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The disjointed musings of the financial media support groups and the politicians desperation to patch up the emperor's new clothes again, serve notice that the final act has begun.
The banks have sucked the blood from their governments through a series of bailouts.
The governments have sucked away the lives of their peoples through ongoing and expanding programs of austerity.
They have stolen from multiple generations of the unborn through bond issuance and leveraging so called "stability funds".
Financial institutions are stealing from their depositors as they begin to panic at the glimmer of the bottom of the shiny trough.
The managed retreat has begun.
Treaties are hastily being re-written. Doubtless constitutions, bills of rights and human rights legislations will go a similar way.
All areas of the economy have been fatally wounded. And even the most optimistic commentators are now describing the future misery in terms of decades.
It's a zombie paradise.
Regardless of your opinions about the rights or wrongs of the capitalist system, it is the capitalists themselves that are behaving in an anti capitalist manner. Far more so than the so called anti capitalist protesters.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to rig markets and pretend that we are living in a free market system.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to save banks that are to big to fail.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to allow banks to become too big to fail.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to allow banks to create money out of thin air under the cover of the fractional reserve banking system.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to have a shadow banking system that is unregulated and causes other parts of the financial system to behave chaotically.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to have targeted import tariffs and limits.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to set artificially lower interest rates.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to deliberately allow inflation to take off in order to reduce the impact of commercial and sovereign debts.
It's ANTI CAPITALIST to effectively buy your own bonds through a convoluted system of central banks, shadow banks, monetary funds and rescue/stability funds.
Capitalism in its purest form could just work. The trading of goods and services equitably for other goods and services serve many barter only communities well.
Its time to think about just who the anti capitalists are.
About a year ago I posted a blog about the 99ers in the USA. In a nutshell, in the USA, unemployment benefits only pay out for 26 weeks. Then you're on your own with no state support.
Because of the 2008 financial crisis and the huge increase in unemployment numbers, the American government passed an emergency law to increase these benefit payments by a further 73 weeks in order to limit the number of visible destitutes that would end up on the streets of U.S. cities.
That emergency legislation was only allowed to be passed on the basis of a concession to the political right. And that concession was that the new arrangement would be time limited. That time limit is about to expire.
To make matters worse, there is an election coming up soon so it is unlikely that this extension will be kept via a new version of that legislation.
Further details can be seen in my previous blog entry - http://subsister.blogspot.com/2010/12/99ers-set-to-take-off.html
Now then.
If that extension is not forthcoming by the end of this year (about 10 weeks time), the number of 99ers is set to increase on a rapid scale.
By February 2012, the number of new 99ers with no state support will increase by a staggering 2,153,700 people.
What will these 2 million new disenfranchised people decide to do about it?
Last week, the UK government announced a second phase of quantitative easing. Or to give it it's real name "printing lots more digital money."
It was publicised by the Bank of England as a mechanism to kick start the UKs flagging economy. The idea was that this new money would trickle down from the central bank, to the investment banks, then to the high street banks, then to small businesses as loans and finally to facilitating new jobs and new wages.
What a load of bollocks.
This new money will never trickle down. The sum announced was £75 billion. That equates to about £1,300 for each person in the UK. That new money is yet another lot of new money that will have to be paid back at some future date by you and me.
My guess is that if you are lucky and the usual 90% to 10% rule applies, then you might see about £115 of that new money in your pocket over the next year or two. The other £1,200 will disappear much further up the food chain. It might even be used to save a bank from collapse or just be gambled to zero by hapless city traders.
The point is, the only way to get people spending again, is to put real cash directly into the pockets of real people. Most people (the 90%) have to spend all of their income on basic living expenses plus a few luxuries once in a while. If the new money were directed to the poorest 10%, that money would be spent in the blink of an eye and would continue sloshing around in the lower economy for some time. This would create demand, jobs and compounding VAT revenues.
Either the people at the top just don't get it, because they are so far removed from the realities of ordinary peoples daily lives or they are just plain evil and are pursuing a deliberate program of enslavement.
I'll leave you to decide.
