Iain McMillan and Scotland PLC

It's that time of year when we reflect on what's happened over the last 12 months and Das Herald Sturmer isn't going to let a good nat-bashing opportunity go to waste:

Put economy not politics first, CBI chief tells SNP

Yes, Iain McMillan gets to dress up his unionist bent as economics once again. Not so long ago he was slapped down by his own members for being overtly anti-SNP. It escaped this propagandist that many of his own members were independence supporters.

As for the substance or lack thereof:

I guess the introductory paragraph is balanced enough as it exposes McMillan's obviously transparent agenda:

McMillan chose to use his customary “New Year message” to ramp up his criticism of the Scottish Government on several fronts and to question the sincerity of its commitment to the economy and business.

Let's get this straight, Iain McMillan represents his big corporate clients. His recent swipes at the SNP were based on them not supporting things like private prisons. Let me tell you something about them. In the USA were you have private prisons people invest in terms of bed occupancy. The longer the bed is sure to be occupied the bigger the return on investment. Thus we have corporate representatives like McMillan pushing the government for longer jail sentences. Crime pays eh? That kind of corrupt world is exactly where people like Iain McMillan will take Scotland.

Something else irked McMillan:

..he highlighted his annoyance with Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s remarks at the SNP conference about never putting private profit before public sector need.

Eh, aren't businessmen supposed to ask for government to be as removed from the economy as possible? When you have government manipulation in the economy then there is no 'free market'. Of course people like McMillan see citizens as mere capital, neo-feudal debt slaves. There only for the ability of labour.

The reason the economy here and in the US is nose-diving is because giant, blood-sucking squids are sticking their funnels into anything that smells of money and that happens to be the public purse. Special interests now dominate the US government. Britain is going down the same path. Combining government and industrial interest is called fascism according to Mussolini. People like McMillan are not really businessmen, they want everything - it's power.

When the price of a currency is assured by government these megalomaniacs can't help but try to control political parties and governments. Their uncontrolled greed means they have no interest in markets - just money.

When these people have increasing power over government like they do in the US you end up going to war because big business makes a fortune out of it and getting flu vaccines because big pharma companies make a fortune out of it; you get wars on terror because they sell security systems and weapons. If you don't stop them they'll destroy countries and even the world. This is the kind of 'businessman' Iain McMillan is, even though he doesn't know it. These people have to be watched and very closely. Government and big business should be kept apart as much as possible in a democracy! Or even in a capitalist economy!

The bankers in the US and UK are bringing down the economy because of their greed and influence over government. Business 'leaders' like McMillan don't espouse 'capitalism' - they just want as much of your money as they can stuff in their Swiss bank accounts. And while millions slip into poverty they lick their lips at the thought of cheap labour and profits that can be made out of rising crime - remember those prison beds..?

When governments get involved in business they distort the market. They prevent a fair playing field as special interests gain leverage. McMillan should be told this and sent packing. Businesses will not be efficient if government interferes in the market place. His advice should be for the SNP to do as little as possible, to get out of the way.

If McMillan understood economics he would be going for Gordon Brown's throat. By reducing interest rates Brown and Mervin King have flooded the economy with cheap money. This has prevented savings and investment from taking off. The expansion of the credit supply has destroyed the real economy and yet McMillan attacks the SNP over a public spat with one of his members, which is no angel!?

McMillan criticises the SNP for halting infrastructure projects. Eh, if one of his members had problems with cash-flow would be be advising them to spend more money? No! Since when did capitalists start becoming Keynsian? Again, economic illiteracy and plain old greed. Government should never spend 1 penny more than it makes. If it does you move towards hyper-inflation and currency collapse which is exactly where Brown and Obama are taking the Western world.

It seems our 'business leaders' have no clue about the economy. Until they do, they really shouldn't be lecturing governments about what their job is. Go read some economics Iain and then come back and say something useful..

