How Neoliberlism Drove Our Leaders Insane.

Hurricane Irma is a fitting symbol for the end of neoliberalism as an economic "theory". Neoliberalism forced the greedy and selfishness to deny the reality of global warming since it threatened to undermine the profits to be made from the profligate use of fossil fuels. Global warning, they insisted, was either a liberal conspiracy or a Chinese conspiracy depending on which "enemy" they had in their sights at the moment. With the reality of global warming now bearing down on the United in the form of hurricane Irma and another one following close behind those Republicans who still embrace neoliberalism may soon have to deny aid to their own citizens once again. Twenty State Representatives and both Texas State Senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, have all voted against a $50.5 billion dollar relief package for victims of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy when it came before them in January 2013 despite the damage to their own state. Will they now vote against an even bigger relief package in the wake of hurricane Irma? Neoliberal "theory" says they must since greed and selfishness are more important than decency, humanity or even common sense. Much the same can be seen in the Brexit debacle unfolding in Britain. The chance to deny human and workers rights in the UK is far too important to the political arm of organised crime known as the Tory party. Nothing is more important than their "right" to grab whatever money they can in order to stuff their tax free overseas bank accounts. Not even the economic future of the country must be allowed to stand in the way of this goal. How else can they privatise the NHS and flog it off to American health care companies without undue interference from Brussels? In both the US and in the UK the vehicle that is being used to sell this insanity to the voting public is nationalism and its handmaiden, patriotism. With neoliberalism exposed as the fraud it always was this is the only way to hang onto its idiotic precepts long enough to squeeze out the last drop of profit. As Ben Johnson once observed, patriotism truly is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Football, Corruption, The Couch Potato And Business.

Football is essentially a mindless pastime with adults playing a children's game for vast amounts of money watched by other adults with nothing better to do. Because of this, in our upside-down topsy-turvy world, it has grown into an industry worth billions. Players, most of whom find it difficult to articulate a meaningful sentence, are paid more than brain surgeons to bounce a ball from one end of a football pitch to the other. Fans will pay huge amounts of their income to watch this inane spectacle and will travel the world insulting local populations as they go while often remaining utterly ignorant of the local culture. With this amount of boneheaded, knuckle-dragging ignorance amongst football fans it is hardly surprising that corruption is a way of life to those organising it all. After sixteen years in charge with absolutely zero progress being made in stamping out graft, bribery and corruption, Sepp Blatter has yet again been re-elected as the president of FIFA. A bunch of crooks have put back in charge the man who has allowed their criminality to go unchecked. Not really so surprising given the level of corruption and racketeering in the rest of the world's business community from international banking to local market stalls selling fashion "knock-offs". Andy Burnham, in his campaign to win the leadership of the Labour party, has described businessmen as "heroes". This would be true if said businessmen were the entrepreneurs of yesteryear, men risking their own capital in pursuit of a dream of excellence. Unfortunately business today seems to consist all too often of slick confidence tricks, double-dealing and misdirection at the expense of a public too busy watching football to realise what's going on around them. The so-called "beautiful game" is neither beautiful nor a game, it is an ugly multi-billion pound business and a poster child for the corruption inherent in the neoliberal economic system.

Fat Cats Still Fat Cats And Getting Fatter.

Its been nearly five years now since the neoliberal economic system came crashing down under the weight of its own greed and stupidity and things have certainly changed. World trade has yet to recover, unemployment is still catastrophically high in far too many countries and austerity is still biting across the globe. In Britain the Tories have indulged their wet dream of dismantling the welfare state and returning the country to the mid-nineteenth century. The NHS is now ripe for picking and is sliding inexorably into private hands. An entire generation has been thrown onto the scrap heap, pensions for the older generation are gradually being whittled away to nothing, worker's rights are gradually disappearing and wages remain stagnant. Unless, of course, you were one of the criminals who foisted the neoliberal economic thesis onto the rest of us in the first place and then spent the next 30 years grabbing everything in sight. For them the word "change" has little if any meaning. In the last year alone executive pay has leapt by 10%, bankers are still greedily helping themselves to their customers money while ignoring any complaints from them and big corporations, like Thames Water, are still avoiding tax with complete immunity. For the wealthy criminal class who like to describe themselves as "businessmen" absolutely nothing has changed. They are still incompetent and crooked, still getting unfeasibly large pensions after a lifetime of playing golf, still not paying tax and they are still laughing at the rest of us.

Neoliberalism Is Dead! Long Live Neoliberalism!

