A thought occurred to me whilst coming home from holiday yesterday.
A nagging concern hit me. Have we suffered a coup d'tat?
Those who have take control are central bankers. Using the excuse of inflation they are not wasting the opportunity to rebuild the economy in the way that they would wish.
The Fed has rates on hold this month but says they will rise again, even though inflation there is falling.
The ECB raised rates even though eurozone inflation is undoubtedly falling. It is already down to 3% in Spain.
And the Bank of England is going to raise rates here even though there is good reason to think inflation will fall further, soon.
So, has there been a quiet, totally undemocratic and totally unaccountable revolution to restructure the economy of the West to be one where wealth flows upwards and positive real interest rates are the norm, whatever the consequence for most people, jobs, the green transition and developing countries?
I think this plausible, and it certainly looks to be co-ordinated.
Did democracy meet its maker at Jackson Hole (the location of central banker's annual meeting) in that case? It seems plausible.
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Is your argument plausible? Yes in the sense that the West has fallen victim to the the silly Hayekian/Friedmanite argument that only a free market economy should rule whereas pragmatism or plain commonsense tells us it should be a mixture of both a state command economy and a free market economy. Historically, a relatively recent example of this is the American Marshall Plan:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Raymond Plant (a Labour peer) came close to explaining this in his 2009 book “The Neo-Liberal State” where he argued that even Hayek had to admit that state intervention was necessary for economic and general well-being. This undermined Hayek’s ideological battle with Keynes of course:-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neo-Liberal-State-Raymond-Plant/dp/0199281750/ref=sr_1_8?crid=38ULP4ED4ZHQ5&keywords=The+Neoliberal+State&qid=1686982711&sprefix=the+neoliberal+state%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-8
Since all British political parties are dominated by Neoliberalism (Thatcher’s “the government has no money of its own”) and as yet fail to understand MMT’s logic challenge to this which needs to be seen as a revival of the necessity for a command economy as well as a free market economy it is obvious that bankers through the “ideological” capture of central banks are going to take advantage of this lack of pragmatism by politicians.
The pragmatism the British need to re-learn is that in matters of national well-being if “markets don’t work, don’t use markets”!
None of the UK’s political parties as I’ve said appear to me to really understand this and the proof of this is their failure to adopt an MMT understanding of money creation and how it can be used.
We have not entered a Freidman stage of monetary policy. The central banks do not control money supply by a computer. Central banks set interest rates, and Friedman was opposed to this very idea. He believed that central banks determined market interest rates by managing the money supply. According to Milton Friedman monetary policy should be managed to make interest rates of government bonds almost always be 0!
As far as Hayek is concerned, all plans of the economy can fail. Even the plans of central banks run by the most enlightened. The question then is; are the current central bank failures a mistake of planning, or did they plan to fail all along.
I would describe the current central bank policies a moral panic of animal spirits rather than an attempt of neoliberalism. They have ran out of ideas and their ‘expertise’ has clear and obvious limits.
If you are correct and I suspect you may be, surely there will be a tipping point in the near future when mass populations will rise up in rebellion and the bankers plans will backfire.
I am not sure if the Central Bankers have taken over but I am confident that for the last forty years Britain has been run entirely for the benefit of the City of London.
To the detriment of the country, its institutions and ninety-nine per cent of everybody that lives in the UK.
It’s so hard to explain that net migration.
Wealthy leaving, people from low income countries coming in.
If the country was being run for the benefit of the wealthy then the people running it aren’t good at it.
I’d agree that they’re not very good at managing anything, but looking at the increasing wealth of the top few percent and the decreasing wealth of the rest of us, I think their plan is going very well.
And I’d challenge you to provide a reliable source of data to show that the number of very rich people in the UK is dropping.
There have been fewer “golden hellos” issued recently, but that’s because of sanctions against people supporting Putin. Some very wealthy people are leaving – Mone is an obvious example – but the investigations into Government contracts probably explains a lot of that.
Or is it another Brexit bonus? Are wealthy mainland European people heading home having seen that the possibilities for a good life here are declining?
What figures are you using to assert that the wealthy are leaving, and where are they going?
There is no evidence that they are
Wealthy people leaving the country is no surprise. You don’t have to live here to extract wealth from the country.
