An Imaginary Beast Called ‘The Deficit’

There’s a Global Capitalist Conspiracy to reduce welfare and public services. Who knows where & when it started? Who is running it?

What is its intention? Simple! To put even more money into the hands of the wealthy. One is beginning to notice the results: the wealthier are getting more wealthy; the poor a good deal poorer.

The banking so-called ‘crisis’ of 2008 was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Global Capitalist Conspirators, amongst whom may be counted the  UK  Camclegg, Condem, Coalition, to invent a need for what they call ‘Austerity’.

It’s fine for a government of millionaires to invent the lie of Austerity; it won’t touch them in their gated country retreats. And they’ve succeeded in brainwashing the rest of us into imagining that we have to tighten our belts, etc.

Austerity is a Lie

Much serious research suggests that the so-called deficit is overwhelmingly attributable to plunging tax receipts. The simple solution is to increase taxation on the wealthy and to plug the avoidance of tax (see Postcript).

There’s always an actual deficit which is easily tackled by printing money and by raising taxes.

Money itself is just an invention deliberately shrouded in mystery.

As it is portrayed through the media, ‘The Deficit Dragon’ is a creature of the imagination—it’s an abstraction, an invention that enables the Global Capitalist Conspirators to create the fiction that public expenditure is its castle which has to be attacked by organising their ‘solution’ which is to slash welfare and public services. In the real world this has the effect of further reducing tax revenue. Abstractions constitute an easy con when they are reified—made into real existing things, talked about in that way, thought viruses…

Meanwhile the Power Possessors continue with their meaningless rhetoric without the least sign of Conscience.

Evidence

On 15th March 2005 a Mr Danny Kruger was quoted in the Guardian newspaper as saying: “We plan to introduce a period of creative destruction in the public services.” He was not a mere party member; he held some post in Tory campaign headquarters; it was said of him,  “He is not some unknown hopeful fighting an unwinnable seat. He is a man who has worked at the heart of Conservative policy development…”

They want to destroy public services.

Of course, a Tory party spokesperson said that the comment had been taken out of context. Without saying what they were, the spokesperson said, “He fully supports the party’s policies on, and approach to, the public services.” As we have now seen this was to slash them just as Mr Kruger predicted. He had apparently been intending to stand against Bliar in Sedgefield but, the statement continued, “However, in order to avoid any further misrepresentation of his views and any damage to the Party, he has decided not to stand at the next election.” I expect he was pushed.

At that time, Labour election coordinator Alan Milburn claimed Mr Kruger had exposed the Tory agenda for £35bn of cuts to public services. “His claim that the Tories were planning ‘a period of creative destruction in the public services’ is not a rogue claim… It is the authentic and shocking voice of the Conservative Party. It reveals the true picture of what they would do.”  And what they have proceeded to do in the name of ‘Austerity’ and ‘Reducing the Deficit…’ They lie through their teeth.

But has the Labour Party followed this up? Brought the way the Conspiracy is working to the attention of the electorate? No, they will stick to Tory cuts.

Background to the Lies

The background to all the lies emerges every so often but one has to be very quick to notice what’s going on. As usual the politicians rely on the fact that people have short memories and in any case are so busy getting on with their lives that they can’t take it all in to start with

Maybe you were too busy doing other things to notice another Guardian report dated 18th December 2010. It seems that a key member of Cameron’s mob put his foot in it the night before by announcing on film that what the prime minister and the witless Clegg, mean by ‘people power’: it is the  unleashing of ‘chaotic’ effects across local communities. Questioned about what the ‘Big Society’ really meant, Nicholas Boles, Tory MP for Grantham and Stamford, described as one of Cameron’s most influential advisers before the election, said that he and Camclegg did not believe in central planning; that it would be a good thing to have different communities offering differing types of services, even if the appearance was chaotic.

“I mean, bluntly, there comes a question in life,” he told the audience. “Do you believe planning works? That clever people sitting in a room can plan how people’s communities should develop, or do you believe it can’t work? I believe it can’t work, David Cameron believes it can’t, Nick Clegg believes it can’t. Chaotic therefore in our vocabulary is a good thing… I want there to be ‘chaotic’ in the sense I want lots of organisations doing different things, in different areas…”

I wonder if Boles made a plan to say that. I wonder if he’s planned his next holiday. I wonder if the plan to dismantle the Welfare State is working for him. I wonder if they’re all planning a strategy for the next election. How could one not believe that planning works? Boles was simply harnessing his question’s undoubted power as a tub-thumping rhetorical gesture.

I’m Planning to Finish This Glob Shortly

All this fits well with local government man Pickles announcing the most severe cuts in local government funding for a generation, with some of the poorest areas receiving the biggest reductions. This is hushed up; we’re not supposed to know this or if we do we must put it down to the inevitability of Austerity.

The Upshot—Cognitive Dissonance as Policy

As a teacher, I found it very useful to create a small state of ‘cognitive dissonance’ in the mind of learners. Too much cognitive dissonance when I failed to do things properly and they dropped out of the race; just enough uncertainty for just enough a length of time and they’d work hard, with my assistance, to rid themselves of it by learning something new for themselves. In a general politically orchestrated chaotic situation, where cognitive dissonance is created on a grand scale and no attempt is made to assist its reduction, it’s more or less impossible to keep track of what’s going on. That’s part of the Conspiracy. So many initiatives on so many fronts… Protest is fragmented because there’s so much to protest about and anyway there’s the inevitability of Austerity…

When there is this degree of applied fragmentation, it’s inevitable that a political will to obtain ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ is lost sight of; it becomes inevitable that the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ sinks without trace under the weight of privatisation and monetarism.

Postscript from The Observer 22nd July 2012

£13 trillion—the hoard hidden from the taxman by global elite

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore—as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together—according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy.

Private banks vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, ‘protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy’. For many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests. ‘The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments’, the report says. [Sounds familiar!]

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry’s calculations, 6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world’s population—a tiny class of the mega-rich…

The Lie of Trickle-Down

‘These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people,’ said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. ‘People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become…’ [But there’s a general feeling of impotency and there’s the inevitability of Austerity…]

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “Countries around the world are under intense pressure to reduce their deficits and governments cannot afford to let so much wealth slip past into tax havens… Closing down the tax loopholes (exploited by multinationals and the super-rich to avoid paying their fair share will reduce the deficit. This way the government can focus on  stimulating the economy, rather than squeezing the life out of it with cuts and tax rises for the 99% of people who aren’t rich enough to avoid paying their taxes.”

The wealthy use public services—they need the streets to be cleaned, people need public transport to get to their shops—but they don’t want to pay for it.