Stuff Your Faces Like/Because There's No Tomorrow

Ah, the days of stuffing our faces and dishing out prezzies like there's no tomorrow. Well, is there a tomorrow anything like yesterday?

According to an increasing volume of observers, no.

Financial ruin may well face the US in 2010 according to the best economics blog out there ZeroHedge





















And Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator of the Financial Times is urging leaders to act now to avert global currency tensions ahead of the imminent collapse of the $ as the world's reserve currency. See the report here or excerpt below:

Do we need a new reserve currency?

"Because the dollar, to my mind, given its underlying conditions, is no longer a credible long-term store of value," said Wolf. The decline of the US dollar underscores a phase of global power transition, with the balance of power moving from the US to Europe, China and India, Wolf argues, adding that the greenback's loss of credibility as the dominant global reserve currency is part of this messy transition.

No credible US policy

"The Americans no longer have the means to save themselves, this is what I think people don't understand. There is no credible American policy," said Wolf.

"We need to discuss this globally in a harmonious way. It's not happening, so at the moment the euro zone is a prime victim and it will continue to be, and that will create very big problems for European-based manufacturers, and quite particularly those that are relatively vulnerable to global price effects."

And it's a tremendous mess, a horrifying mess and that's where we are, I'm sorry. And we've got to get through this transition as quickly as possible to a more stable global monetary system with a lesser reliance on the dollar. We're going to get there over the next 10 years, I'm sure of it. We're going to get there. The only question we have to decide is, how we're going to get there." US-China trade

Meanwhile, a trade skirmish between the US and China could ensue, if Beijing continues to devalue its currency to bolster export-driven economic growth at the expense of economic recovery in the US, said Wolf.

He says China is working hard to defend the artificially low value of the renminbi in the hope that exports will pick up when external demand recovers. According to China's customs authorities, exports from January to November plunged by 18.8 per cent to $1.07trn from a year ago. However, according to The Royal Bank of Canada, export growth should pick up in the coming months and reach double-digits in early 2010.

China's efforts, Wolf said, will spark a "very vigorous, even vicious" reaction from the US as it's destabilising US efforts to engender an economic recovery.

Santa and Banks

In China a severely handicapped man (see below) teaches maths to the children of 'migrant workers'. According to China Hush he suffered from medical malpractice and struggled through life doing well at maths and self-educating himself to the point where he now runs after school programmes.














He lives on and his ambition is clearly to empower these children with the tools of life that maths confers.

At school, I was really good at picking up maths but for some reason, after a couple of weeks I forgot what I'd learned. The consequence of this was that as the maths brought more and more concepts together, I lost the way because I'd forgotten what I'd learned before. I often wondered why that happened to me and not others. My latest answer is that the maths didn't mean anything to me.

And, now as we head into a depression it seems that the vast majority of the Scottish political and journalistic class along with the electorate and the blogeratti are clueless about the meaning of numbers. Why was our understanding of maths never extended to finance? Would we be too powerful as citizens if we understood numbers and apply them to real life?

It would seem so.

Even simple things are not understood. Take for example all the money that Britain makes every year. It amounts (or did recently) to around GBP 1.5 trillion. That's all the money going through people's hands over a year. Then, the Bank of England creates new money to the tune of GBP 150 billion and gives it to the banks. Those banks are then allowed to 'leverage' or multiply that by sometimes as much as 50 times. Let's for the sake of it say 10 times. That gives the banks the right to make new money to the tune of GBP 1.5 trillion. At the flick of a switch the citizens' wealth has been halved in two. The people have been robbed, their futures stolen and unborn grandchildren will be laden with this debt. This is the best case scenario.

This is pretty basic stuff in terms of maths and yet very few commentators seem to get it. Last year the entire population was looted in order to help out bankers who, through massive fraudulant schemes, became so greedy that they ended up owing hundreds of trillions of dollars and pounds. British banks may well owe a hundred times Britain's GDP.

