Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Section_31]

Of course it does. The funny thing is that the tory voter will moan and bitch when the people they've cut the ladder from break into their home and steal their shit. Survival of the fittest is only fair when comparing bank balances apparently.

 

The idea that the private sector "Competing" for public work is efficient is laughably naive. Try checking out the correlation between funding and contracts if you want a framework that reflects reality.

 

Aye, I've worked for a private contractor which was doing work for the DWP, it was an absolute joke of a setup - it's not more efficient at all, it just achieves savings by hiring teenagers on temp contracts, setting up shop in a warehouse, and papering up the cracks in service quality with some jiggery-pokery.

 

The Tory voters you refer to Stu will soon get dragged into the myre I fear, this isn't like the 80s where the decimation was limited to industrial towns (the ones we're now seemingly missing as we try and 're balance' the economy - having Tories say we need to rebuild manufacturing is amusing, nay?)

 

This time it will be everybody, everybody will suffer. Was looking at an FOI for the local council's spending today and the amount of private firms on their payroll was massive. They were spending millions on equipment and office supplies with local firms, those firms will now surely feel the squeeze.

 

The whole things is so shortsighted, the damage we've been doing to ourselves economically and socially - the way we've turned so much over to the desturctive free market, was already the wrong direction for us, but rather than reverse it the electorate chose to elect a Tory regime which would only take us further down that path.

 

New Labour were bad enough on this score, but voting the Tories in was like having cancer and taking your holiday in Pripyat.

[lifetime fan]

Hello what? Believe it or not, some of us still have jobs and can't spend all day on TLW. Give me a fucking chance to read the thread, will you?

 

Now then...

 

 

 

 

Apparently they haven't told anyone else either:

 

 

 

 

Anyone else as confused as me?

 

 

 

 

What's sauce for the goose...

 

 

 

 

Now I thought that was a fair excuse a year ago, and I don't see what has changed.

 

Look at the dates.

[lifetime fan]

Now I thought that was a fair excuse a year ago, and I don't see what has changed.

 

Look at the dates FFS. I'm telling you what is happening today. Or should I believe a fake lib, well briefed by their pay masters in how to bull shit the public. Mind you, the fake libs didn't need much 'media training' did they? Clegg has fucked your party in double quick time which is a disgrace.

 

As a disaffected Labour voter I voted lib at this last election with an open mind. I could have voted lib the rest of my life. You've no fucking chance now. Due to boundary changes I now fall under a newly drawn up constituency which includes several semi rural areas. All three main parties when canvassing stated it was a straight fight between the tories and the fake libs as they were then.

 

Guess what Stronts? The fake libs came in third behind a Labour party that put a half arsed attempt into winning the seat due to boundary changes.

 

And you lost seats! Guess what else is going to happen. Yep you know it, but don't want to admit it. You're going to lose the AV vote thanks to you masters press and end up completely fucked.

 

Mobility changes have started already. I know it. Your government know it and if you don't stop stop arguing against it. You have already CLEARLY demostrated your lack of knowledge on the subject of intensive care provided.

 

In summary, you know fuckall about the subject and I look forward to a neg/pathetic ignorant reply.

[Arl arse]

I can't get my head around how so many of you still believe politicians of any persuasion have any say on the policies enforced on the people of any country, politicians are just the puppets for the few Global Elites.

 

We are all but slaves living in their 1984 style control grid, fed a diet of sports, sex, celebrity, never ending wars and false politics to keep us fighting with each other instead of turning our collective anger on them.

 

So continue your futile arguments, but know this "He who controls the money supply, controls the world"

[Section_31]

I can't get my head around how so many of you still believe politicians of any persuasion have any say on the policies enforced on the people of any country, politicians are just the puppets for the few Global Elites.

 

We are all but slaves living in their 1984 style control grid, fed a diet of sports, sex, celebrity, never ending wars and false politics to keep us fighting with each other instead of turning our collective anger on them.

 

So continue your futile arguments, but know this "He who controls the money supply, controls the world"

 

I agree, but I thinnk that tide is turning, largely down to the internet. There is unrest everywhere and it is focussed at the people you pinpoint, from Maouist groups in India to student riots in Greeze and France. I've said before that a class war is coming, and it will be global.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

I agree, but I thinnk that tide is turning, largely down to the internet. There is unrest everywhere and it is focussed at the people you pinpoint, from Maouist groups in India to student riots in Greeze and France. I've said before that a class war is coming, and it will be global.