Neoliberalism is as dead as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It died when the banks collpased in 2008, taking the world economy with them. After 30 years of pass the parcel, profits that never existed and a property bubble based on bad debt, the whole rotten edifice that the greedy, the smug, the self-satisfed and the idiotic had erected for their own benefit came crashing down. The truth of that was self-evident - everyone could see it and you had to be a fool not see what it all meant. In Iceland the people staged a democratic revolution, arrested the bankers and their poliical allies, told the IMF to go spin on it, created a new constitution and then set about rebuilding their shattered country and economy. In Britain the greedy, the smug, the self-satisfied and the idiotic managed, with the help of a turncoat LibDem party, to slip through the back door of 10 Downing Street and seize the reins of power. Looking at the lessons that the crash of 2008 taught us, David Cameron and George Osborne decided that the best thing to do was to recreate the whole rotten thing all over again and, what's more, they decided that the poor should pay for it so the wealthy could keep their offshore bank accounts safe. The utter insanity of this soon became evident and it wasn't long before even the IMF was calling on Osborne to ease austerity. Every policy that the Tories have inflicted on the country since 2010 have been specifically designed to protect the wealthy against the consequencies of their own greed and stupidity. Every policy has been designed to make the poor pay for their mistakes. The truth of this is glaringly obvious when Osborne's plan for reviving the mortgage market is scrutinised. It is designed to recreate the property bubble that got us into this mess int the first place. It is designed to increase house prices and does nothing to aid first time buyers. A one-eyed moron can see that the way to get Britain out of recession is to build affordable housing so that supply catches up with demand and prices fall to a point where first-time buyers can afford them once again. Cameron and Osborne are not morons - they are simply greedy, smug and self-satisfied while their blindness is entirely willful. What is undeniably plain is that this country needs more of the same like it needs a hole in its collective head and needs Cameron and Osborne like it needs the Plague.

Mitt Romney Lets The Neoliberal Cat Out Of The Bag.

Mitt Romney, a man with more teeth than brain cells, has been caught out telling his Republican mates that almost half off all US citizens are of no interest to him. According to this flagbearer for the utter greed and selfishness of neoliberalism, the people who support Barak Obama "believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it". Having castigated ordinary people for expecting their own government to act in their best interests he added "My job is is not to worry about those people." In effect he was saying that he has an overriding loyalty to something outside of the United States - international big business, which makes him rich and insulates him from the concerns of the peasants. Seeking to distance himself from the embarassing truth about him and his corporate paymasters his lame excuse was that what he had said was "not elegantly stated." Yes it was - his words summed exactly how people like him, on both sides of the Atlantic, think about those whose vote they want to obtain by deception. Their favourite line is that they aren't really as nasty as our previous experience of them would suggest - that they have "detoxified" their party - that they want to be "inclusive". The truth is they are elitist, selfish, smug and deeply, deeply vicious when it comes to their treatment of people less fortunate than themselves. They love to pat each other on the back and congratulate themselves for being geniuses and tell each other that their success in life has nothing to do with the priveleges they inherited - behind closed doors of course. In fact they are the scum of the earth and the electorate vote for them at their peril.

Selfish, Greedy And Supid Still In Charge.

The woman pictured above is Gina Rinehart and she happens to be the richest woman in the world. Looking at the economic disaster that the last 30 years of neoliberal madness has caused she told a magazine in Australia; "If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working." That might be regarded as good advice by those whose monomania consists of amassing as much money as possible for no sensible reason. It might also be understandable if Ms Rinehart had spent her whole life working hard to amass her billions. Unfortunately, like so many smug, self-satisfied wealthy elitists, she inherited her money. In other words she's never done a hard day's work in her life. Even more unfortunately people like her have a nasty habit of gravitating towards politics, especially in Britain, where they bring their smug, self-satisfaction to bear on the rest of us. People like David Cameron who wanted to become Prime Minister because he saw it as his birthright and thinks nothing of spending £13,000 of taxpayers money to pay for a wine-tasting tour during a recent official visit to Australia. (Strangely enough Ms.Rinehart's home country). His four day international tour cost a staggering £8,552 per hour - yes, that right, per hour not per day - most of which was spent on chartering a private jet to whisk him from party to party. Meanwhile back in Britain David Cameron's favourite LibDem, David Laws (famous for fiddling his expenses and stealing taxpayers money), was lecturing us all in Britain that the way to cure our economic woes was for the rich to pay less taxes and for all of us to have access to fewer and fewer and services. These people are not part of the solution, they are the problem.

Private Sector Efficiency.