To try and get out of this massive black hole, PM Brown gave more money to the banks so that they could amplify the money and try to get back to where we were. The problem is that where we were was the result of decades of too much credit and fraudulant trading. It burst because it could expand no further. That's why 'quantative easing' is doomed to failure.

Politicians will remain in denial. Governments have the exclusive right to take your money. That's why banks like to control governments and they do! In 2010 they'll take more. They will try to blow up that old fraudulant debt bubble but it is over. In the words of the famous Austrain economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973):

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Modern economics preaches that debt is the same as capital. People can apparently borrow to spend and that is healthy economics. Spending not saving has been the name of the game now for decades. No-one has bought into that economic theology more than Gordon Brown. Pain-free gifts are what politicians love. Imagine being able to promise everything that everyone wants. What do the little children want from Santa this year? So, the money-printing machine is incredibly popular with politicians.

As the old saying goes: 'Money doesn't grow on trees'. The theology that it does has taken a strong grip in recent decades. It suits politicians but it also suits banks. Banks sell debt. When you have more debt the banks have more control over your life, more power. It's neo-feudal economics - you become a debt serf.

The 'credit crunch' was caused because the availability of credit was expanded too much. People borrowed and borrowed. With all the extra money going around it drove up house prices. Well, people didn't need to save because if they ever needed a lump sum they could refinance their house. When the debt became out of control people stopped believing they'd be payed back and so the banks stopped giving credit to each other and to businesses and people. So, people (consumers) have less money and businesses (employers) are going under. Leveraged house prices trying to correct downwards..

The government makes no money, it has money given to it by employees and businesses. So, when it gave money to the banks it had to take it from people and productive businesses. So, these consumers can't support the economy and these businesses can't afford to produce nor hire staff. The money was given to the banks but the banks have not extended credit. Well, they continue to lend some in terms of credit cards. How does that work? Well, the banks borrow money from the Bank of England (that's yours and my money) at 0.5% interest and they lend it back to us at sometimes 40 or 50% interest. So, they take the money off you so you need to borrow from them at immoral rates of interest. This interest takes more money from the real economy and we spiral further down the hole.

So, as they try to 'fix' the problem they cause economic collapse. However, the economists and the politicians then tell you that the 'recession' was worse than they thought and that they need to print more money. And so the problems become more and more acute. Many of these people through arrogance or ignorance actually believe this economic theology and so they pump it through the media with zeal. We need more of this vaccine. They have no clue that the vaccine holds the contagion. To hide the severity of the problem they had to co-opt the ratings agencies and the regulators, then change the rules of accounting that apply to financial services and bring in new laws relating to the Bank of England. All about concealment. While they talked about recovery, many knew the true mess we are in and the hid it from us. This is aiding and abetting fraud schemes which transcend anything ever seen in the history of the world.

The problem is that some actually realise that this economic theology transfers wealth from the many to a few oligarchs. The money involved is so vast that these oligarchs overpower elected governments. The politicians are terrified of them. Hank Paulson threatened the US congress with economic armageddon if it did not pass a bill giving $ hundreds of billions to the banks. This is the equivalent of a financial suicide bomber. More recently Royal Bank of Scotland tried the same thing. These banks were called 'too big to fail'. This 'too big to fail' concept meant that more and more taxpayers money was pumped into them to prop them up. The result is that they are even bigger and even more dangerous but still not stable.

Right under our noses we have witnessed the biggest robbery in history. By the banks. The scale of the transfer of wealth is so wide and so deep that otherwise intelligent commentators and observers have no idea how to understand what they're looking at. They quibble over civil servants' pay or allow themselves to be stupified by weapons of mass distraction like the war on drugs or binge drinking. The scale of the looting is just too big to come into view and our innumeracy defends the fraudsters. 'Too big to fail' and 'bail-outs' have created what is called 'moral hazard' whereby banks try to speculate on a high risk basis knowing that if they lose the taxpayer is behind them. There is no end to this lunacy until there is an ultimate currency collapse!

