help the governments

[paul123456]

hello there ,

and so the next step will be to make the worker ants work longer than 65 years , oops it is allready happening in Holland !
Like the pension funds people have been lured in to , put 10 euro in and we will give you 100 euro return , false promises ?
lies , fraude ?
Putting money into such promising funds is it silly or greed ? as if some bank wanted to make you rich .

In Holland now they want the worker ants to go on until 67 years , France was shut down by strikes , Sarkozy proposed working untill 60 ? Like in Greece they only work till 55 ?

The recession has not ended yet .

regards ,

Paul

[Big Al]

I s'pose when the West is going through another cyclical economic and social meltdown, living(as much as poss) on the outside of the madness I should be pretty smug,but I just feel anger.It's now that the unfairness,doublespeak,and downright bullshit comes flooding out,as those who can least afford it, pay the price of 'a return to growth'.
Meanwhile,on the box in the corner. some chirpy halfwit on £100 grand a year will fill endless hours of empty airtime monstering anyone who dares to question what is quite clearly the only path to take.

our houshold income is less than 16k per year.......... are we those who will pay for the growth OJ?

Still don't bere a grudge to the wealthy.......

[oldjerry]

Agreed Graham, but the pretence is maintained by the illusion of 'reality' created to sustain the status quo.As things go onwards you just have to wonder when joe public will see through the theatre created and maintained by the media.Maybe never.(the present problems aren't the result of catastrophically poor decisions made by multi-national banks,but a handfull of middle-class kids( who wouldn't know what Anarchy really was if it kicked them up the rear end,and will all have nice middle-class jobs in 10 yrs), Check out the news for the REAL culprits!

[old tree man]

i have always felt the same way i love my country, i can't stand the MORONS that run it, no matter who you put in power they will only line thier own pockets

[okra]

We are heading towards a turbulent period in history - will capitalism survive?

[oldjerry]

our houshold income is less than 16k per year.......... are we those who will pay for the growth OJ? :


Yeah,course you are,and me,and every one else at the lower end of the triangle.Do cheaper house prices mean poorer people can get one? Course not it means those with plenty can by a few more to rent out.
20% VAT is the most regressive taxation move the current faces could have possibly made.The very poorest are effectively paying the price of 'economic failure',whatever that means....

[The Riff-Raff Element]

Riff-Raff, your analysis is impeccable, this is what is happpening, but they can't keep on going round in circles like this... there will come a time when they realise they can't extract enough money from us and they can't keep the pretence going, then the system will start to collapse, agreements won't work and they will turn in on one another, each fighting to save their own bit of capital at the expense of others, but things are so interconnected as you have described, that whole countries are going to collapse like a pack of cards.

It really does concern that things like economics and politics are not generally taught at secondary level. We see regular news items about inflation, interest rates, public sector borrowing requirements, trade deficits and GDP growth, but, given how these things affect our lives whether we want them to or not (and in my case I'd really rather be left to get on in peace ), I worry about how well understood they are.

I'm not into conspiricy theories, but if I were I might venture to suggest that the political classes would prefer there to be a general widespread ignorance about such matters.

Otherwise we might be tempted to put their heads onto spikes.

[oldjerry]

Well I'm not sure that you wouldn't make things worse,if there were to economics widely available at secondary level you can be sure it would taught in a 'vacuum' i.e. without reference to the social ,cultural and above all enviromental cosequences,of various economic procedures.( somewhat like the media portrayal.)
At the risk of appearing even more pompous than usual,I can see only three approaches to economic analyses :capitalist, marxist and post- left anarchist.................and I'd like to meet the teacher that had the gonads to introduce either of the last 2 into a syllabus!

[Big Al]

68% of all british people never get to claim their state retirment pension because they die befor 65 years old..

[greenorelse]

For those the nicer side of the Irish sea, ( ) here's Der Spiegel's analysis of what's going wrong in Ireland - and where we should be going (ie doing an Iceland).

We are not going to be able to pay the w...bankers' debts, ever, so I don't think we should even start.

[Ellendra]

We are heading towards a turbulent period in history - will capitalism survive?

Depends on how you're defining "capitalism". Pure capitalism is practically instinctive, it's the barter-and-swap that you see any time or place where people aren't simply handed something they want, from the boardroom to the schoolyard. Money just provides a convenient medium of exchange.

However, that's no longer what most people think of when they hear the word "capitalism".

[MKG]

Well, what a collection of revolutionaries we are

This is good - we are possibly representative of a reasonably substantial sector of the population. I do hope so. One day (not soon, but one day) a reasonably substantial sector of the population may genuinely see through the myth of "growth". I have said on here in the past exactly what Ellendra said about money being a token of barter - it is, and it cannot be anything else - and that means that it is a measure of production. Given that, growth MUST mean ever-increasing production (real or imagined) and, in a closed system such as the world, that simply cannot go on forever. At some point it all falls down, the value of money decreases, and nation-states find themselves in the financial cesspit. Sound familiar?

But no - we'll "grow" ourselves out of trouble. So - increased production with all the concommitant (or have I got my Ms and Ts the wrong way round?) increases in energy usage and CO2 production (and so warming and so on), or a completely artificial redefinition of what money actually is. Take your pick. Personally, I find "helping" Ireland out by providing a loan which will itself make £400 million for the UK to be a tad on the hypocritical side, not to say stupid. Let's see - we basically bet a proportion of our future production against the capacity of Ireland to not only increase their own but also outstrip the expenditure levels which got the country into trouble in the first place.

Are we to believe that the population of Ireland has suddenly decreased massively, or have many of them suddenly decided to produce less? Was there another potato famine that I missed? No - they've been carrying on as usual, totally hoodwinked by monetary games (like the rest of the population of the world) into believing the fairy stories promulgated within invented disciplines such as economics.

Rant over - but thank goodness that there is a growing number of people around who really do increase genuine production in a non-destructive way. Believe it or not, every bloody cabbage from your garden, every egg from your chooks, every seed you save from last year's crop, increases the value of your currency. It's real, you see.

Mike

[The Riff-Raff Element]

Rant over - but thank goodness that there is a growing number of people around who really do increase genuine production in a non-destructive way. Believe it or not, every bloody cabbage from your garden, every egg from your chooks, every seed you save from last year's crop, increases the value of your currency. It's real, you see.

Mike

Mike - very well put. This last paragraph particularly.

[oldjerry]

Spot on.

[greenorelse]

Personally, I find "helping" Ireland out by providing a loan which will itself make £400 million for the UK to be a tad on the hypocritical side, not to say stupid.

+1

I have to say I'm one of those that says we should default on all loans (give 20¢ in the €) and start again by spending less than we earn.

Rant over - but thank goodness that there is a growing number of people around who really do increase genuine production in a non-destructive way. Believe it or not, every bloody cabbage from your garden, every egg from your chooks, every seed you save from last year's crop, increases the value of your currency. It's real, you see.

Mike

+2

'Growth' need not be physical, either.