 

 

If there's a government overthrow - and a system overthrow to go with it - then I'm there. The revolution will likely be televised.

[Strontium]

Mobility changes have started already. I know it. Your government know it and if you don't stop stop arguing against it. You have already CLEARLY demostrated your lack of knowledge on the subject of intensive care provided.

 

In summary, you know fuckall about the subject and I look forward to a neg/pathetic ignorant reply.

 

 

I don't suppose you have any evidence beyond your say-so?

[Cardie]

Just me who had relatively little trouble right up 'til 23rd/24th then? I ordered something on the 21st and it was here on the 22nd.

 

I think discounting the quarterly results, that are actually heavily weighted to the first two months of the quarter, just because of a week of disruption, is pretty weak. I'm not saying it had no influence - of course it did - but -0.5%, an estimate that is more likely to go south rather than north in my opinion, isn't unsubstantial when it was predicted as up to 0.6% growth.

 

We're teetering on the edge at the moment. We need to be careful.

 

Had a delivery from amazon on Christmas eve.

[lifetime fan]

I don't suppose you have any evidence beyond your say-so?

 

How about 6 claimants having their mobility allowance stopped over night?

 

Do you seriously expect me to give you names of people I work with? You do know of DPA don't you?

[Strontium]

How about 6 claimants having their mobility allowance stopped over night?

 

Do you seriously expect me to give you names of people I work with? You do know of DPA don't you?

 

 

I don't expect names, just some, say, news reports which demonstrate that someone is jumping the gun on government policy. If it's actually happening now, as opposed to 21 months time when it's supposed to happen, then it's massively newsworthy.

[piscinin]

I agree, but I thinnk that tide is turning, largely down to the internet. There is unrest everywhere and it is focussed at the people you pinpoint, from Maouist groups in India to student riots in Greeze and France. I've said before that a class war is coming, and it will be global.

 

There's unrest and that's a prerequisite to change but so is having a workable alternative to replace X with. What is that?

[dennis tooth]

There's unrest and that's a prerequisite to change but so is having a workable alternative to replace X with. What is that?

 

[piscinin]

 

Yeah, that's another way of putting it I guess.

[lifetime fan]

I don't expect names, just some, say, news reports which demonstrate that someone is jumping the gun on government policy. If it's actually happening now, as opposed to 21 months time when it's supposed to happen, then it's massively newsworthy.

 

Who would you like a news report from? The Sun? The Daily Mail? Any othere paper that supports you?

 

I'm not talking of news reports, I am talking of actual events that are happening now.

[dennis tooth]

Wall Street: A blunder or a crime?

Q: When is a crime not considered criminal? A: When it's hatched on Wall Street.

 

 

All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he's the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.

 

These thrillers, set against the background of high financial crimes and misdemeanours, have become global best-sellers, doubtless in part owing to their gripping plots, elaborate mysteries and engaging characters. But their success is also indisputably a by-product of the macroeconomic chicaneries of our era and the human catastrophes they have wrought.

 

Larsson understood that financial crimes are far from victimless. They have upended millions of people's lives, even if most of the victims don't understand how they've been shortchanged and who is responsible.

 

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated. One estimate of the damage: $197 trillion.

 

Avoiding the 'c-word'

 

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average US household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets.

 

This brings us close to $100,000 per family. Against that backdrop, it's not hard to see the appeal of Larsson's hero Blomkvist, whose "contempt for his fellow financial journalists" the author encapsulates with stinging clarity:

 

"A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time… The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinise company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament."

 

This is why I identified with Blomkvists's fictional mission; in some ways it captured my own frustrations in a media world for which the 'c-word' - as in financial crime - seems must never be spoken.

 

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era. Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, "So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporised… there haven't been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG."

 

I know how hard it is to alarm the public with mere facts. They don't have the context within which to interpret complicated stories. In 2006 I released the film In Debt We Trust, exposing illegal subprime scams and warning of the coming meltdown. It was well reviewed, but no mainstream TV outlet would air it.

 

I was dismissed as an alarmist and a "doom and gloomer". A mass denial of the dangers ahead seemed to be embedded in the euphoria of the very bubble that was bringing in billions for Wall Street's financial alchemists, who themselves seemed oblivious to the risks and indifferent to the social impact their practises courted.