The solution to the crisis was easy. If the banks who got into trouble through fraud were allowed to go bankrupt, shareholders and bondholders would have lost their investments and the depositors would have been insured. The assets that were of any value would have been bought by competent, 'untarnished' investors and a new financial system would have emerged. If a fraction of the money that was given to the banks was used to cancel mortgage and credit card debt then our citizens would have emerged consuming and saving. Instead, the banks are still zombies, consumption is dead and the real economy is collapsing. The tax-take is nose-diving, unemployment is sky-rocketing and the pound is being increasingly devalued through printing. Britain is becoming a basket-case and yet AND still the sheeple cling to the theology of debt economics.

The tradgedy is that with all the pain that has been taken and is still to be taken the banks are still not in a position to be saved. There will be no credit. So governments will print and print. Eventually, hyper-inflation will cause panic, the banks will go into liquidation and with next to nothing Britain will have to climb out of the hole through manufacturing. This will take decades because the manufacturing base is destroyed by debt economics and because you need savings or capital to invest in manufacturing. In Britain, as the oil runs out and The City collapses, all that is left is some weapons manufacturing and some foreign owned football teams. Nothing else. The great delusion, oil driven, of British wealth and power since Thatcher kicked the bubble off now has to be paid for. A large % of Britain's sovereign debt is owed to foreigners because the people were told to spend not save.. Foreign investors want their money back and are now thinking that they may not get it or if they do the pound will have lost so much value that their investments are diluted. See this article in The Telegraph.

The best example in European history of such a situation where massive foreign debt must be paid back from a shrunken manufacturing base is Germany's Weimar Republic. Printing caused currency collapse and ended up with civil disorder and some rather ugly politics which threatend peace in the world. Let's not forget that Britain is a nuclear power. The nuclear threat is the only influence we'll have.

And so we march into 2010. High value jobs will be destroyed in the name of 'recovery'. As the government pumps more money into the economy so we will have no real idea of market prices of assets or even the true value of the pound. The economy wants to correct itself through recession but the government will just not let it happen. So, with false money people will buy things the economy can't afford and the transfer of labour from the leveraged 'distorted' economy to the productive real economy will be prevented from taking place and this will be done at massive expense to the taxpayer. The real problem which is debt will be worsened. The banks and the government they control are going to continue robbing us because we just don't understand numbers. There will be more 'stimulus' and 'quantative easing', the pound will sink, unemployment will rise. We'll be fed doctored statistics about GDP, unemployment and inflation.

Corporate economists and politicians will tell us they've seen green-shoots. There'll be no serious debate until a real crisis hits. Perhaps we'll have another war to stimulate production in the short term and distract us from economic mayhem. Iran for example.

We'll be paying for a long time for the illusion of wealth that debt economics gave us. The young would be wise to emigrate. Government will distrust the people more and more -not long ago they tried to give the police tazer-guns and the police refused them.

The banks will demand money or threaten to destroy the economy. They'll get it. The people will become poorer and more desperate.

This year Santa only visited the banks.

Merry Christmas

Kleptocracy? Power To The Sheeple.

Good news for those who don't know their being robbed unless the villains tell you. Caught on CCTV, some sheeple have started fighting back against the Kleptocracy we all live in.





















Aye, the wee lambs won't be silenced! If I were one of those bankster, fraudulant derivatives chancers - I'd be having nightmares about a bonfire of the vanities!

Thou Shalt Steal!

A CNN report:

A UK priest has defended his comments that it is acceptable to steal from large companies.
Tim Jones, parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda, told his congregation in York, northern England: "My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift."

The Vicar goes on to qualify his advice:

I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses,..

In the video clip Tories and local express outrage at the priest. The question I want answered is where is the outrage at the massive financial fraud being perpetrated by banks with the complicit help of government? We are outraged by someone nicking something to eat but when the entire wealth of the nation is being looted by bankers, causing economic mayhem, that's somehow ok? Where is the anger? If we don't go after these criminals we'll all maybe be forced to commit crimes to survive!

