Apropos the last post: we dissidents are not alone. Have belatedly come across David Malone’s excellent post (written earlier but somehow missed by me) on the same theme – the airbrushing of the financial crisis from all political discourse. David goes further and highlights the implications for democracy and the rule of law. I hope he does not mind if I reproduce a few paragraphs for the benefit of those that have not already read it.
It really is very good.
“The official narrative today is that the plan of recovery is working. The narrative focuses on the rise of the stock markets to almost pre-crash heights. The failure of housing or commercial property markets to recover and the fact that unemployment is hideously high is simply no longer part of the recovery narrative. These things have been dropped. What has been added has been the ‘shocking’ level of public, national debt. In the new narrative the cause of the ballooning of public debt has been steered away from facts about the cost of the bail outs or how the disintegration of the speculative bubble caused a subsequent collapse of real economic activity. The new story is that the debts we have now are nothing to do with the banks and their temporary difficulties. They are due to a deeper incontinence in public spending.
“The narrative is being re-written so that the ‘debt crisis’ is seen as something that is under control and being solved, whereas the present and pressing problem in need of controlling is the cost of public services and the unreasonable expectations that underlie them. Public expectation of a free lunch for their children at school or a pension for their life’s work or a health service paid for through taxes – these socialist weapons of fiscal destruction are to blame for the vast public debt. That is the narrative we are being fed. The bankers are being air brushed out of the story and certainly any mention of blame being attached to them is being described as backward looking if not downright suspect and dangerous. Not far, I suspect, from being vaguely alluded to as financial terrorism or a ‘financial hate crime’.
“What we are left with in the official narrative is that our betters have one crisis under control – the cash flow/liquidity crisis and are now taking equally heroic steps to deal with the recently uncovered, deeper, systemic crisis – the ‘true’ crisis – of out-of-control public spending which is responsible for sovereign debt levels that are injurious to the efficient workings of the markets. Markets whose fearless leaders are trying, despite pubic profligacy and obstinate stupidity, to help us out of debt and back on to the true path of prosperity via necessary austerity and more ‘realisitic’ expectations of what we are worth and what we deserve.
” The question for me is if the dissident narrative can hold its ground and find something more say. Or have we been been swept aside?
“Certainly we are outgunned and alone. The press are supine collaborators, the rule of law has been bought and whored, and academia is either captured by the dominant ideology and too dimwitted to escape or just too concerned with grovelling for tenure and a city sinecure.
“The dissident narrative I advance says that what we are told are temporary and extraordinary measures are nothing of the sort. The measures taken to ‘deal’ with the ‘crisis’ have in fact created, whether by accident design, a new and very much more reliable, system for ensuring that the super rich stay that way. The new system horrifies me because it has put finance above democracy, markets over governments, and it appals free-marketeers because it sets up an untouchable aristocracy within the markets who are not allowed to lose and who can therefore take what they want, when they want, from whomever they want and the law will not touch them. Neither the law of the land nor the law of the markets. Free marketeers and those on the left like me find ourselves in the unlikely position of sharing an abhorrence for what the super elite are doing.
“What we have in place now is a system of permanent and institutionalized acceptance that the largest accumulations of wealth and those who own, manage and serve them can never be imperilled or threatened either by democratic rule of law nor even the workings of the markets themselves. Both perils have been removed for the super rich and their banks because it is now established that the purpose of government is to make sure the system and the hierarchy of wealth and power at its peak, remains untouchable and unchangeable.
“With this accepted, the rules of sovereign democratic government and global finance have mutated beyond recognition. Today when banks need more of their assets purchased by the public purse in order to relieve them of possible losses, the public purse is opened without discussion. What this means is that you and I are NO LONGER simply buying up, as a temporary, emergency measure, mistakes made in the bubble of three years ago. We are there to buy up the results of any greedy speculations made in the last two years. Government purchases and the QE which fund them are no longer part of dealing with any ‘crisis’ at all. They are now part of how the banks do business. They are the new normal.
“This isn’t a crisis. This is the new business of profit without risk. It isn’t even really a ‘bail out’. The new normal is a no risk machine for expropriating public wealth. The banks can now buy what ever they want, the higher the risk the better, because the new system guarantees that there is no risk for them. The banks can speculate on sovereign debt, currencies and commodities knowing that if they are in the elite, they will be bailed out. Not in the spectacularly embarrassing fashion of 07-08 but in the low key ways dreamt up in the last two years. A plethora of ‘exceptional’ funding measures, bond purchases and abrogations of the rule of law in favour of bank profit, which are all, in fact, bank bail outs at public expense.
“Crisis? What crisis?
“The only crisis for the elite and their banks will be if the next round of QE in America and of ECB bail outs for German and French Banks via Greece, Portugal and Ireland somehow do not happen. If there is a minor miracle and our leaders remember we exist – THEN there will be a crisis for the banks and the financial elite and some small hope for us.”