As for people from poor counties coming here, societies with a large amount of inequality generate a lot of poorly paid jobs as domestic servants, security guards etc.
I worry about the Reeves/Starmer strategy of cosying up to “The Markets”. Markets anticipate, and they must already anticipate a Labour government by 2025. If the market thought Labour would fix public services, they would already be dumping the £. Labour would be starting from a position where market fears were already built in, but on the Conservative’s watch. By promising in advance to only deliver hot air, Labour will be trapped. Any attempt to fix problems will crash the markets. By being bolder now, Labour would find it easier to deliver in 2025.
This is on the fringe of my constant worry as to how Anything can Change . How can any new government actually implement even a moderate change to a greener fairer economy? When Truss &co tried something radical (Not our ideas on this blog at all , but They thought they were right), the ***** markets forced them out. John MacDonalds fully costed plans never got chance ,nor the Green New Deal in USA etc etc .
Labours vaguely greenish spending plans now suddenly ditched as the ‘markets’ did not appear to respond to well .
So , uk virtually a police state , the bankers rule , can anyone tell me how anything can change except by violent revolution which I feel is possibly simmering everywhere.
Is there any sensible practical solution that could actually happen?
Yes
But it takes a narrative that supports it
Possibly, although I would argue that it isn’t a coup by dint of the fact that such control has been achieved by bankers merely filling the vacuum left by the political classes who seem to have abandoned any pretence of managing the economy. They are in turn, allowed to get away with it by the electorate’s supine acceptance of the “inevitable” imposed on them by interests who don’t appear to be motivated by improving the general good and supine acceptance of things over which you allegedly have no control is one of the major triumphs of Thatcherism.
Coup d’etat, takeovers, they don’t need to be direct. If bankers can just raise interest on an entire population with no accountability, no democratic oversight, that’s ample demonstration of power and attack. Money and its grip on the very heart of people’s lives has far more force than guns and bombs. Reduce incomes and you can kill hundreds of thousands with full media backing and a thick veneer of economic excuses. And the deaths are far cheaper to produce, compared to the price of armies. And they’re virtually invisible unless someone does the research. Diplomacy and war are synonymous (war being diplomacy by other means), I would argue that it looks like economics can be added to that mix.
Well, since the central bankers literally seized power in 2008, it would follow that there would be a concerted effort by the rich to seize that central bank power for themselves – they do this quite often don’t they with anything big that happens – religion, war – they co-opt it all into their simple project of the retention of their money power over generations.
By seizing it, they can ensure that that policy helps them – there will be no bail out for ‘main street’, no epiphany now.
A lot of this is driven by fear – we have global warming, migration etc., and our geography is going to change a lot, so the rich are pulling up the drawbridge whilst trying to grab as much resource for themselves as possible. It’s RAND’s/Nash’s game theory writ large in all its glory: ‘ Fuck you buddy’.
The fact that there are more of us than them – always the big hope when talking about democracy – has now been weaponised against us – there are too many ordinary people now apparently, when in fact we know it is the uneven allocation of resources that is the problem. But you might as well be talking to a brick wall. It’s our fault for not being criminals, for not working in the City and using the daylight robbery of high finance to reallocate resources to our selves and a small group of like-minded sub-humans.
Those who measure progress through the production of millionaires and ‘trickle down’ have a lot to answer for. All it has done is create a self-serving cabal of anti-social humans who are essentially of no use to anyone but themselves using a key man-made resource known as money.
So that might be the epitaph of our species – Homo Sapiens – wiped out by money and greed.
What a tragedy. But even using the word ‘tragedy’ is inappropriate, giving it a grandeur when it is all far too grubby actually.
No, what it is, is PATHETIC. That’s what it is.
When we’re gone, we’re gone – whether like me you believe that that is the end, or whether you believe you become a ward of God. But there are no cash machines or off shore banks in heaven. I don’t see them mentioned when the afterlife is being considered in the Bible, Torah or the Quran for example.
Yes, most definitely a coup d’ tat 🙂
I used to wonder, where does the banking sector do when it reaches the point where is nothing left to be financialised? I now wonder if we have gone beyond that point.
Now that Rod is a good question.
The answer is that not everything has gone yet but it’s on its way (the NHS, education).