According to the Tories and other neoliberal morons throughout the world, it is a well known "fact" that private enterprise is more efficient than the public sector. The proof of this can be seen everywhere you look. How bad would the railways be if it wasn't for a whole bunch of people diverting money from services into private offshore banks for instance? How expensive would gas and electricity be if it wasn't for those same people siphoning off the profits into the those same offshore banks? How would the water companies have achieved water shortages in an island that is in a state of almost continual flooding? A clue might be seen in the latest scandal surrounding G4S. Highly paid executives, it turns out, had no idea that there would be a manpower shortage at the Olympics until a few days ago. Nor could they guarantee how many of the people they did manage to recruit and train could actually speak English. The security boss and executive in charge of stating the bleeding obvious at G4S, Nick Buckles, told the BBC that he had "underestimated the task of supplying staff to the Olympics". The reason for this is quite evident - he's an overpaid and incompetent twat. And that is where the neoliberal belief in the efficiency of the private sector falls short - it fails to take into account the sheer idiocy of executives whose only ineterest in life is getting their hands on as much easy money as possible. Greed is not good, it is simply a character flaw and is usually accompanied by other flaws such as stupidity and arrogance. In short neoliberalism is a simple theory that appeals only to simpletons and nowhere will you find a greater concentration of simpletons than in the Tory party.

Neoliberalism Comes Of The Rails.

The idea of neoliberal economics seems to have run its course in Britain as the system it created is submerged under a tide of scandal and criminality. People are getting really, really tired of being pissed on and being then told its raining. The catalyst for the change in thinking that has taken place was the sheer criminal greed displayed by the banks who shouted loudly for deregulation and then indulged themselves in a law-breaking and common-sense-defying gambling spree that wrecked the world economy. The present scandal over the Libor is simply the tip of a very dirty iceberg and demonstrates quite clearly what the "News in Shorts" has been saying for some time - these people are criminals and should be thrown into prison where they belong. Despite the mounting evidence, however, the present government has tried to forcefeed the country with ever more unpalatable and ultimately self-defeating neoliberal nostrums. Fortunaterly there are growing signs that the tide is beginning to turn at last. After decades in which the Labour party seemed as much in thrall to the likes of Margaret Thatcher as the Tories themselves, socialist principles such as fairness and regulation are making a comeback. In London the council in Islington has refused to take advantage of Eric Pickles offer to allow them to hike council-house rents up to the astronomical levels charged by greedy private landlords and deny tenants any security of tenure. More telling still is that the Labour party is actively considering a renationalism of the railways, removing the private companies, who have plundered the transport system in their quest for ever-growing profits, once more from the equation. Only two years ago, under the shadow of Thatcher and the neoliberal economic nonsense, that would have been unthinkable. Hopefully it will only be a matter of time before the same sea-change happens with regard to the utilities - water, gas and electricity. Meanwhile the Tory party is descending into complete chaos as right-wingers continue to feed Cameron with soundbite policies that both terrify and disgust the electorate and George Osborne completes his latest u-turn, while the Chancellor now has a new nickname amongst Tory backbenchers - "Bastard."

Does Paul Krugman Read "The News In Shorts?"

Paul Krugman made an appearance on "Newsnight" tonight and, much to Jeremy Paxman's amusement, made mincemeat of the right wing opposition to his ideas. In quick succession he routed Ken Ragoff, Paul Mason and Allegra Stratton, all of whom trotted out the tired and discredited mantra that austerity and deregulation will cure our economic woes. In one telling illustration he compared the present politicians, both here in Britain and in the rest of Europe, to Medieval doctors intent on bleeding their patients white - a comparison made by "The News In Shorts" in its report entitled "Tories Continue To Kill The Patient" on May 24th. So does Paul Krugman read "The News In Shorts?" We asked the nobel prize-winning economist; "The News In Shorts? Never heard of it. And stop pinching my metaphors before I use them." Oh well, chagrined as the editor was by this, this reporter is more a fan of Mr.Krugman than ever. After two years of complete failure, with economies shrinking across the world, unemployment rising through the roof and no sign whatsoever of the private sector magically expanding to save us all from an impending depression, all Ken Ragoff, Paul Mason and Allegra Stratton could say is that debts have to be paid off double-quick no matter what disasters befall us, that young people are straining at the leash to establish new vibrant businesses and are held back only by excessive employment regulation and that tax cuts for the rich are the key to prosperity. In other words more of the same. As Mr.Krugman pointed out this is merely ideology masquerading as economics as right-wingers scrabble to shrink the state while they have the opportunity. Everywhere the neoliberal-supporting establishment have tried to curb democracy, here in Britain by insisting on a full five year term for this woeful coalition government, in Greece and Italy where elected heads of state have been replaced by bankers and even in Canada where attempts have been made to outlaw student protests over rising university fees. Defending the indefensible, trying to save an economic system broken beyond repair, moronic national leaders have prevaricated, tried their best to have the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich and, after two years of utter idiocy, are now facing the prospect of a disorderly exit from the Euro by Greece -an event that any moron could see coming from a mile away.