 

The media coverage has made a complex reality deliberately complicated, even incomprehensible. The satirical paper The Onion put the financial press in its place regarding the totally obtuse reporting for which financial journalists were justly infamous even before the biggest scoop since 1929 fell into their laps: "JPMorgan Chase Acquires Bear Stearns In Tedious-To-Read News Article." The Onion witheringly characterised the coverage as "bogging down the news for anyone who might be remotely interested in grasping what the fuck is going on."

 

Omens shrugged

 

Yet there were truth-tellers out there who were largely ignored. Investors like Warren Buffett compared the new exotic financial instruments to weapons of mass destruction - financial nuclear bombs.

 

Even guru of the right Ayn Rand had warned in Atlas Shrugged about greed destroying her beloved free market: "When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

 

Doomed or not, in the second year of the Age of Obama the hoped-for economic turnaround has yet to occur.

 

Even as the stock market goes up again, benefiting institutional investors with the capabilities to exploit it, unemployment remains high and loan defaults continue to rise. The best projections forecast a "jobless recovery," which for millions is no recovery at all.

 

How did we get into this mess? Put ten economists in a room, and you get 20 explanations.

 

Most of them revolve around business mistakes, poor risk models or even psychological problems like delusion and market madness. Few will concede senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) is right in charging that "fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis."

 

Missing has been a hard-nosed look at the crisis as a crime story. Former bank examiner William Black understands this; focusing on looting and CEO fraud, he helped send over 1,000 bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the 1980s.

 

This time there were neither dogged sleuths nor crime-busting news hounds on the beat.

 

Even Alan Greenspan has finally admitted in his all-too-polite exchange with a government enquiry that has come to resemble a Princeton seminar, "If you don't have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you're not coming to grips with the issue." Of course, this "maestro" didn't go into detail on "a lot of that stuff".

 

What we are watching is an abstruse debate about banks that are "too big to fail", not too big to jail. Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims - the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes.

 

Most of the commentary still looks up at CEOs, not down at the people whom they robbed by design, as folk singer Woody Guthrie put it, not with a six-gun but "with a fountain pen".

 

Lawyer up

 

When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters with guns, not banksters with elaborate schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their accounts.

 

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair - a publication more at home with Groucho Marx than Karl - said of the meltdown: "[This] may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history… never before have so few done so much to so many."

 

Yet economists, even progressive ones like James Kwak, deeply mired in the labyrinthine world of financial transactions, still don't believe it. The day the SEC filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, he wrote on BaselineScenario.com, one of the more critical websites covering the collapse of this vast swindle:

 

"One of the things I say now and then that most annoys people is that the financial crisis was not caused by criminal behaviour…. My general line is that I'm sure there was some bad behaviour that rose to the level of criminal liability - like lying in disclosure documents - but that it wasn't necessary for the crisis, and we could have had the crisis without any criminal activity at all."

 

The problem with this thinking is that it defines financial crime too narrowly, only in terms of securities laws concerned primarily with protecting investors.

 

It doesn't acknowledge that financial institutions spent nearly a billion dollars underwriting efforts to erode government controls and change rules, regulations and even laws to allow them to get away with whatever enhanced their bottom lines, no matter who got hurt.

 

Their well-documented history of aggressive lobbying and buying up politicians qualifies them as avaricious manipulators, not law-abiding companies. Their legal and moral defences for this conduct are entirely bogus.

 

Let's look at Goldman Sachs. In my film I report that Goldman was accused by Massachusetts authorities of deliberately designing mortgages to fail.

 

They settled the complaint by paying a $60 million fine and wrote it off as a cost of doing business. The SEC later filed civil fraud charges on similar grounds. This was followed by turbulent hearings on the Hill during which senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) repeatedly cited an internal correspondence reference to "shitty" deals that Goldman Sachs peddled only to bet against them.

 

The Justice Department, in a separate action, was asked to open a criminal file. Among the allegations: shady accounting schemes. The giant firm has certainly come in for excoriation and ridicule, but none of Goldman's officers has been convicted of wrongdoing, and they are "lawyered up" to the gills.

 

Leslie Griffith on Reader Supported News writes:

 

"A modern-day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing presidents. Filling the executive branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients… the American people. When their equivalent of 'tax time' came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks."

 

In their testimony before congress, Goldman bankers defended themselves by saying all big banks did what they did.

 

A weak alibi at best, it nonetheless seems to be working for them; the assignment of criminal liability is hardly underway.

 

As one lawyer said to Bloomberg News, "In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing." In plain English: Don't get your hopes up.