Already, by facilitating Russian oligarch cash for example – which could be related to anything from illegal immigration, buying honours, funding destructive ideas like BREXIT, to funding wars to other illegal activity, banks have already diversified and will continue to do so.
We can all be guaranteed that wherever their is money to be made out of misery, modern private banks will get their cut.
Maybe this has been the plan all along… stage 1) invade England under the cover of funding William of Orange so as to get a new banking system set up (Bloodless Revolution), 2) get the peasantry off the land where they can live for free in monetary terms and into factories where they need to earn bank credits to live thus creating demand for the bankers’ product (Industrial Revolution), 3) rinse/repeat abroad (Empire), 4) destroy the UK’s middle classes (Brexit) and obviously this wasn’t planned long ago, this was more along the lines of opportunism, 5) destroy middle classes in general with interest rates and keep them in line using CBDC (Oligarchy) though this last remains speculative. You could probably winkle Austerity in there somewhere too. It’ll be interesting to see how much people are prepared to put up with before resorting to insurrection. I’m 70 now and lots of bits of me hurt so I’ll just be getting the popcorn in myself.
I suggest that what we are seeing is a hydra, the nine headed monster and the commonality of the beast is a closely related set of doctrines which are both economic and political. Their strategy is constantly evolving but the direction of travel is the same. I think this is what you are saying, Richard.
One question ( and probably more) arises and is widely believed out there. How far is this coup dictated from a central source?
I know a few people who believe in these centralised conspiracy theories. The wacky ones involve the Rothschilds or Freemasons. There are some beliefs like the EU is guided by a secret group who wish abolish the nation state or the Neo-Cons in the US plan world domination.
My reply is people at the top of these institutions are usually people with strong egos and are not the sort to take orders from a central authority but would seek to steer it, even when they agree with the direction.
I recall a book in the 1970s which made a case for the Trilateral Commission controlling the economy of the West -and such ideas are often quoted on social media today, along with the WEF and Starmer’s membership of the Trilateral Commission being ‘proof’ he is a Tory plant. We must make clear we repudiate conspiracy theories while challenging their narrative.
The other question is ‘What is the best way to counter it?’ The Central bankers do have real power but their appointment depends on elected politicians. Ideas can be challenged and can lose force. In the 1930/40s we saw a big shift in beliefs about how to run a country. It might be possible to do so again with the help of the web.
Our opposition political parties compete with other but need to put point scoring on one side and debate fundamental ideas-like MMT. There are people in the Greens, Labour, Lib Dem and Nationalist parties who are willing and able to consider alternative doctrines . This is where this blog and others play such an important role. If the ‘progressive thinkers’ ( to use one term) can get together and start to undermine the claims of the central bankers, then there is hope.
Ideas which seem entrenched can collapse very quickly as we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989.
With the above in mind, here’s the latest from Cormack Lawson on Charter Cities/Freezones etc. which is very readable and may well contain more than a core of the truth especially when one considers the efforts Gove seems to be going to to hide the goings-on at Teeside https://medium.com/@cormack.lawson/the-uks-enablement-acts-2023-part-3-brexit-branded-treason-is-the-contagion-4145bd39ad18
I am not convinced, as yet.
A glance at the Internet indicates that the bank rate in China is 3.65% and the rate of child hunger (2020) 2.5%.
Our bank rate is 4.5% and our child hunger rate is somewhere between 25% and 30%.
Might there be a connection?
In China, might the banking industry be subordinate to the government?
Might our government be subordinate to big finance?
Might our mortgage payers be also paying for our governments’ loyalty to the big wallets running the American Empire?
I am not sure I could say this is causal
There is more to it than rates
I agree that Central Banks are operating for the benefit of a few… but it’s not a coup.
Rather, it is pursuing the aims given to it with the tools given to it… by our political masters.
Politicians might claim ‘nothing to do with me, guv’… but this is a nonsense. We should assign blame where it belongs.
But are the politicians part of the coup?
CAN elected politicians be part of a coup? Are they not just exercising their ability to run (or should that be spelt ruin?) the country in the way that they see fit?
It depends on whether they abuse democracy
Yes ..
Mark Carney, former BoE governor, has just informed us that Brexit is to blame for the higher level of inflation in the UK. Will Andrew Bailey now make a public apology for blaming the workers? You can bet he won’t have the human decency to do so!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/17/brexit-to-blame-for-rising-inflation-says-former-bank-of-england-governor
I bet he won’t….
