WHO ARE THE ANTI CAPITALISTS ? - And who are the bad guys ?

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.

99ers UPDATE - Maybe they'll all get on a bus to occupy Wall Street and join in the fun

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?

QE2 - In other words, You are being conned again.

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.

CROSSING THE RUBICON - A Paradigm Shift and The Engineer in Me.

Here are a few reasons as to why the world might be entering a permanent new economic reality that will not be pretty.

1. Up until sometime around the year 1800, all species (particularly ours) had little margin for error. Like all other animals we lived up to the limit of the food supply. The populations ebbed and flowed following simple differential equations bounded by the limits of supply of food and numbers of humans.

2. From around the year 1800, fossil fuel exploitation enabled us to rig the market through advances in mechanisation, production and fertilisation. This positive trend could only ever be a temporary one. It was inevitable that the population would increase to exploit this step change in maximum demand possibilities. All that has happened is that the ebbing and flowing wave has a higher amplitude and a shorter wavelength. In other words, things just happen harder and faster. Markets are exaggerated and rich/poor disparities are exacerbated to insane and ugly degrees.

3. Since around the year 1800, the population has increased from 0.8 billion to nearly 8.0 billion.

4. The high demands of 2 centuries of wealthy countries exploitative folly and the recent extraordinary demands of large, fast developing countries have applied a number of ramping functions and a number of extreme pulses to the system. Anybody who knows anything about control systems design or mathematical modelling fears such pulses.

5. Since 1960 the annualised growth in crop yields has fallen from 3.5% per year to 1.2% per year despite the use of oil based fertilisers having been increased significantly. All of this intense farming is clearly destroying the land's potential to re-mineralise itself through natural irrigation and precipitation processes.

6. Politicians and money-markets will never face up to any of the above truths.

7. From now on, price pressures and resource shortages will be a permanent feature of our lives.


All of the above contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent spikes in commodity prices like oil, energy, metals and foods.

Add the following list of potential tipping points to this and we could be looking at the perfect storm.


1. Events in Syria could be the most likely scenario to inflame a full scale war against Israel, in turn, dragging the whole of the middle east into turmoil.

2. It is highly likely that Israel or the USA will wage a war against Iran if Iran escalates its nuclear program.

3. Libya. Does it need an explaination?

4. As the weather warms in other middle eastern countries, more tensions, protests and revolutions are bound to occur. The tipping points have been attributed to democratic awakenings by western media groups. It is more likely to have manifested itself due to spikes in food prices. Spending on food in second and third world counties forms a much more significant share of a family's budget.

5. The tragic events in Japan and subsequent annihilation of the Fukushima nuclear industry has changed world energy policy forever. The abandoning of existing and future fission projects will add massively to the demand for hydrocarbon based fuels for energy conversion needs. The impact on one of the worlds largest economies is sending out financial shock waves across the globe. Economists will un-forget about peak-oil once more.

6. Energy expenditure in the USA has just exceeded 9% of GDP for the second time. The first time was in the summer of 2008, just before the 'global financial crisis'.

7. Austerity programs (you ain't seen nothin' yet) around the globe both nationally and locally are beginning to impact on the jobs economy. This will accelerate as the story unfolds.

8. The much talked about sovereign debt crisis is about to materialise in spectacular fashion. Who will be the first 'fall guy'? Almost certainly Greece, but much bigger names will be in the frame soon after. A tower of cards teetering. The fallout will be truly shocking.

9. The demise of the U.S dollar seems unlikely to most people but watch this space. China bought massive amounts of US treasuries over the last decade. It is now trying to dump these investments on unsuspecting world bond markets at a faster rate than it accumulated them and that was pretty damn quick.


The next few years (or months even) will be very interesting to say the least.

See you all on the other side.

FOOD DEMAND = FOOD PRICES = FOOD RIOTS = CHAOS

Food prices and other commodity values have been rising considerably during the last few years and particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis.


There are several structural reasons for this which have been discussed in earlier blogs.

While in the West, we find these inflationary food prices annoying or worrying or stressful (depending on which social level you exist), it is becoming a far more desperate story for others around the world.

Here in the UK, an individuals food budget is not too significant, and we can always cut down on other things, shop around, find offers and bargains etc.

When food begins to take significant proportions of a family's budget, people begin to attach a political dimension to their concerns and this may result in protests, riots and even regime change.

Here is a list of 25 countries that like Egypt and Tunisia are finding that their food budget is getting out of control. The list shows the percentage of household income that is spent on food:

Venezuela 32.6 %
Lebanon 34.1 %
Latvia 34.3 %
Tunisia 36.0 %
Libya 37.2 %
Dominican Republic 38.3 %
Sri Lanka 39.6 %
China 39.8 %

Romania 45.4 %
Philippines 45.6 %
Kenya 45.8 %
Angola 46.1 %
Pakistan 47.6 %
Egypt 48.1 %
India 49.5 %
Bulgaria 49.5 %
Vietnam 50.7 %
Sudan 52.9 %
Algeria 53.0 %
Bangladesh 53.8%
Azerbaijan 60.2 %
Ukraine 61.0 %
Morocco 63.0 %
Nigeria 73.0 %

It's not just armies that march on their stomachs.

99ers SET TO TAKE OFF !

In the United States, unemployment benefits are only paid for a maximum of 99 weeks or just less than 2 years.

After that period, that's it. You're on your own.

After the banking crisis of Autumn 2008, unemployment began to soar. Every week the number of unemployed rose. These job losses continued for 55 weeks at a weekly increase of between 50,000 and 200,000 per week.

The worst period was from November 2008 to October 2009. But even since October 2009, the number of new jobs created has never exceeded 50,000 per week.

The net effect of all of the above statistics is that from December 2010 there are likely to be around 50,000 people losing their benefits every week. This figure will get significantly worse up tom around April 2011 when around 200,000 people will lose their benefits every single week.

It remains to be seen what such large numbers of disenfranchised people will do about this over the coming months.

Keep 'em peeled!

Educating Slaves !

The British higher education system has been changed drastically over the last 20 years.

When I was a student, I got a full mandatory grant, a discretionary hardship grant, a book grant and heavily subsidised canteen facilities.

After a very comfortable time at college, I left higher education with a useful qualification that enabled me to be flexible in my career choice, not be tied to a corporations dictatorial mandate and I had no fear of debt.

The last 20 years has seen all the benefits that I received, systematically dismantled. These educational rights have been replaced with a system whereby students are leaving education with massive debts.

The jobs that most of these graduates will end up doing, would have been done by similar people with a couple of 'A' levels 20 years ago.

All that has happened is that the jobs market has been fixed in order that a large percentage of the new working population are being systematically enslaved by debt at the start of their careers; at the start of their adult lives; before they can even think about housing, families etc

During the next phase of this program, employers will bring down graduate wages to a median figure of less than £21,000. The feed in interest repayment taper will become a ceiling for employers to exploit.

Fancy a workforce that's too scared to answer back or question management?
Fancy a workforce enslaved by the fear of their own debts?
Then look no further. Employ a graduate today. Or even better employ a cheaper slave in 3 years time.

It's time to wake up !

It's time to take back control !

It's time to change your destiny !