 

By deception and design

 

The government has not declared war on Wall Street even after Wall Street declared war on Main Street. The housing bubble was built on a bedrock of fraud linking shady subprime brokers and appraisers to an industry of financial products that were then resold with misrepresented values thanks to the connivance of unethical ratings agencies.

 

The selling and reselling of assetless asset-backed securities is a central element of the vast fraud, as is the practise of insuring while simultaneously betting against these investments through companies like AIG.

 

We are talking about a criminal enterprise involving tens of thousands of people working in the financial services industry. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times explained that three industries worked together almost like a cabal to perpetuate these schemes. The architects of the FIRE economy (structured around Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), operated in the shadow of bent rules and apathetic regulators. They built a huge infrastructure of collaborators and henchmen called "financial service professionals."

 

Writes Wolf: "In between the ultimate borrowers and the risk-takers were loan-originators, designers and packagers of securitised assets, ratings agencies, sales staff, managers of banks and SIVs [structured Investment Vehicles] and managers of pension-and other-funds."

 

What chance did some poor homeowner or credit card customer have against this savvy and well-funded phalanx of operatives whose one mission was to separate them from their property and money?

 

Many knew the people they were selling to could not afford to buy their products. They didn't care. It was all done deceptively and by design. It was deliberate, engineered in public and hidden in plain sight.

 

At the local level, mortgage companies said they were under pressure from Wall Street to keep selling homes to the poor so the paper could be resold in an atmosphere of trickle-down corruption.

 

My own investigation led me to produce a new film, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, out on DVD from Disinfo. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com). I also wrote a companion book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation Books) with more documentation than you can get into any film of reasonable length.

 

I was surprised when the Wall Street Journal characterised it as an "anti-Wall Street film [that] isn't just for Michael Moore fans". The Hollywood Interview blog called it "fascinating and nail-biting, much like All the President's Men."

 

Movie City News elaborated:

 

"Plunder: The Crime of Our Time describes how Wall Street interests greased the skids for just such a collapse, consciously breaking laws they knew government regulators were unlikely to defend. Michael Moore has trod similar ground, but in a more overtly entertaining style… It's a sobering documentary, but one that's too important to ignore… in Schechter's case, again."

 

This crisis can be explained in a way most people will understand, and when the public "gets it" they will get angry and act. It's the oldest truism: Where there is a will, there's a way.

[Stu Monty]

Mark Steel taking apart Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, for being the mendacious, bullshitting twat that he is:

 

Mark Steel: Grant Shapps: at last – a man to really annoy us - Mark Steel, Commentators - The Independent

[torahboy]

Mark Steel taking apart Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, for being the mendacious, bullshitting twat that he is:

 

Mark Steel: Grant Shapps: at last – a man to really annoy us - Mark Steel, Commentators - The Independent

 

 

 

Shapps, as one response to the article pointed out, is only one of many members of this cabinet who has the ability to annoy.

 

I must be careful when posting about Jewish politicians as SD might play his anti-semitic/self-loathing Jew card. So I will just say that I agree with Mark Steel.

[Strontium]

You, and Palestine activist Mark Steel, can say whatever the hell you like about any Jewish person. It's the Zionist conspiracy bullshit I have an issue with.

[torahboy]

You, and Palestine activist Mark Steel, can say whatever the hell you like about any Jewish person. It's the Zionist conspiracy bullshit I have an issue with.

 

 

 

What 'Zionist conspiracy bullshit' would that be?

[Stu Monty]

You, and Palestine activist Mark Steel, can say whatever the hell you like about any Jewish person. It's the Zionist conspiracy bullshit I have an issue with.

 

Disgraceful shithousery. The insinuation that there's an anti-Israel agenda to the article is sublime cowardice towards tackling the actual subject matter, and that's exactly what you're insinuating with the Palestine activist comment.

[Strontium]

I wasn't insinuating anything. I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that Mark Steel singled out the solitary Jewish member of the Cabinet for special condemnation. Stop seeing things that aren't there.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

What 'Zionist conspiracy bullshit' would that be?

 

I wouldn't mind hearing your definition of that, Strontominium.

[Stu Monty]

I wasn't insinuating anything. I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that Mark Steel singled out the solitary Jewish member of the Cabinet for special condemnation. Stop seeing things that aren't there.

 

What a massive twat you can be.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

I wouldn't mind hearing your definition of that, Strontominium.

 

.

[Strontium]

With the search function still borked I would have a hard time proving it even if it was the case. I am happy to withdraw the comment until any such time as I can substantiate it.