Furthermore I note in the Guardian article that Andrea Leadsom is at least blaming supply chain problems albeit from the effects of Covid as though no other country with lower inflation rates but as badly affected by Covid didn’t have the same supply chain problems. Time Leadsom made the effort to talk to someone in the medical field instead of making stuff up! Time the Guardian took a tougher line on politicians who make up lies!
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/funding/health-funding-data-analysis
I’m very much against ad hominem attacks on people, but I have to say, I don’t remember reading anthing that Leadsom has ever said without thinking that downright bloody stupidity was a plausible explanation.
I hope I can be forgiven this one ad hom.
Forgiven
I am not sure that is an ad hominem. It appears to be be reasonable reaction.
I would say that there has been a neoliberal coup, rather than a central banking coup. Neoliberals seem to be very wealthy corporations, not least Big Pharma and Big Food. They fund universities, the media, and “sponsor” politicians. For a little insight, I can recommend: The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Democracy-Childrens-ebook/dp/B08XQYGC68/
I still can’t believe that MPs are allowed to vote on issues they have received money from.
Maybe we just need to look at it that way
My view is that whether it is the Neo-liberal outlook or the central bankers, the support and funding of wealth is involved.
There is a self-reaffirming dynamic between wealth/the rich and Neo-liberalism.
Neo-liberalism has provided the false intellectual basis for acquisition and greed – from ‘state monopoly’ in ‘choice theory’ to trickle down economics.
So, there is the validation. Then follows the money from the validated rich basically to help create the means to spread the word – from funding the Mont Pelerin Society through to what happens on Tufton Street today.
Then think about how it inculcated our universities in the West, who was running those ‘teaching’ programmes and how they might have been seeded by wealth. Add in the oil crisis and the regrowth of post war economies like Germany and Japan, floating market derived currency valuation, then you have a wonderful opportunity for something new – but not necessarily better – to get a foothold – and one day there is Neo-liberalism everywhere.
Frederic Bastiat is responsible for one of my favourite quotes:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Followed by a definition of that plunder:
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
Now at this stage I’m thinking about high finance and credit default swaps for example where you can create a financial instrument that is nothing more than a bet or similar to being able to take out insurance on something you don’t own in order to get a big pay out at someone else’s expense. Imagine that? Insuring you neighbours house, and hoping that it might burn down! But in the REAL world that would be illegal, and you can only insure what you own. Well, for now anyway!!
But no, Bastiat – a ‘liberal’ economist is actually talking about the state as a plunderer:
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.”
This is what is so fascinating about Bastiat – you see the same inconsistency and one-eyed bias in Charles Buchannan’s public choice theory where in his world only state departments seek to grow their budgets and remits for themselves – no one else. Buchanan completely ignores the ‘market making’ that private banks do to grow their departments and which causes so much trouble for society. What Bastiat and Buchanan (who has no excuse) observe actually happens in both private and state apparatus – their observations apply to both. It is a human factor – not a sectorial one.
But as well as bias against the state linking Bastiat and Buchanan over their hundreds of year apart together, there is a word ‘ Liberal’ and a philosophy about freedom behind it.
Liberalism and its connotations with liberty – or freedom – is a powerful notion that has frankly been abused. It is also a high-minded concept because it is related to human rationality.
My view is that liberalism actually imposes an idealised version of rationality on human beings that is irreconcilable with reality. This is at the core of the issues we have with Neo-liberalism.
And where liberalism comes REALLY undone is when money comes into the picture. Because money changes people, and it changes their relationship to each other. As much as money can make so many wonderful things possible, it also brings out the worst in people. Even Bastiat for all his intellectual power ignores this and also practiced reductionism:
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
So here, he is saying liberty and property existed naturally BEFORE any laws to regulate it. There is no desire to apply his high minded views on liberty to asking whether the property or the liberty was gained in a fair or reasonable way? Was a fair price paid? Who claimed that which was made by God for their own? No, we are invited in a Panglossian way to accept the world as it is. But it’s all SO convenient for those who are already wealthy isn’t it?
