John Ward – Global Looting: Selling The Poor Folks’ Jobs, And Buying The Things They Paid Taxes To Create – 12 March 2014

Are two parrot-Eds any better than one?

As Ezak Hunt’s Hospital Closures Bill made rapid progress yesterday by promising ‘consultation’ hahaha with the local communities involved, there was ample evidence around the World of the shift of power from the labour of the majority to the capital of the self-appointed élites.

From the Earls Court development and spreading outwards across Borisconi’s fiefdom of London, subsidised housing designed to offer decent accommodation to the less well-off is being snapped up by the usual suspects. Over at Testosterone Pit, blogger Raging Bullshit writing as Don Quijones has been reporting on the latest heist.

Last November, Spain’s social housing occupants got letters ‘consulting’ with them about a done deal: the government had sold their apartments to a group going by the name of Cibeles. Cibeles was a Greek goddess of nature and fertility, so given Lloyd Blankfein’s interest in doing God’s work, it will come as no surprise to you to know that Cibeles is….Goldman Sachs.

It doesn’t get any better than this. Spain gets into a mess by borrowing from Wall Street, which it then has to pay back at usury-level interest rates. Then Wall Street’s finest wait until Madrid is desperate before moving in to buy the apartments for a piddling sum: Goldman is paying €67,000 per flat, upon which it will sit for 2-3 years until the property market improves, before selling them at the estimated cost to the government of building each one originally – €187,000.

There is every chance, of course, that the Spanish property market will take forever to turn the corner. So stay tuned to a Goldman scam at some point aimed at hyping the Spanish, er, property market. As Lou Reed famously sang, “Somewhere, a landlord’s laughing ’til he wets his pants”.

Gored by the EC last year, Cyprus is now actively engaged in flogging State assets to the gargoyles. Greek Cypriot state sector workers walked off the job on Friday over the government’s privatisation plans. In return for 10 billion euros in aid to dig it out of bankruptcy, Cyprus has had to shut a major loss-making bank, and haircut depositors’ savings above 100,000 euros. Cyprus hurtled towards insolvency as a result of loyally buying Greek sovereign bonds…sales of which were steered by the Troika…a major part of which is the IIF…which is also heavily involved in the Spanish apartments deal.

Last month The Athens parliament approved legislation to privatise its electricity grid, and it looks like Athens Airport is going to the Chinese/Abu Dhabi consortium Fosun.

In Britain, ironically, an education system that was in my view f**ked up and dumbed down by fluffy post-modern education bollocks has produced a generation of forty-somethings who can’t join up the dots without someone showing them how to draw a line. That crumbling educational form was then starved for a decade by Thatcher, and buggered up still further by the Blairite syllabus-targets-numbers drive to ensure everyone had a degree, but nobody could think…or do plumbing.

Now Michael Gove is busy flogging off perhaps the most valuable piece of silver we have….the further education system. Once the envy of the world (when I was there, the engineering faculty was stuffed with Arabs, Russians and Chinese) it is now to become a purveyor of phoney Degrees in Zen treacle-bending from the University of Stonehenge.

They all want the munneeee. That’s all there is to see. So whyTF isn’t Labour’s leadership joining up the dots at PMQs and across the country?

Simples: because they’re scared to death. Scared to death of looking radical, or sounding passionate, or showing up the Emperor’s nudity….because after 2015, they want to be the Emperors for a bit. Labour has no strategy because it thinks only of tactics to score in the media. It has no principles because its principals have no ideas. And it has no ideas because it doesn’t want Middle England to be repelled. It sucked up to Murdoch because it had no idea what to do with the BBC. It elected Blair leader because it had no idea how to get reelected as a proper Grown-Up radical alternative. All Miliband can do is woffle, and all Balls can do is parrot a slightly watered-down version of the neoliberalist crap he should be damning with deconstruction. But then, if your brother advises hedge funds, what else can we expect? Um, a Cooperative Movement owned by, er, hedge funds I suppose.

Parrot parrot parrot. I’m a clever boy then I’m a clever boy then, disappear the deficit disappear the deficit IwillIwillIwill, make EU work for UK make EU work for UK, Global Vision Global Vision parrot parrot parrot tweet tweet tweet.

This parrot is dead. Britain needs an Opposition that’s alive with new ideas and prepared to reject archaic dogma. This never has been and never will be The Labour Party. The world needs a new online socio-cultural movement before it’s too late.

It is almost too late already. Get real – or get screwed. It’s that simple.