” many of this generation enjoyed. They were born into a world where, if you kept you nose clean, if you kept you head down and worked hard, you could be guaranteed a decent private pension and a house that was affordable for one major wage earner. However, if you were not a big wage earner, you could be guaranteed to be looked after by the state in terms of cheap housing, healthcare, education and, finally, a state pension that would allow you to live a dignified old age. Beverage’s “cradle to grave” society, in other words.
Those days are gone now. Today’s generation, just jumping on board the system, can expect to have no state pension by the time they retire. They can expect to see health care fully privatised before they reach retirement. Indeed, even if they are able to afford to pay into a private pension, they can expect to see the value of it well below the value their parents and grandparents enjoyed as they will be paying into a contracting economy giving ever smaller returns on investments (not to mention the fact that, in terms of their state pension contributions, these are being used to pay for today’s pensioners).
This government, and other governments around the Western world, have been busily “printing” money (or the functional equivalent to “printing”) like there is no tomorrow in order to keep asset prices (in particular, real estate) at their current insane levels. By way of illustration, I want to paint an entirely typical anecdote involving one of today’s pensioners. Someone who I personally know, in fact. This person is one of that post war generation I was talking about, above. He started work in the mid-fifties. He steadily worked his way up to a middling position in his industry, got married and bought a decent detached house commensurate with his economic position. His mortgage was low enough that he could afford to pay into his private pension regularly which was, of course, performing very well as the economy was heading perpetually north. All of this on just the one primary wage coming into his family.
During this time, ever more credit was being lent into existence, inflating the money supply. This credit chased assets in the economy looking for a home that would give a good return on investment. In the fifties and sixties, this would have been in any number of sectors. However, since the mid seventies, much of the primary wealth-generating industries in this country (indeed across the western world) have since moved to developing countries. Nevertheless, money continued to be lent into the economy. This led to that money being diverted into largely a single asset class. Namely, property. Ever since then, an asset class that was already steadily rising in value began to take off. And so we now find ourselves in the position of insanely high house prices. These prices have not risen due to a massive rise in demand (though there has been some of course). They have not risen due to a sudden collapse of supply (though, there is, of course, some shortages). No, the major reason house prices have risen so much is due to a wall of credit chasing them. Indeed, one could argue that we have already had rampant inflation in the Western world for the last twenty to thirty years. It’s just that it has expressed itself in inflationary driven price rises in just the one sector and so has not been recognised for what it is.
So what has this got to do with my anecdote? To continue his story, he retired about ten years ago and began receiving his pension. About 7 years ago, he decided to sell his detached house which now, instead of being worth the indexed equivalent of the £1000 he paid for it back in the mid sixties, was now worth 300k. He downsized and bought himself a smaller place for 150k and is using the money released from the sale of his house to go on several holidays per year and generally live a very nice retirement.
The thing is, though, one has to consider where all of that “money” has come from. The answer is that is has come from the future. Yours and mine and that of our descendants.
When money is lent into existence in a FIAT system of FRB, what is really happening is that a loan has been taken out from someone’s future productive fruits. If the money loaned more or less matches the current supply/demand driven value of the asset it is being borrowed for in order to buy, then the money has been borrowed from the future productive value of the person who has taken the loan out (all other things being equal). However if the amount that is being lent into existence massively outstrips the value of the asset for which it was borrowed, then the “price” of that asset will rise to reflect the debasing rise in supply of the credit that is chasing it. This is what has happened in the real estate market. The upshot of this is that, in a giant ponzi-like scheme, each successive buyer of a given property has been placed in the unavoidable position of having to pay for the rise in value of the previous owner. In other words, the high-on-the-hog lifestyle that is being enjoyed by the now retired person used in my example is being funded by the person who has taken out the massive mortgage when they purchased his 300k house off him.
It was all bound to end in tears, eventually. Eventually, there would come a point where the successive piling on of ever greater levels of debt onto future generation would hit a breaking point. That point came when the economy was no longer able to grow. The reason it was no longer able to grow is because oil hit 150 dollars per barrel. This caused debts to no longer be serviceable and so the whole house of cards began to come crashing down. Don’t misunderstand me here, the ponzi scheme otherwise known as a debt based money supply is always a car crash waiting to happen (and that car crash has indeed happened on a number of occasions on our journey from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the present). It’s just that this time is different. This time, it’s not just that we had built up unsustainable debt levels (even assuming the possibility of future growth), it’s that this time there will be no future growth due to resource constraints. The debt’s can never be repaid. I think our illustrious leaders know this only too well and so they are engaging in the only game left in town.
Buying time.
We have had one generation who have gown wealthy off the back of the debt of their children. Those children are now so indebted that they cannot afford to keep up the payments and so our governments have, via QE and other fiscal measures, passed the debt onto their children in turn. The kids of today will be expected to bear these debts by way of reduced pensions, reduced healthcare, reduced education and increased taxes. All in a context of house prices that will be continued to be held aloft if possible.
It’s wrong, plain and simple. The debts need to by borne by those who took them out. Or they need to be defaulted on by those who took them out and so be borne by the fuckwits who lent all of this unsustainable debts into existence.
Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing anything at all negative about young people today. They have been royally fucked over and they need all the help and encouragement we can possibly give them.
We owe them it. And by god they deserve it.
This generation coming up needs to say “fuck off, we’re not paying”.
I, for one, Leonard, won’t blame them.
Jesus, I need to get off forums for a bit and go and get some fresh air….