One (rich) man’s liberty is another (lesser rich) man’s servility and lack of freedom. In short, liberalism is contradicted by Neo-liberalism and should not be in the name at all. And liberalism needs to deal once and for all with money, and its poisonous effects on human rationality. Stop being so bloody high-minded and accept the grubbiness of human nature.
What should a renewed Liberalism be about? To me, it should be about recognising human frailty and mitigating its effects; it should be about realising that liberty itself is unequal. Liberalism is about managing freedom – and this involves curbing it where it is causing harm as well as enabling it. And that will involve curbing freedom for groups we currently give too much freedom to – and doing what Carl Schmitt says needs doing every now and then – being sovereign and making the exception.
Can Liberals cope with that? At the moment Neo-liberalism is concerned with doing nothing more than freeing wealth of its obligations, standards, commitments and accountability because it is unable to reconcile the liberal bit in its label and question how wealth comes about.
The ghost of Bastiat lives on, demonstrating just how un-self aware ‘Neo-liberalism’ is of its contradictions and hypocrisy. And as long as wealth funds it, it will continue to do so until politics has the courage to call time on it or when the planet can no longer sustain us or both.
Even the Telegraph is blistering-
– https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/16/bank-of-england-running-out-places-hide/
Richard,
I must admit I don’t understand your criticism of positive interest real rates – surely if we want corporations and individuals to invest and grow the economy, they need to achieve a return ahead of inflation, otherwise they are net worse off?
Why do you want to discourage investment AND make people worse off? What have I missed?
Sarah Pascoe Please could you explain why a return on investment requires real interest rates? Surely investing in a corporation should generate returns through increased profitability and shareholder dividends?
“Have we suffered a coup d’etat? Those who have take control are central bankers.”
A friend of mine, a professor of finance, has been saying similar things for a while now.
Serfs rise up & rebel?
I’m not convinced. Banksters have a position in society very similar to that of the German civil service in the 1930/40s and then in post 1945 (and very much the same faces: Hitlers little helpers morphed into Adenauers). Banksters have a fair understanding how to make finances work do they need dramatic cutting down to size and a change of ideology?, yup, was the German civil service “weeded” post 1945? yup.
Furthermore, one could characterise banksters and their activities as a key underlying cause of the emergence of monsters (= symptoms) such as Trump, fatberg and possibly Orban.
At the end is an extract from the contradictory gibberings of Lagarde ECB president. These gibberings are identical to those from the imbeciles in charge of the BoE. Both (ECB & BoE) are monomaniacs – focused on inflation – mostly caused by fuel price rises (which could have been reduced if e.g. the EU decided to import low cost LNG from USA and use it to drive down market prices – but it did not. A lobbyist I know well proposed this to a senior Commission official – who was shocked at the idea. The UK could have forced the pricing of North Sea gas down to extraction costs – it did not. Why?
The wage demands is/was triggered by fuel price rises. The rhetoric from both camps (ECB & BoE) shows that they WANT people poorer, (by suppressing the demand for higher wages) Charming.
There is a pathology at work here identical to the one that exists with respect to the EC/DG ENER/EU institutions and the laisser faire approach towards elec market reform. Well paid people largely unaffected by events, going through the motions of pretending to care about EU (or UK) citizen-serfs. I will pass over in silence a Commission director general who owns a luxury hotel in Bali.
One problem is that the banksters in charge of central banks come from the banking industry & thus take actions only in the interests of the banking industry. Compare & contrast:
Central Bank of China: low interest loans to Chinese industry.
ECB: raise interest rates to make life more costly for EU industry.
Hmm, wonder how that’s going to play out. As for Lagard’s “quite a harmonious discussion” (see below) this falls into the class of group think/conventional wisdom. Which is extremely dangerous. All the above gives serfs the impression that their betters don’t give a stuf – & they would be right. In turn this leads to the emergence of monsters like Trump (or Fatberg). They are human representations of a collective finger by serfs to the (quite homogeneous) ruling elites,
What follows is an extract from G web site reporting on Lagarde’s gibberish which in places is contradictory.
Lagarde “We are not seeing a second-round effect. We are not seeing a wage-price spiral…The sooner the better in terms of when do we bring inflation back to 2%, but we have also to be realistic and measured in the response that we give.”
