Systemic Dishonesty.
John De Roe
25 Oct 2009
Financial news last week contained a headline "Britain to come out of recession." Now not only was this blatantly untrue, it raised my eyebrows for the multiple levels of dishonesty embedded in it. Not only is the economy a lot further up shit creek than it was a year or six months ago, there is no sign of a paddle nor even a lollipop stick with which to propel our ship of fools back towards prosperity.
With the prices of gold (in which international transactions are now being made more frequently as the US dollar collapses) oil, metals and food commodities skyrocketing and the value of the pound in free fall against most major international currencies there is no end in sight to the slump. In spite of the incompetence of Barack Obama and his administration of amateurs the British economy is in worse shape than any in the developed world thanks to our policy implemented by parties on both sides of the political spectrum of dismantling the manufacturing base and trying to build a solid economy on consumer debt, financial services and candy floss industries.
The only comfort available is the opportunity for those of us who predicted all this to wallow in schadenfreude as we watch the American economy, crippled by eight years of Bush neo-con lunacy now powering past our own and further up this creek of brown, smelly stuff as if powered by two Evinrude outboards.
But why is the government lying to us, surely they know people will suss out things are not really improving, you might well ask. Right so, we will, even the dullards amongst us. What the government are relying on is our being tricked into trusting themselves enough to take on even bigger debts so we can start spending again and so launch a consumer led recovery. In other words we buy the government's debts.
Politicians will deny this is the case of course. They will point to statistics showing the economy has actually shown a millionth of a percentage point increase in activity over the preceding period. They will produce charts and graphs and statistics. Do not believe these. The Daily Stirrer has always said when people try to blind you with science and start quoting percentages just ask "per cent of what?"
In this case it would be per cent of economic activity over the last accounting period which represented the low point of the recession so far. Now to our way of thinking we can only truly say we are out of recession when the economic activity has returned to where it was before it started contracting and is growing against that figure.
Until that happens do not be fooled by the economic doublespeak, the economic crisis has a long way to travel and we will be ploughing up shit creek propelled by our own momentum for some while yet.