A Financial Terrorism Story: The Mervin King and I

The unionist machine really can concoct staggering pieces of propaganda. Das Schottishman was at its creative best yesterday with this headline:

If an independent Scotland kept the pound, it would have no say on interest rates – King

These articles are teed up so that unionist shills on the paper comment sections can spread misinformation. I read reems of garbage being disseminated. For a start, who says the pound is England's currency? It's Scotland's too, no?

My favourite though is the one about Scotland not being able to deal with inflation if we can't set interest rates. Ok, let's skip over the fact that Scotland has no control over interest rates right now. Interest rates have always been set to suit The City of London hence driving away manufacturing from economies like Scotland's in the UK.

No, what is amazing is the source - Mervin King. The man has done nothing but print money. He's pumped trillions of pounds into the financial services sector. Hyper-inflation could kick off at any time and he won't be able to use interest rates to deal with the problem because government and consumer debt is so monumentally large. If he puts up interest rates more than half of the UK's taxes will go on debt repayments. Britain will sink to the bottom of Europe overnight. His policy of low interest rates is flooding the British economy with money which is chasing away investors and savings - the very thing Scotland needs to encourage manufacturing.
So, he's shafting Scotland's economy while pretending to be wisely advising Scots what's best for them. Where do these arrogant fools get off?

The reason he's keeping interest rates so low is because all of Britain's banks are insolvent (admitted by John McFall) and they need large amounts of cash to plug the holes. Under whose watch did that happen Mervin? The key reason for the financial crisis is the low interest rate policy of the Bank of England. Rates were so low that banks borrowed lots of cash then leveraged it up and bought and sold fraudulant derivatives and King knows this and so is complicitous in widescale financial fraud.

Money was cheap cheap cheap and the banks sucked it up. Each pound represents the sweat of workers and every time he prints more and gives it to his mates the pounds in your bank account lose value or 'spending power' and your house loses value etc. His policy is killing jobs and business the length and breadth of Scotland. It does nothing but profound damage to the future of all Scots. The pain this man is causing and is going to cause families all over Scotland for generations is acute. This is the willful destruction of lives and people's futures so he can help out his buddies. Some are calling this 'financial terrorism'. He should be tried in a criminal court. Instead Das Schottishman wheels out this dangerous, megalomaniacal criminal to put us in our place?

Do you want to know what international investors think of Mervin? John Emby (chief investment strategist) of Sprott Asset Management calls him one of the four horsemen of the global apocalypse. Here is a quote from his article in the Investor's Digest of Canada.

In my opinion, the current equivalent of the mythical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are our financial leaders in the western world who are enthusiastically promoting and aggressively implementing quantitative easing in an attempt to sustain an obviously failed system and to bail out their banking cronies. They would include the atavistic Lawrence Summers, President Obama’seconomic guru and a key figure in the gold suppression scheme, the extremely naive Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke; the truly feckless U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner and Bernanke’s British equivalent, the hapless Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England.

We know that Das Schottishman is only interested in propaganda exercises instead of independent journalism. In order to seem balanced they allowed George Kerevan to write a piece on the subject which is pro-independence. However Kerevan's ripost which explains how Scotland could control interest rates is not prioritised and the damage has already been done.

These guys are stealing the people's money. In China a financier faced capital punishment for financial crimes last week. Here they get encouraged to rob us blind!

Hopey McChange

When economies get trashed civil liberties/human rights are not far behind -

As reported by Chris Floyd the Obama administration has managed to have the Supreme Court accept that if he or his representatives adjudge someone to be an 'enemy combatant' then those people are denied any rights under the law:

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

Yes, it is against the US constitution:

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

Yehh, change you can believe in eh? More troops at war and banks creaming the taxpayer. What a nice place the world is with the US/Ukanian empire descending into a moral quagmire where people have less rights than you were guaranteed 2000 years ago in ancient Rome.

Sorry but our grandfathers put their lives on the line to defend us against people who behaved like that. People, we simply have to take care of our democracies.