“rising unit labour costs did contribute to the upward revision to eurozone core inflation forecasts. Today we took these monetary policy decisions We raised interest rates by 0.25 percentage points Our future decisions will depend on how we see inflation developing and how well our past rate hikes tame inflation”
Q: Were today’s decisions unanimous?
Lagarde: “there was quite a harmonious discussion at this month’s meeting, with some deep analysis of the eurozone labour market and the factors driving inflation. It was a very, very broad consensus, to raise interest rates and to confirm that the ECB would stop reinvesting cash from maturing bonds bought through its asset purchase programme.”.
Does this “and to confirm that the ECB would stop reinvesting cash from maturing bonds bought through its asset purchase programme” mean QT? I assume it does. Wow. Let’s make money itself, the stuff we all need to trade, more expensive and scarcer. As I’ve suggested before, this can easily be interpreted as a way of returning the middle classes to the serfdom they traded their way out of centuries ago. It’s a co-ordinated attack too, though not global as has been suggested as I gather the Chinese are lately keen on elevating their peasantry from out of poverty. It’s just the West, then. We may soon have to start publishing survival tips on here.
I confirm, they are doing QT
“A Very British Coup” is a 1982 novel by British Labour politician Chris Mullin. The novel has twice been adapted for television; as “A Very British Coup” in 1988 and as “Secret State” in 2012. It has been described as “The novel that foretold the rise of Corbyn”.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_British_Coup
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-British-Coup-foretold-Corbyn/dp/1846687403
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-very-british-coup
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/13/very-british-coup-political-drama-box-set-review
This book was published in May 2023:
Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy
by Matt Kennard, Claire Provost
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silent-Coup-Corporations-Overthrew-Democracy/dp/1350269980/
If only I had more time….
One thing that is overlooked about the notion of an independent central bank is that it’s inevitable that there will be pressure on the governor of the bank not to embarrass the political party in office to stay in the job and this would seem especially so when you have a country dominated by the unpragmatic ideology of “Kiss of Death” Neoliberalism.
So as I commented earlier Mark Carney has embarrassingly mentioned Brexit as a main contributory factor to the UK’s higher than normal inflation rate but Biden’s huge “greening of America” stimulation budget which will attract a lot of capital investment into the country will also be having an effect. This is the opposite of the dumb Neoliberal mantra that only spending by the market has value. Even then capital investment in the UK is very poor for a developed economy. Here’s a 2018 TUC report and things have surely got worse since then on the capital investment front with the Tory government’s handling of Brexit and Covid:-
https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/uk-near-bottom-oecd-rankings-national-investment
Richard is right; there has been an “undemocratic and totally unaccountable revolution to restructure the economy of the West to be one where wealth flows upwards”.
After the 2019 General Election I shared with colleagues (to blank looks) the idea that we’d suffered a bloodless coup. I thought it was political, and was the result of at least thirty years campaigning by the far right and outrageous but focussed media messaging. But it’s becoming clear that it isn’t about politics in the sense of governing a country, it is about making money at all costs, even human lives. And it’s not just about Britain; it’s worldwide.
It concerns me that at a time when the electorate is ready for a change of direction, the Labour Party seems to be offering more of the same. But hopefully, much of that is tactics to avoid policies being derided or torn apart before they ever see light of an election. It saddens me that on this enlightened blog they are often undermined by correspondents whose philosophy and politics I admire. If we want serious democratic change, and the opportunity to engage and implement all the best ideas there are, we need to remove the Tory government. By splitting the opposition vote at this stage, divide and rule will continue to empower the neo-liberals.
I think Labour is now neoliberal to its core again.
A traditional Capitalist agenda is not the same as Neo-liberal. We’ll never persuade enough people to accept MMT if we don’t start by getting rid of the Tories.