Tories Continue To Kill The Patient.

In her speech about the British economy Christine Lagarde effectively told us that George Osborne was doing all the right things while it was only reality that prevented his policies from working. In other words the cure is working but the patient is dying nevertheless. We all laugh when we read about Medieval doctors bleeding their patients to remove "evil humours" but it isn't funny when George Osborne does the same thing to the economy. Neoliberal economics was once described by George Bush Snr as "voodoo economics" and he wasn't wrong. It is based on a self-serving mythology, mumbo-jumbo of the worst kind, and inflicted on the rest of us by the greedy and stupid for whom economics is not a science but a kind or religion - an irrational belief that if you do enough idiotic and utterly selfish things everything will turn out for the best. Well it hasn't, as everyone can now plainly see. Demand in Britain fell sharply in April with people, fearful of the future and having no faith whatsover in this woeful government, unwilling to spend. To add to the fear factor Adrian Beecroft has now unveiled his plans to make it easier to sack the very workers he depends upon to keep his businesses afloat. Nothing illustrates better the sheer idiotic vindictiveness of these people who seek to restore confidence by making everyone more fearful and promote growth by making everyone (except themselves) poorer. The madness of super-sized austerity is evident in the situation in Greece and will soon be evident in Spain and still people like Angela Merkal insist that administering poison is the only cure. The insane have been in charge of the asylum for too long.

Neoliberlism: The Jig Is Up.

"Neoliberalism is a contemporary political movement advocating economic liberalizations, free trade and open markets. Neoliberalism supports the privatization of nationalized industries, deregulation, and enhancing the role of the private sector in modern society." Hmmm. Well, we've had thirty years of this horse manure so far and how has it fared? Free trade has so far delivered only unemployment. Privatization of nationalised industries has delivered ever-increasing prices. Deregulation has led to ever-lower wages and less rights for workers. Enhancing the role of the private sector has led to ever-increasing inequality. The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. The rich pay less and less tax, the poor pay more and more. Corruption in high places, in business, politics and the media is rampant. And now, to add insult to injury, the whole rotten system has come crashing down, threatening to ruin us all, destroy a civilization that has lasted 2,000 years and delivered victory to our ideological rivals on a plate. After the so-called fall of Communism in the 1990's the West has managed to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. They sold us a pup and now are busy trying to sell us another one. When these greedy, smug, self-centred morons talk to us about austerity there is not the vaguest hint that they are ready to take the hit as well. "We're all in this together." Really? Of course not. They are busily engaged trying to save a system that is beyond repair because that is in their narrow interests. But the worst thing is that they are too dim, too unimaginative and just too plain stupid to see what is staring them in the face. The party's over, it's time to call it a day, the jig is most definitely up.

Europe Turns Left.

The French have thrown out Sarkozy, the Greeks have abandoned their traditional political parties and Iceland has prosecuted the bankers and politicians who destroyed their country. Angela Merkel immediately went on the attack deploying the "there's no alternative" argument for all she's worth. Meanwhile in Britain Cameron has licked his wounds after the bruising local elections and promised more of the same using simpler language so the peasants will understand better. Their message is the same - we have to pay our debts caused by the banking crisis to the banks otherwise its the end of the world. No, it will simply be the end of theirs. What is becoming increasingly clear - to anyone who isn't a politician at any rate - is that the financial system they love so much hasn't suffered a mild case of hiccups but a terminal heart-attack. It has been revealed for what it always was, a huge Ponzi scheme - not so much a financial system as a gravy train - and the victims of it have had enough. Time now for the politicians to do what they pride themselves on - catching the popular mood - and bloody-well do something about it instead of wringing their hands and thinking up catchy slogans. We don't want to hear "we're all in this together" or "there's no alternative." What we want to hear is that the people who were responsible for this mess - the bankers - have been detained, that the criminals have been apprehended, locked up and key thrown away. We want regulation, people put before profits and for the rich to realise that their wealth is a privilege not a right and that extraordinary rewards demand extraordinary responsibilities. This reporter agrees that austerity is demanded, but not for the poor - they've always had it, even during the "good" times. What we need now is austerity for the rich. They've revelled in increasing wealth for decades and now its time for them to pay their dues.