But Labour are neoliberal
For me, the acid test for being neo-liberal is whether you want to privatise all, or part of healthcare. Privatisation means profiting by blackmailing people over their health. We can see which MPs have received “donations” from private healthcare companies here (blue pins) https://www.everydoctor.org.uk/map-of-nhs-privatisation
According to this source, Labour party leader Keir Starmer has received more than £157,000, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has earnt almost £300,000, and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting more than £193,000. https://www.thenational.scot/news/uk-news/23568478.much-labour-tory-mps-get-private-health-firms/
For me, this is a huge conflict of interest, and another indication of neo-liberalism. I am reminded that “twelve years after Margaret Thatcher left office, she was asked at a dinner what was her greatest achievement. Thatcher replied: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’.” Source: https://economicsociology.org/2018/03/19/thatcherisms-greatest-achievement/
I think the concern is rather that however one votes, one gets neoliberal. Both main parties clearly have as their objective the implementation of neofeudalism with themselves included in the Lords cohort (as opposed to the Serfs) and since the LibDems last had any political meaning as enablers to the Tories there doesn’t seem to be any sensible reason to be voting for them either. What to do? I’ll be keeping my head down and surviving, myself, aided by vats of popcorn.
Pat Adams: “….at a time when the electorate is ready for a change of direction, the Labour Party seems to be offering more of the same. But hopefully, much of that is tactics to avoid policies being derided or torn apart before they ever see light of an election.”
I would love to think you are right, but find it very hard to have any confidence. It’s true that the right-wing/centrist media would savage anything more enlightened from Reeves et al, but surely they could find some form of words that gives some hope? Unless, as Richard says, they are utterly benighted and neo-liberal to the core.
[…] Has the West already suffered a coup d’etat? Have the central bankers already seized power? Funding the Future […]
This rather strikes me as having been baked into the architecture of “independent” central banking right from the beginning, no? By design central banks are aristocratic institutions inimical to labour. Volcker is reputed for instance to have carried around a slip of paper in his wallet to remind him always to be conscious of crushing the unions.
I wish this were a discernible, and thus repairable, matter, given its premise.
BUT. Since ALL money – in ALL nations – must be BORROWED into circulation via a bank loan from a lender RULED by a central banker, how can there ever be any question of whether the central bankers rule the world ? Remember, central banking grew out of the shyster gold merchants from 500 years ago printing more gold ‘receipts’ than they had gold, thus enriching themselves while giving the economy a boost.
Seems to me the bigger question yet is, why do governments that could and in some cases CAN, issue that money into circulation, rather than it being borrowed into circulation, then why the F, and when the F, will we change that ?
Why Does GUV Borrow ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HRt6sSXpOQ
Since PositiveMoney UK has thrown in the towel on its former promise of ‘reform’ – what else can anyone expect ?
Either we have a global switch back to money creation via a public monetary authority, or we continue to suffer the worst.
Thanks.
The Money Apprentice
Positive Money got everything about money wrong for a long time
It looks like you do too
I just spotted this post vis Naked Capitalism and thought: “finally”!
I had given up on you and unsubscribed, but now I’m going to sign up again!
Yes, the central bankers are taking down the economy. Here’s a super useful resource:
https://bestevidence.substack.com/
Thanks Ian Tresman for pointing to ‘Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy’ by Matt Kennard and Claire Provost describing how transnational corporations have established a supranational legal framework designed to be impervious to any democratic will, which prevents popularly elected bodies from enacting any legislation that can harm the interests and profits of those corporations. Banks are transnational corporations that can act in concert across borders.
Presumably, with many elected representatives having worked in banking and other corporations they are well trained to protect those interests and profits. Taking the oath of allegiance to the monarch ought to contradict any transnational interests although not in the same way as taking an oath to your constituents might.
While you can take your pick as to the pivotal moments when a notional coup may have occurred (2008,2015,2016, 2019?) I’d suggest that it has been a continual process since the turn of the 80s. In my own field -education – there has been a trend to remove the tools for social criticism from the populace (I use Matthew Arnold’s term deliberately), and with the occasional wobble, either deaden critical faculties via the ‘soma’ of mass culture (as per Huxley) or quash dissent by Orwellian manipulation and repression. The ‘social liberal’ aspect of British society, the saving grace of Blair’s era, has shed the ‘social’ for its true base of ‘neo’, and Labour is now revealed in its true form following the hiccup of Corbyn. Now graced with near absolute power, the BoE lunacy is not the coup, simply another step on a path long established. The triumph of conspiracy theories (believed it seems by some 30% of the population), or the bollix uttered by politicians and the media in the C21, is to fill the void created by the evisceration of education and the failure of such ‘organic intellectuals’ as yourselves to turn the tide of ignorance.
Bit grumpy this morning. Sorry.
Grumpiness is allowed